Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire - Hardcover

Lisa M Diamond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674026241 ISBN 13: 9780674026247

Publisher: Harvard UP, 2008

Synopsis

Is love "blind" when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one-hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. "Sexual Fluidity" offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: "I fall in love with the person, not the gender," say some respondents." Sexual Fluidity" offers a new understanding of women's sexuality - and of the central importance of love.

About this title

Review:

"Demonstrating equal awareness and sympathy for evidence from genetics,
endocrinology, neurology, development and evolutionary psychology and social
constructionist/feminist perspectives, Diamond also provides a balanced and informed
critique of the methodological conduct of previous contributions to the relevant
debates. [...] Sexual Fluidity presents itself as a well-constructed and coherent study.
Graduate students with specialist interest would find it informative. So would
relationship counsellors and sex therapists." -- - Paula Nicolson, Times Higher Education, 17/04/08

About the Author:

Lisa M. Diamond is Associate Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard UP
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0674026241
• ISBN 13: 9780674026247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330