Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire - Softcover

Diamond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674032268 ISBN 13: 9780674032262

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2009

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 M. 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

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674032268
• ISBN 13: 9780674032262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352