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

Diamond, Lisa M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674026241 ISBN 13: 9780674026247

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 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

About the Author

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

Review

Fascinating and certain to be controversial...Diamond says traditional labels for sexual desire are inadequate; for some women even "bisexual" does not truly express the protean nature of their sexuality. Diamond details in accessible and nuanced language her own study of 100 young women (by her own admission not "fully representative") over a period of 10 years. She says that she is "calling for an expanded understanding of same-sex sexuality" that could radically affect both LGBT activists who hold that sexual identity is fixed and antigay groups who believe sexuality is chosen. (Publishers Weekly 2007-10-29)

Captivating, nuanced, and rigorous...Diamond's work is vital precisely because sexual fluidity is not a new concept--Freud called his version "polymorphous perversity"--but merely one that is typically dismissed. Nor is it news to women, particularly not to a generation for whom a nonspecific "queer" affiliation, or no affiliation at all, is increasingly common. What is so important is not that this fluidity exists, but that someone has finally paid it systematic attention and found that it is in fact not the exception, but may well be the rule. (Hanne Blank Ms. 2008-01-01)

Traditionally, female sexuality has been presumed to work in the same way and by the same rules as male sexual identity, but Diamond argues that for women, sexual identity isn't fixed in the same categories. (Temma Ehrenfeld Psychologies 2008-03-01)

Setting out to prove the theory that, for some women, love is truly blind where gender is concerned, Diamond presents her evidence in a fascinating, anecdotal fashion--by tracking over the span of a decade the relationships of nearly 100 women who at one point or another had experienced "same-sex attractions." The women move from men to women and back again (or vice-versa), their sexual identity as changeable as their desires. Additionally, she delves into the brain science behind lust, love and infatuation, revealing that what draws women toward a particular partner is as much a function of biology as it is anything else. To her credit, Diamond avoids scripting her arguments in obtuse academese. With her compassionate, understated approach, she has stepped up the business of gender research. (Lily Burana Washington Post Book World 2008-04-13)

A fascinating read. (Times Higher Education Supplement 2008-04-17)

The book has many riveting accounts by women of their own experiences of sexual attraction and distraction...Diamond has written a fascinating book. (Adam Phillips London Review of Books 2008-06-19)

[Diamond] did something unique, following 100 female subjects with same-sex attractions for 10 years...Her book is worth reading. (Sheela Lambert examiner.com 2009-08-05)

Diamond's study has the potential to lead to more acceptance of variety within sexual orientation. With young women leading the way, everyone will become less fearful of diverse sexual experiences. Sexual Fluidity can take us beyond the divisive language of "phases" and "denial" as we speak the truth of our lives to each other. (Ellyn Ruthstrom Women's Review of Books 2009-03-01)

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0674026241
• ISBN 13: 9780674026247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352