Bisexual Women's Friendship Experiences

SUMMARY

While filling in some gaps in the literature and successfully expanding the discourse on friendships to include bisexual and bi-curious women's friendships, Bisexual Women: Friendship and Social Organization also raises a diversity of issues and poses several challenges for of research and theorizing on friendships. Three of these challenges are explored in this chapter: (1) conceptualizing sexual identities in friendship dyadic research; (2) the potentially positive and negative roles friends may play in each other's lives and in the dynamics of privilege and oppression; and (3) narrowing the lines between friends and lovers.

Key Words:

• Bisexual
• friendship
• sexual identity development
• oppression
• privilege
• lovers