Pregnant Plurisexual Women's Sexual and Relationship Histories across the Life Span: A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT

Women identifying as plurisexual (i.e., those with the potential for attraction to more than one gender) experience unique issues associated with forming and maintaining intimate relationships. In particular, women identifying as plurisexual, unlike women identifying as monosexual, navigate choices and decisions related to the gender of their partners throughout their lifetime and may experience a variety of social pressures and constraints that influence these decisions. However, previous research on women's sexual and relationship trajectories has largely focused on adolescence and young adulthood, and therefore we know little about the experiences of women identifying as plurisexual at other life stages. The aim of this study was to profile the lifetime sexual and relationship trajectories of 29 different-gender partnered women identifying as plurisexual as described during pregnancy. The authors identified three primary types of trajectories: women who predominantly partnered with men, women who partnered with men and women about equally, and women who predominantly partnered with women, and found that various contextual factors, including heterosexism and monosexism, constrained women's opportunities for partnering with women. Implications for social and clinical interventions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurisexual
• bisexual
• sexual and relationship trajectories
• pregnancy

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the essential contributions of our participants, as well as research assistance by Alia Januwalla, Melissa Manley, Keisha Williams, Iradele Plante, and Melissa Marie Legge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant R01MH099000, awarded to LER and AEG.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lori E. Ross

Lori E. Ross is an associate professor in the Social and Behavioral Health Sciences Division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and affiliate scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. She is the leader of the Re:searching for LGBTQ Health Team (www.lgbtqhealth.ca). Lori uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches in her research work, with a strong focus on integrating the principles of community-based research. Much of her research focuses on understanding the mental health and service needs of marginalized populations including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people to improve access to services for these communities.

Lesley A. Tarasoff

Lesley A. Tarasoff is a PhD candidate in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and has been a member of the Re:Searching for LGBTQ Health team since summer 2010. Her PhD research explores how women with physical disabilities experience the transition to motherhood, with an emphasis on embodiment and care experiences. Drawing on intersectionality and feminist disability scholarship, she is committed to doing research that contributes to improving the health and health care experiences of marginalized groups of women. With members of the Re:searching for LGBTQ Health team and other scholars across North America, she has worked on a number of projects in the areas of reproductive and perinatal health, mental health, and LGBTQ health.

Abbie E. Goldberg

Abbie E. Goldberg is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research examines diverse families, including lesbian- and gay-parent families and adoptive-parent families. A particular focus of her research is the transition to parenthood for same-sex couples, with attention to the role that supportive and unsupportive contexts play in new parents' mental health. She is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed articles and two books: Gay Dads (NYU Press) and Lesbian- and Gay-Parent Families (APA). She is the coeditor of LGBT-Parent Families: Innovations in Research and Implications for Practice (Springer) and the editor of the Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies (Sage). She has received research funding from the American Psychological Association, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Williams Institute, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the National Institutes of Health, and the Spencer Foundation.

Corey E. Flanders

Corey E. Flanders did her postdoctoral fellowship with the Re:searching for LGBTQ Health team, was the research coordinator for the Postpartum Wellbeing Study in Toronto from January 2014 to July 2016, and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests focus on addressing health inequities experienced by LGBTQ people, with a particular emphasis on mental, sexual, and reproductive health. She employs mixed-methods and community engaged research approaches within her work.