Women's Bisexuality as a Category in Social Research, Revisited

Abstract

This reconsideration of a previous study, “Bisexuality as a Category in Social Research,” examines recent abstracts of social scientific, scholarly articles to see how common is the practice of merging lesbian and bisexual women subjects in social scientific research and, in studies that do distinguish between lesbian and bisexual women, how often that distinction is a useful one. Reviewing 292 abstracts of social scientific articles published in 2010, the study found that bisexual women are being treated as a category in social research by a growing number of researchers. This separate treatment yields results; bisexual women have been found to have distinct experiences regarding health, discrimination and substance abuse. It is likely that bi women possess instructive experiences in many other regards, if only more researchers would include them as a category of their own.

KEYWORDS:

• bisexual women
• bisexuality
• social science
• health
• discrimination
• substance abuse

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Kim Lemoon for library assistance in researching this article.