Sexual Citizenship and Queer Post-Feminism

Young Women's Health and Identity Politics

Ruby Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000171136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Sexuelle Gesundheit & Sexualität

Sexual Citizenship and Queer Post-Feminism makes new connections between post-feminism and queer theory to explore the complexities of contemporary gender and sexuality. In a wide-ranging examination of sex education, safe sex, and sexual healthcare, this book demonstrates how queer post-feminist discourses practically shape young women's lives.

Bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, queer. With the ever-expanding scope of gender and sexuality categories, some feminists have bemoaned a "shrinking of the lesbian world." But how do young women understand these identity politics? Drawing on extensive interviews with queer young people, this book offers a timely exploration of the links between identity, sex, and health.

Utilising cross-disciplinary perspectives grounded in international social science research, this book will appeal to students and scholars with interests in sexuality and sexual health and those in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, public health, social work, and sociology. The book also offers implications for practice, suitable for policy-makers, health practitioners, and activist audiences.

Chapter 1

Identity politics
Queer women’s negotiations of sexual labels

Introduction

When I came out as bisexual, many met my identification with confusion. What experiences entitled me to claim that label? Why was I identifying this way when I was in a monogamous relationship with a cisgender man? Why didn’t I describe myself using other plurisexual terms such as ‘pansexual’ or ‘queer’? And why was I identifying this way now? Implicit in these questions are assumptions and misconceptions about young women’s experiences of sexuality and sexual citizenship. These questions inspired me to think deeply about how other young people articulate sexuality and how the words we use describe our relations with structures of power. In this post-gay era of increasing internal specification within LGBTIQ communities, I was interested to explore how bisexual and queer young women and non-binary people were making sense of identity politics and their role in gender, sexual citizenship, and health. Crucially, how might the ways we identify have an impact on our ability to access and experience health and wellbeing? How do we make sense of these kinds of identity politics?

The term ‘identity politics’ is having a moment. From the election of US President Donald Trump, to Brexit, to immigration, to marriage equality, to Black Lives Matter, to climate change, and beyond, discussions of identity are currently at the forefront of many transnational citizenship debates. Broadly, identity politics refers to any mobilisation related to politics, culture, and identity that could be used to describe phenomena as diverse as multiculturalism, feminism, civil rights, disability rights, and LGBTIQ movements, to name a few (Bernstein 2005). Identity politics often describes the demand by marginalised groups for recognition and equality within systems that are structurally designed to disadvantage them. More specifically, identity politics can also refer to internal group discourses of identification, belonging, and collective goals based on identity. Some suggest that it is unsurprising that a particular politics of identity has emerged in the contemporary neoliberal West that focuses on individual identities and specificity, rather than more traditional forms of collective party politics and citizenship. The overwhelming pushback against identity politics, from right-wing conservatives and left progressives alike, positions identity politics as a false sense of injury (“playing the race card!”) or a regressive individualism corroding the potential for collective effort (“focusing on gender difference is divisive!”). In general, critics of identity politics often frame it as a derogatory synonym for feminism, anti-racism, and anti-heterosexism, largely due to the idea that personal identities are purely private and are not tied to anything other than their own abstractions. However, as I argue throughout this book, the words we use to describe our identities do matter and they carry tangible socio-political consequences.

Sexual identity politics have a long and colourful history, replete with debate around the importance of sexual orientation or sexuality as a meaningful category for human groups. As Foucault (1979) and others have described, the concept of sexual identity is a modern social construct. While, in earlier times, sexual acts and desire carried little to no bearing on individuals’ public identities, the medical categorisation of sexual ‘deviants’ in the nineteenth century arguably saw the rise of sexual orientation as a descriptor for a distinct type of person. Since the earliest homophile movements of the 1950s, gay and lesbian activists have called for equal citizenship rights and recognition for people who are same-sex attracted, basing much of this activism on the notion of an essential or unchangeable sexual self. As I will discuss in this chapter, the parallel rise of queer activism and queer theory in the 1990s challenged traditional gay and lesbian identity politics with deconstructionist approaches to identity. Queer theorists and activists critique the notion of a single, stable sexual identity, instead offering more fluid understandings of the self.

