Bisexuality as a Category in Social Research

ABSTRACT

Bisexual and lesbian women are often categorized as a single entity in social scientific studies, resulting in potential distortion of knowledge. After surveying scholarly debates about bisexuality as a research category, the gendered narratives of a small group of heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women were analyzed to see which of two binary sexual classification schemes best provided useful analytic distinctions: “straight/gay” and “bisexual/monosexual.” Findings revealed that bisexual women expressed different relationships to femininity than “monosexuals.” Acknowledging the potential for reification using either schema, the author concluded that the “bi/mono” binary and its concomitant ternary conceptualization of the sexual might be useful tools for social scientific analyses of gender and sexuality.

Key Words:

• Bisexual women
• bisexuality
• gender
• narratives
• monosexual
• femininity