Sexual Fluidity

Fun fact about the author: Lisa is a faculty member in my department, and in addition to being a ridiculously prolific researcher, she is an outstanding baker. (At high altitudes, no less!). This includes everything from whatever her grad students request as their special birthday treat to transgender ginger people before winter break.

Back to the book: fantastic. The moral of the story is that for decades, researchers treated a large segment of women as “noise” in their sexuality work: the women who identified as bisexual, the women who changed their self-identified orientation, the women who identified in a way that didn't match their behavior, etc. They didn't fit in neat boxes. Lisa, through a 10-year+ study of 100 such women, argues that these women don't fit in neat boxes because our boxes are a combination of male-centered theories about sexuality, and reductive notions about what orientation really means. In fact, the better and more sensitive research shows that such women are actually far more “normal” than we ever anticipated, and that female sexuality is quite nuanced, and still not well-understood.

One of the things that I think she handles most deftly is the inconvenient fact that more complicated understandings of sexuality generally do not lend themselves to easy advocacy for same-sex civil rights in this intolerant cultural climate. Acknowledging that sexual orientation, especially for women, involves a very complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors that span the entirety of women's lives means we can't necessarily continue to argue with statements like “Lesbians were born that way.” But Lisa points out, I think quite rightly so, that failing to do the necessary research to better understand how women develop their sexual identities is, in the end, far worse.

Her research is impeccable, and it's a real treat to get to hear the stories of many of the women she has followed, and is continuing to follow. Read if you're in the mood for something equally educational & fascinating.