As the deadline for the NSRC Summer Institute approaches, NSRC staff and interns are going to write about our featured Summer Institute lectures each week and tell you why you want to spend a portion of your summer in a classroom with these talented scholars. To kick off the series, I’m pulling out all of the stops and throwing down this ever-convincing gambit – if you love Oprah, you should come to the Summer Institute.
No, Oprah is not one of our featured scholars, but Lisa Diamond is and on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 she will be on The Oprah Winfrey Show discussing her research on women’s sexual fluidity. So if you want to know more about Oprah and what she is really like in person, the NSRC summer institute with Dr. Lisa Diamond is the place to be! But seriously, Oprah may have revolutionized daytime television, but she's got nothing on Lisa Diamond when it comes to revolutionizing the way we think about sexuality.
Students interested in identity, attraction, and sexuality must meet Dr. Diamond because she is doing some of the most innovative research in the field. Her book, Sexuality Fluidity, takes a critical look at gender, sexual attraction, and systems of categorizing sexual identity by analyzing her ten-year longitudinal study of women attracted to women. Ultimately she finds that women who are attracted to women as well as men resist labels for their sexual orientation finding the labels inadequate for describing their identity.
According to Dr. Diamond women's attraction to another person is based on intimacy, and often an intimacy exists between women that develops into attraction. She tells Oprah, "A lot of people think fluidity means choice. That's not true...a lot of these women never expected to feel what they felt. It was not a conscious decision. It was something they experienced happening to them." Since many women never expected to be attracted to other women, they have a hard time identifying as gay or bisexual. Dr. Diamond says, "For many women, the question they're asking themselves is, 'Am I gay or am I not?'"
Dr. Diamond’s research has major implications for how advocacy, education, and outreach should be conducted. It is particularly important as we consider the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. It begs the question how other social identity categories, like gender, race and ethnicity, fall short of personal identity and what opportunities we miss when we base our research or intervention programs on established categories without criticism.
Sitting in a classroom with Lisa Diamond this summer at the Summer Institute will definitely collapse the degrees of separation between you and Oprah, but it will also undermine your preconceptions about sexual identity. Join us and Lisa Diamond this summer as we get closer to Oprah and a new understanding of sexuality. Sharing a classroom with Lisa Diamond; now there’s a big O (opportunity) not to be missed!
engendering fluidities
Anonymous on Mar 31, 2009 12:18am