In Their Own Words

Is love "blind" when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.
This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked 100 women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: "I fall in love with the person, not the gender," say some respondents.
Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women's sexuality--and of the central importance of love.

This book is a collection of 13 studies of sodomy and sodomites in Portugal and Brazil from Henry the Navigator to modern Rio de Janeiro. Includes the first English translations of several important studies previously available only in Portuguese.

Gender differentiation is a universal human social norm. Every society has a mechanism intact for casting people into socio-sexual roles and this gender process can be traced in the archaeological record. That said, one must quickly counter that HOW gender is expressed varies drastically. Within a culture, the engendering process varies according to caste, class, economic standing or other cultural sub-group. Between cultures gender is continually interacting with other social norms. Gender takes on a life of its own as it changes through time, like all other aspects of a society. Tracking this change through time and space is the study of what I call "archaeogender."