Understand the unique emotional dynamics of bisexual women’s friendship relationships Prevailing attitudes toward bisexuality affect every aspect of a bisexual woman’s emotional and sexual life. Bisexual Women: Friendship and Social Organization comprehensively explores the friendship relationships of bisexual women, and the ways that bisexuality shapes the friendship experience. This book fills a gap in the literature and research on bisexuality and friendship, presenting leading experts discussing the latest qualitative and quantitative studies on this rarely visited topic. This examination explains how the friendships of bisexual and bi-curious women can be affected by sexism, heterosexism, biphobia, and racism, as well as providing an insightful review of how bisexual women are portrayed in film and literature. Bisexual and bi-curious women often have a more diverse range of friendship experiences than heterosexual women. Bisexual Women: Friendship and Social Organization presents studies and personal essays to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns of various friendship relationships that exist because of—and in spite of—prevalent social attitudes about bisexuality. This extensive look details various aspects of bisexual women’s relationships as well as society’s biases and preconceived notions. Analysis of research explores the various effects that being bisexual has on the way women approach friendship, as well as how society views both bisexuality and relationships. Topics in Bisexual Women: Friendship and Social Organization include: research into young women’s emerging sexual orientation identity types of friendships formed by bisexual women how friendship experiences are shaped by sociopolitical attitudes bisexual images in popular media critique of the bisexual women’s friendship literature how heterosexism shapes platonic and erotic relationships how bisexuality constricts social relationships analysis of how sexual experiences influenced friendships much more Bisexual Women: Friendship and Social Organization is insightful, important reading for psychologists, counselors, LGBT studies professionals, educators, and students.

A collection of 18 in-depth interviews with a wide range of bisexual women of different races, ages, and economic classes involved in a very wide variety of lifestyles.

At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.

Framed by a comprehensive review of international research, literature, and film, this book is an intimate journey into the experiences and insights of 79 Australian women in relationships with bisexual men. It takes us into the daily lives, sexual intimacies, and families of MOREs (mixed-orientation relationships) that span the gamut from extremely oppressive experiences with bi-misogynist men to extremely liberating with bi-profeminist men. Aged 19 to 65, the women are in monogamous, open, and polyamorous relationships with bisexual-identifying and/or bisexual-behaving men. The women themselves are bisexual, lesbian, heterosexual, while others refuse to categorize their own sexualities. The book addresses the discovery or disclosure of the man's bisexuality, how the relationships work and where they flounder, how the partners negotiate and establish 'new rules' and boundaries to maintain their relationship, and the impact of class, rural/urban setting, ethnicity, indigeneity, race, religion, and education on these relationships. But this book isn’t only about MOREs. The research, revelations and reflections in this book tell us much about current and shifting global constructions and understandings of intimate relationships, sexual desires and love, and the socio-cultural representations and labeling of genders and sexualities.

Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century reflects the brave new world of bisexual women's lives through an eclectic collection of articles that typifies an ongoing feminist process of theory grounded in life experience. The book's broad scope addresses a world created in response to lesbian-feminism, homophobia within the mainstream women’s movement, and sexism within the gay rights movement. The book includes Carol Queen's memoirs of the swinging lesbian scene in the 1970s, a critical examination of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar, and a look back at the controversy surrounding bisexual inclusion in the Northampton Lesbian and Gay Pride March in Massachusetts in the early 90s. Previous groundbreaking work on bisexuality had to focus on breaking the silence around bisexual invisibility. This collection works from that foundation to explore the complexities and histories of bisexual women's lives. Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century examines: tensions between lesbians and bisexual women the shifting place of bisexual women in society the use of skin color as a charged metaphor the inclusion of bisexuality into queer theory groundbreaking new work on bisexual youth the creative use of the sacred whore archetype Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century is an essential source of social and political critique, and a vital resource for anyone interested in the complex dynamics of human sexuality, regardless of sexual orientation.

For author and activist Baumgardner, bisexuality has always been more than the "sexual non-preference of the '90s." Here she takes a close look at gay and bisexual people on the national cultural stage and the issues their growing visibility raises. In a society supposedly grown more open and accepting, what can it mean that bisexuality continues to be marginalized by both gay and straight cultures, and dismissed either as a phase or, worse, a cop-out? Baumgardner discusses her own experience as a bisexual, and the struggle she's undergone to reconcile the privilege of a woman who is perceived as straight, and the empowerment and satisfaction she's derived from her relationships with women. Her book is a study in bisexual lives lived secretly and openly, and an exploration of the lessons learned by writers, artists, and activists who have refused the either/or paradigm defended by both gay and straight communities.--From publisher description.

Emerging from a case study in secondary schools, this book explores young bisexual women’s notions of bisexuality through their own sense of self-identification and how they express their personal beliefs. McAllum sheds light on the presence and practices of "bisexual misrecognition" and "bi-misogyny" in school settings, and draws out the implications of this bias on bisexual women. Incorporating women’s own spoken and written anecdotes, this book reveals hidden narratives and helps boost awareness about the social and learning needs of young bisexual women.