Emergent Identities

New Sexualities, Genders and Relationships in a Digital Era

Rob Cover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351597814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Examining the emergence of new sexual and gender identities in the context of an ever-changing digital landscape, Emergent Identities considers how traditional, binary understandings of sexuality and gender are being challenged and overridden by a taxonomy of non-binary, fluid classifications and descriptors.

In this comprehensive account of the ongoing shift in our understandings of gender and sexuality, Cover explores how and why traditional masculine/feminine and hetero/homo dichotomies are quickly being replaced with identity labels such as heteroflexible, bigender, non-binary, asexual, sapiosexual, demisexual, ciswoman and transcurious. Drawing on real-world data, Cover considers how new ways of perceiving relationships, attraction and desire are contesting authorised, institutional knowledge on gender and sexuality. The book explores the role that digital communication practices have played in these developments and considers the implications of these new approaches for identity, individuality, creativity, media, healthcare and social belonging.

A timely response to recent developments in the field of gender identity, this will be a fascinating read for students of Psychology, Gender Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and related areas as well as professionals in this field.

1
Introduction

New post-binary sexualities and genders for a digital era

The cultures of new genders and sexualities

Digital media has in recent years enabled people, including particularly younger people, to engage creatively and interactively in defining their own sense of identity. This has included the production of new, diverse ‘labels’ or ‘categories’ of sexuality and gender identity and definitions of relationships. Challenging the older languages of LGBT identity in many ways, the new labels include over a hundred new terms to describe sexuality and gender, including terms such as heteroflexible, non-binary, asexual, greysexual, sapiosexual, demisexual, ciswoman, transcurious, maverique and many more. Social networking sites have responded by opening up or expanding the selection of gender and sexual categories used in drop-down menus and lists for self-identification. Some have done away with lists for gender and sexual orientation altogether in favour of ‘write in your own’ text boxes – a sensible move given the speed at which new terms, categories and labels are developed and, relatedly, the way in which new exclusions and injustices are produced by the failure to include and represent a sufficient range of gender/sexual terms. New youth digital cultural practices of announcing, rating and ranking this diverse range of gender and sexuality labels have become unexpectedly popular in very recent years in both online and offline settings. This has occurred alongside a new younger-generational custom of announcing preferred pronouns (she, he, ze, they or others a long list of new terms), together with the preferred use of new terms such as cismale, cisfemale and cisgender to describe, in contrast to transgender, those who have remained in the same gender roles as assigned at birth.

What we are seeing emerge is what I refer to as a new ‘taxonomy’ of gender and sexuality, one that actively challenges authorised and institutional knowledge on identity and social practices, and that simultaneously contests both older homophobic/misogynistic practices and the more dominant, everyday liberal–humanist perspectives of tolerated LGBT identities and post-feminist gender identities. It is a taxonomy in the sense that it works as a means of classification: dozens of the new terms are defined in online lists, books (Mardell 2016) and YouTube content. Classifications are debated and discussed such as, for example, the difference between heteroflexible and bicurious sexual identities (Albury 2015). The Merriam– Webster dictionary has begun crowdsourcing on Twitter to determine which of the new labels are worthy of inclusion, and debating with members of the public (and trolls) the need for inclusion of complex, new sexual and gender terminology (Nichols 2016).

Older taxonomies have governed how we have described, discussed and identified sexuality, sexual behaviour, sexual morals, gender identities, gender relations and the relationship between gender and sexuality – in the case of gender, for centuries, transforming over time. In the case of sexualities, across particularly the twentieth centuries, and typically built around the classificatory terms of ‘hetero’ versus ‘homo’. A taxonomy of gender or sexuality – or what we might otherwise call a discourse, a language or a lexicon – may sound like something only for gender theorists and sexologists to worry about, much as the taxonomic classification of fossils belongs properly in the biological, archaeological and anthropological sciences. However, there is clear evidence of very substantial interest among, particularly, younger people in working through the classificatory terms that comprise the new framework of diverse and proliferating gender and sexual identity labels. In this respect, the new taxonomy is something quite different from older classificatory systems given by institutions, experts and within the power/knowledge framework that was so central to the advent of homosexual and heterosexual identity in the late nineteenth century (Foucault 1980, 1990).

