ABSTRACT
Originally published in the Journal of Social Issues 33, 2:30-45. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers and Pepper Schwartz. Blumstein’s and Schwartz’s research on bisexual identities and behaviours in the 1970s was truly ground breaking. Not only did they conduct empirical, interview-based research with people whose sexual histories included encounters with both women and men-perhaps the first time such research had been conducted on a significant scalethey also regarded bisexuality as an important topic for the understanding of human sexuality as a whole. While a handful of scholars around this period were gathering similar data from people with ostensibly bisexual histories or backgrounds, such as ‘swingers’ (Symonds 1976; cf. Dixon 1985), Blumstein and Schwartz took a distinctive approach which interrogated bisexuality conceptually as well as empirically. In this chapter they offer some reflections on the conceptual dilemma arising from different interpretations of the Kinsey scale outlined in the introduction to Chapter 6.