Some 30 years on, what has been the legacy of these debates? How might we describe current queer identity politics? Did the rise of queer really spell the “end of gay” for a new generation (Archer 2004)? Some scholars argue that growing acceptance of same-sex attraction in the West is influencing the ways in which young people understand and articulate sexual identities (Ghaziani 2011; Richardson 2005). Recent studies from the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia suggest that young people are now placing less importance on traditional sexual identity labels such as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian.’ Several large-scale surveys have found that millennial women are increasingly more likely to identify as ‘bisexual,’ ‘pansexual,’ or ‘queer’ than previous generations. Studies also show that millennial women identify as bisexual, pansexual, or queer more than their male peers, who tend to maintain more traditional labels. This shift has also been represented in popular culture and media, with celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Kristen Stewart, Cara Delevingne, Janelle Monáe, and Ruby Rose all refusing to label their fluid sexualities or publicly embracing alternative labels such as ‘pansexual’ and ‘fluid.’ In mainstream Western popular cultures, it is evident that a particular subset of millennial women are at the forefront of this contemporary shift in queer identity politics. However, few have specifically examined why this is. Adams et al. (2014: 459) suggest that the increasing normalisation of diverse sexualities is reducing the “strategic importance of identity categories” for young people, causing them to abandon common identity labels. In other words, it is no longer useful or necessary to identify as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ in a world where sexuality is apparently a non-issue. In contrast, some argue that young people, particularly women, are expanding their understandings of gender and sexuality, subsequently broadening their use of increasingly specific and alternative sexual categories (Robards 2018).

In this chapter, I will explore why this particular generation of young people is seemingly drawn to more fluid identifications and how this is a product of a specific kind of queer post-feminist sexual citizenship. I will consider the origins of contemporary queer identity politics through a discussion of sociological, feminist, and queer theoretical approaches to sexual identity. The latter half will focus on how the women I interviewed situated themselves within these debates, demonstrating three key positions on the importance of sexual identity labels: (1) rejecting labels, (2) embracing labels, and (3) complicating labels. Through my discussion of these approaches I intend to map aspects of queer post-feminist approaches to identity – suggesting that contemporary queer post-feminist sexual citizenship is characterised by a complex identity politics that simultaneously embraces and rejects neoliberal, homonormative forms of identity. As I will discuss throughout this chapter, queer post-feminism is characterised by contradiction and fluid disidentifications.

Theorising queer women’s identities

During the period of rapid social change in the mid-twentieth century, growing awareness and acceptance of homosexuality saw shifts in understandings and theoretical approaches to gay and lesbian identities. While many empirical studies of homosexuality during the early/mid-twentieth century had mostly focused on gay men’s participation in ‘deviant’ sexual subcultures, emerging multidisciplinary gay and lesbian studies introduced more humanising approaches. Rather than understanding homosexuality as deviance or illness, social constructionist approaches shifted the focus from ‘the homosexual’ as a type of person to considerations of how homosexuality has been socio-historically positioned and produced (see Foucault 1979; McIntosh 1968). During this time, some of the most comprehensive theoretical analyses of homosexuality came from lesbian feminist theory, particularly through critiques of patriarchy and the normalisation of heterosexuality (see Rich 1986; Rubin 1989). However, women have been historically underrepresented in studies of sexuality and sexual identity, with much theorising focusing on gay men’s experiences of identity formation (Levitt and Horne 2002: 27). Despite this, research is increasingly showing that although there are similarities, lesbian and queer women’s identity formation, self-identification, and processes of coming out may differ from those of men.