I describe the new taxonomy as ‘emergent’ for a few reasons, broadly following the cultural studies work of Raymond Williams (1977). Williams differentiated emergent structures and cultural practices from those which he figured as dominant. In the contexts of gender and sexuality, a liberal–humanist tolerance is almost certainly the dominant cultural framework in the West and many other parts of the world as well, although this tolerance is regularly marred by a residual homophobia and heterosexism ranging in intensity in different regions of the globe. What emerges, however, differs from the dominant not in the sense of being something alien to it and wholly incompatible, but as something that draws on the dominant to produce new configurations, meanings, values and practices. The new emergent framework for gender and sexuality includes more than simply the flourishing of individual labels, categories and classifications. It also includes new ways in which new debates and discussions around gender and sexual choice, rather than automatic assumptions that all sexualities – and, especially, genders – are innate, given and ‘born that way’. These are cultural shifts of some significance, re-framing the ways in which gender and sexuality are thought, enacted, embodied, represented and practiced. The extent to which novelty becomes emergence and replaces the dominant is, of course, always difficult to apprehend in advance.

At the same time, however, by drawing on dominant cultural perspectives (as emergent structures always do and must), this new cultural innovation involves a certain kind of conservatism. I deal with this in more detail in later chapters, although it is important to say here that by conservatism I am talking about the protection of identity categories and processes of categorisation themselves. Other, alternative and radical ways of describing and thinking about sexuality and gender as fluid, amorphous, changeable and mutable have emerged many times in the past, such as in versions of French Feminism (Grosz 1989), versions of Marxist psychoanalysis (Marcuse 1969), Gay Liberationism of the 1970s (Altman 1971), and queer theory of the 1990s (Jagose 1996). Each of these theoretical perspectives utilised a range of philosophic tools to present alternatives to the ‘received wisdom’ of masculine/feminine gendered bodies and hetero/homosexual identities as immutable, innate and unchanging. These were powerful theoretical positions that sometimes spilled over into both radical political movements and into everyday practices, which included ways of reading and re-reading our everyday practices of gender and sexuality and sponsoring the search for alternative ways of thinking. While these have undoubtedly had an influence on our thinking at an everyday social level (for what ostensibly begins in the university and avant-garde cultural production is not contained wholly there), much of what was learned there is not necessarily part of the emerging framework of increased categories and classifications of gender and sexuality – with the possible exception of some aspects of choosing sexual labels and gender identities as I describe them in parts of Chapter 5.

Rather, what might be said to be happening here is a proliferation of identity labels and practices that help accommodate complexity, intersectionality and fluidity into an existing liberal–humanist understanding of identity, subjectivity and selfhood. A range of ‘old school’ mechanisms, then, are often deployed to make new emerging concepts fit within the older framework of identity. These include disciplinary practices of normalisation that ask subjects to stabilise their identities. It includes ways of protecting the coherence or exclusiveness of some of the older, more popular and more common sexualities, including particularly heterosexuality, such as by establishing a new label of ‘heteroflexibility’ to account for straight people who aren’t uniformly conforming to straight expectations. In so doing, those heterosexuals with a proven track record of being heterosexual but who experience a one-off, a curiosity, an act of ostensibly same-sex pleasure or a desire to expand beyond heterosexual norms can be effectively ‘relegated’ to a new identity label, heteroflexible, in order to keep the concept, category and classification of heterosexuality relatively pure (that is, heterosexuals do not slip – if you slipped into some kind of same-sex attraction, desire or practice, then it is because you were not really heterosexual, certainly not gay or lesbian or bisexual, but quite possible heteroflexible). I deal more with this issue in Chapter 6.

