Abstract
In this chapter I draw together the two temporal dimensions central to my Life Course-Sexual Landscape model, biographical and historical time, and provide the first-ever test of cross-cohort differences in sexual fluidity. Specifically, I compare the sexual identity trajectories of emerging adult women from the Gen X and Millennial birth cohorts. My results tell a nuanced story. Young women from the Millennial cohort are less likely than young women from the Gen X cohort to identify as exclusively heterosexual. Further, among those who do, Millennial women are more likely than Gen X women to change to away from that identity over time. Millennial women are also more likely than their predecessors to report a mainly heterosexual or bisexual identity and to hold that identity stably over time. Altogether, the sexual identities of young Millennial women are significantly less binary and more fluid than those of Gen X women at the same age.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter contains material previously published in the following journal article: Campbell, A., Perales, F., & Baxter, J. (2021). Changes in sexual identity labels in a contemporary cohort of emerging adult women: Patterns, prevalence and a typology. The Journal of Sex Research, 58(5), 612–624. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2020.1814092. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (CE140100027 and CE200100025). The research on which this paper is based was conducted as part of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health by the University of Queensland and the University of Newcastle. We are grateful to the Australian Government Department of Health for funding and to the women who provided the survey data.
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Campbell, A. (2022). From Gen X to Millennials: Generational Differences in Sexual Fluidity. In: Sexual Fluidity Among Millennial Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13650-4_4
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