Essentialist perspectives position gender and sexuality as innate and located within the biological make-up of individuals ‒ factors of our identity that are with us from birth. Studies have indicated that essentialist beliefs in the biological basis of gender or race can result in a greater likelihood of accepting sexist and racist stereotypes that reduce difference and social inequalities to biological ‘facts’ (Haslam and Levy 2006). However, essentialist understandings of homosexuality as biologically based and therefore unchangeable have been used in gay and lesbian rights movements to counter the social stigma, medicalisation, and criminalisation of sexual minorities. A number of participants in both Kitzinger’s (1987: 82) and Esterberg’s (1997) studies of lesbian identity expressed these essentialist sentiments, stating that they were “born a lesbian” or had “always known” they were lesbians, an experience no different or less normal than mainstream understandings of being heterosexual. In these accounts, women often interpret (or reinterpret) their lives in order to support their sense that they were essentially lesbian “all along,” remembering childhood gender nonconformity as an early sign of the ‘truth’ to their lesbian self prior to coming out (Kitzinger 1987: 110).

In contrast, queer theoretical approaches are critical of the notion of an essential or innate gendered, sexual self. Instead, queer theorists draw from constructionist traditions to argue that gender, sexuality, and identity are created and reproduced through social interaction and performance. Queer theorists (e.g. Butler 1990; De Lauretis 1991; Fuss 1991; Halperin 1990; Ingraham 1996; Jackson 2003; Sedgwick 1990) challenge structuralist notions of sexuality as constituting an inner truth to the self that, when revealed through the narrative process of ‘coming out,’ will bring renewed meaning to one’s identity. Diana Fuss (1991) similarly problematised this kind of dualism, suggesting that social constructions of homosexuality as deviant are established through a binary thinking that is necessary for the normalisation of heterosexuality ‒ the ‘outside’ reinforces and defines the ‘inside.’ From these perspectives, the process of coming out is less of a realisation of essential truth than a process of identity construction and a narrative ordering of subjective reality (see Plummer 1995; Weeks 2003). While queer theory largely seeks to destabilise identity categories altogether (see Butler 1991), Jeffrey Weeks (2003) agrees that identities are fluid and constructed, but compellingly suggests that they are “necessary fictions,” providing meaning, structure, and a means of subversion or collective action in heteronormative contexts.

Following this approach, Esterberg (1997) explored American lesbian and bisexual women’s experiences of identity creation and construction through their narratives of self and their social performances and embodiments of identities. Despite her initial criticisms of queer theory, a central finding from Esterberg’s (1997: 7) study was that participants’ lesbian and bisexual identities were experienced as fluid, multiple, and contingent. Esterberg (1996: 261) found that while lesbians experienced gender categories as real and meaningful in many ways, “there is an element of play, of fun, in the slippage of categories.” But rather than being entirely ‘free’ and fluid, for Esterberg (1996: 261), “we make and remake our identities … within the boundaries of convention, and while we may choose to transgress those boundaries, we do so at the risk of making our performances unintelligible.” Weeks’s (2003) notion of sexual identities as “necessary fictions” may be a pertinent means of theorising these experiences as fluid and playful but also deeply meaningful for the women’s sense of self and belonging. Throughout this book, I largely take this perspective, agreeing with Weeks (2003) that while queer theoretical perspectives are useful to describe the fluid and constructed nature of identities, they are also important aspects of individuals’ lives, necessary, no matter how fictitious.

As Esterberg (1996) indicates, queer perspectives on sexuality and identity have drawn sustained critiques. The emergence of queer theory intersected with critical debates in gay and lesbian communities around identity, naming, and group membership. Scholars and activists questioned: “if gay (and man) and lesbian (and woman) are unstable categories, what happens to sexuality-based politics?” (Gamson 1995: 399). Butler (1991: 15) provocatively illustrates these concerns:

What, if anything, can lesbians be said to share? […] What or who is it that is ‘out,’ made manifest and fully disclosed, when and if I reveal myself as a lesbian? What is it that is now known? Anything?

Bersani (1995) argues that the increasing use of queer as an umbrella term for a range of non-normative sexualities and genders has a “de-gaying” effect, or a “liberal pluralism notorious for its capacity for co-option and depoliticisation” (Jagose 1996: 112). In response, Butler (1990: 148) argues that “the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics, rather it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”

Queer is, th...