Other technologies of power that are at play include surveillance, which I discuss more in Chapters 2 and 3, and which includes practices of rating and ranking different identity labels in terms of those deemed to be the most vulnerable (Bell 2013) as well as the use of individual social networking profiles by others to review and determine if one is really the sexual or gender identity label they claim. There is also the cultural mechanism of a certain kind of concord between rights and representation that is utilised in liberal–humanist movements aligned with the new framework of thinking about gender and sexual identity within contexts of proliferating but separate categories, labels and classifications. I am thinking, for example, about the demand that transgender characters in films and television be played by transgender actors. Certainly in the last two or three years there has been significant celebration of the hiring of a greater number of transgender actors for trans roles than ever before (Cassata 2017, Erbland 2018). This is absolutely right and provides much-needed visibility for real-world trans people and for trans actors, particularly in mass-circulation film and television. It also helps ensure the creative process of representation is not marred by unfortunate, narrow or insulting stereotypes. At the same time, however, in preferring or even demanding that all trans roles be played by trans actors, we lose an important, albeit very tacit, instance of radical interference in gender norms and a possible reduction in the possibility of change and fluidity. For example, when a very straight, very masculine actor such as David Duchovny plays a transgender character in the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91, 2017) in a way which is not mocking, not for comedic purposes, sympathetic, straight and empowered, then we are given an opportunity to identity simultaneously with the actor and the character; bearing witness to this double identification opens up the possibility of saying, if Duchovny can play transgender, and if a straight masculine man can appear transgendered, then others can be transgender, too, and, indeed, I ask myself if I too may be trans. When we attempt to use liberal rights discourses to argue that a trans person should be aligned with a trans character, we risk undoing that instance of radical discord and instead saying, The trans person in Orange Is the New Black is played by trans actor Laverne Cox, and that is good and fine and right and my world is not shattered. We lose the possibility of shattering world-views, in other words. Again, this is not to make judgement on which is the better option, but to say that for every positive move that draws on older, liberal–humanist and conservative discourses, we potentially lose an instance of radical re-figuration that may have helped produce something different and, as yet, culturally unknowable.

At the same time, the governance strategy of biopolitics, which attempts to deploy disciplinary logic at an administrative level, builds a culture in the second half of the twentieth century in which identities are conceptualised in terms of exchange value and data is gathered in ways which are seen to enable all “activities to be measured and assessed” (Foucault 2008, p. 247). For Foucault (2007), biopolitical discourses do not work on a mutually exclusive binary of normal/abnormal, but

a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality, and the operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable.

(p. 63)

To perform a coherent gender or sexual identity, then, is to take up the tacit invitation to be active in that process of plotting where one lies on the distributional curve through self-surveillance and self-checking, and the curve that one accesses is typically that given in media formations today. A coherent gender or sexual identity (or any of the practices related to sex and sexuality, relationships and gendered performances) is, in this biopolitical framework, permitted to stray from the norm, but only by a certain amount. Normativity is produced through being within proximity to a certain norm on that distributional curve. This is a means of making sense of identity in a way that is not limited by the normal/abnormal dichotomy, but that does so in a way which retains the central significance of normativity as a tool of exclusion for those who are not proximate to it on such a distributional curve or continuum. For example, we might have seen this most markedly over the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in magazines which provide normative advice or present quizzes in which one finds out if one’s behaviours are more or less within the range of the normal. It is also the form in which identity is given, broadly speaking, in the reception of certain texts through viewing in a comparative mode – for example, in the spectatorship of a reality television show in which one views the behaviour of others, recognises those behaviours, re-cognises (re-thinks) or re-constitutes the self and goes on to ask how different one might be or how similar one might be to that character or performer.

Within a digital setting today, this practice is deployed to work out quite where one might sit within a taxonomy by responding to the invitation to choose a category that ‘fits’. That was perhaps easier in the past, if masculine and feminine and heterosexual and homosexual were the only available gender and sexual categories, although of course many people fell outside of these and that has had quite significant consequences for health, mental health and liveability. So while the norm is quite variable and complex in any case (Wiegman and Wilson 2015), and what constitutes the norm spirals out across a range, even if one that involves discrete categorisations and classificatory labels, the question Am I normal? continues to play a very substantial role in young people’s lives. Perhaps the most important thing here is that what counts as normal has grown, such that a gender identity which is non-binary or a sexuality which classifies itself as asexual enter the range of possibility of being considered normal and normal categories with which one can identify with coherence, intelligibility and recognition.

Social changes and sexualities, gender and relationships

Over the past few years, I have been writing about sexual identity and young people. In my work on queer youth suicide (2012) in particular, I articulated a perspective on how the slightly higher rate of suicidality among non-heterosexual youth and young adults might be understood not as caused by non-heterosexuality or non-cisgendered status, but as a result of the very frameworks that demand coherent, regimented identities within the narrow categories of heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine. There I argued that for those who fail to fit into the ‘received wisdom’ of the dominant range of identity labels, the risk of suicidality is greater. This is on the basis that a liveable life depends entirely on being able to articulate a subjectivity (including a gender and sexual identity) within coherent, intelligible and recognisable norms. It may matter less if one finds oneself positioned to identify as a gender or sexuality that is non-normativised or positioned as abnormal and tolerable (LGBT), for, like straightness or cisgendered status, those are part of the framework of intelligibility. Those deeply felt desires to be something other, something which may not have a name, or may not have coherence within contemporary languages of identity, are those which are at risk, because they are denied recognition, recognisability, social participation and belonging (including also abject belonging).

The claims I made in 2012 about the regimentary pressures of identity conformity and the impact of these on the health, mental health and social wellbeing of young, non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming persons need to be revisited and revised in order to take into account new understandings of sexual and gender identity emerging from young people’s own voices that challenge masculine/feminine and hetero/homo identity dichotomies in ways which were unexpected only a very small number of years ago. What I am thrilled to discover, then, with the emergent taxonomy, is a way which helps address this very problem: a proliferation of identity labels, norms, practices, desires, genders and subjectivities that give, on the one hand, a new set of terms that might ‘catch’ those who fell through the gaps of liveability and identity coherence previously and, on the other, a means of giving agency to young people, including the very vulnerable, to develop and articulate identity labels that might have a greater ‘fit’ with whatever disjuncture from normativity one might feel is going on in the practice of selfhood. Whether this provides a useful solution to suicidality is not yet something we can know, but I am happy to make a reasonable judgement that the new taxonomy may open possibilities for more liveable lives. This is not, of course, to say that the new taxonomy may not turn out to be responsible for greater anxiety and mental illness among young people who find the task of ‘choosing’ a gender and sexuality from across so many labels to be a task too difficult to face and for which a radical, albeit non-individualised, fluidity, post-category and post-labelling framework for subjectivity might be a better grounding on which to forge a liveable life.

Two years ago, I worked on a book called Digital Identities (2016), in which I argued that digital media is no longer usefully understood as somehow separate from ‘real life’ – a real/virtual dichotomy was very much in vogue in the early years of the Internet in which cyborg conceptualisations of identity play online separate from the ‘meat’ of the body left behind operated across some cultural theory, numerous films and fictional literature, and everyday practices of playing with gender labels, for example, in text-based online chat. What these mythical sensibilities of the early Internet represented was a notion of the disjunct subject. What I argued instead was that digital media and social networking became, instead, the tools par excellence by which to perform as a unified, coherent subject. However, the unified, coherent subject is never actually fully complete, either philosophically or, indeed, in the setting of online representation and performance. As Helen Kennedy (2006) has pointed out about webpages generally, they are a media form which is never entirely finished, just as identity composition is a continuous process – both are constantly “under construction” (p. 869). A...