Understanding Narrative Identity Through Lesbian and Gay Youth

Edmund Coleman-Fountain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137312709
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

This book contests the idea that lesbian and gay categories are disappearing, and that sexuality is becoming fluid, by showing how young people use them in a world in which heterosexuality is privileged. Exploring identity making, the book shows how old modernist stories of sexual being entwine with narratives of normality.

1

Making Sense of Lesbian and Gay Identity

Writers on identity after the postmodern turn are familiar with seeing identity described as fluid and fragmented (Elliott and du Gay, 2009: xii). This is offered up as a departure from the stasis of modernity, where identity in modernity is understood as ‘solid and stable’, and postmodern identity as shaped by a desire to ‘avoid fixation and keep the options open’ (Bauman, 1996: 18). Accounts of postmodern identity have often been concerned with deconstructing categories, and demonstrating their historically contingent nature (Fuss, 1989). This chapter aims to shift away from the repudiation of coherent, unified identities to think of how identity narratives ‘impose an order upon inchoate worlds’ (Plummer, 2001: 195). Such a deployment of narrative in social science writing, which has been called a turn ‘ “back” towards a kind of humanistic modernism’ (Frosh and Baraitser, 2009: 160), allows us to think of how ‘stability and coherence are achieved’ (Plummer, 2001: 195) in a world of complexity. It is in this way that this book sees narratives as ideological. They reflect a ‘relatively formal and articulated system of meanings, values and beliefs of a kind that can be abstracted as a “world view” ’ (Williams, 1977: 109).

More recently, Zygmunt Bauman (2009: 11) has described identity as a ‘never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged’. The process which Bauman describes can be understood as a narrative one. Narratives involve, as Steph Lawler (2008: 16) argues, an interpretation of people’s experience. It is through narrative that people make sense of the lives that they or other people live or have lived; and just as lived experience is open-ended, so too is its interpretation. This process is captured in Plummer’s description of the storytelling subject who, instead of being a ‘centred’, fixed or stable one, is an ‘embodied, emotional, interactive self, striving for meaning’ (Plummer, 2001: 255). Plummer’s description echoes Lawler’s emphasis on the relationship between stories and actual life events; storytellers have ‘real’ lives which they actively interpret. Their experience of those lives comes from their situation in ‘real’ social contexts. It is on this basis that we can consider the relationship between narrative – including ideology as part of the process of making sense, value and meaning – and the non-discursive. It is through narrative that people can both comprehend and act within the conditions in which they live.

How we make sense of the world is socially patterned by prevailing narratives, and it is through those forms that we give structure to experience. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Lawler (2008: 15) uses the concept of ‘emplotment’ to describe how ‘things are brought together … into one coherent story’. In telling stories we make meaning of experience, and as we do we draw on plots and scripts that are bound by ‘a string of dominant conventions and assumptions which are built into narrative structures’ (Plummer, 2001: 195). Stories are, as Hammack (2008: 235) says, ‘formed in dialogue with a larger cultural system’. Our personal stories, he says, are achieved through modifying master narratives that provide templates for our own. In this chapter, the focus is on the way identity is patterned by stories which come to us as the product of generations of joint actions and negotiations. It explores this process through the lens of lesbian and gay identities, looking at how they have been understood culturally, and as subjects of social scientific enquiry.

The focus of the first part of this chapter is on processes of categorization and role-taking, which are fundamental to identity as the social positions from which we speak. It looks at early work on homosexuality by symbolic interactionists who observed the production of a distinct ‘homosexual role’. In particular the concern of those theorists was with the making of a stigmatized homosexual category and the effects that had on the people who identified with it. This work, which is broadly constructionist in approach, is useful for understanding how narrative identities are shaped by the adoption of socially meaningful and scripted roles. The second part of the chapter extends this by looking at the stories that have been told about lesbian and gay identities. A range of stories are looked at, which are placed in order of their emergence. The first of these are medical and religious narratives of pathology and sin; of being sexually strange. Following that is a focus on stories of lesbian and gay identities as forms of cultural practice linked to scripted ways of performing those identities. Finally, a focus on narratives of assimilation addresses the way that social change has altered the sense people make of what it means to be lesbian and gay in societies in which those identities are increasingly considered and claimed to be ‘ordinary’. The point of addressing these ways of framing lesbian and gay identity is to think about how themes of doing and being, sameness and difference shape lesbian and gay identity.

Symbolic interactionism and the study of homosexuality

The narrative approach adopted in this book can be labelled as ‘symbolic interactionist’, where it focuses on interpretation and meaning-making (Blumer, 1969). This is a hallmark of symbolic interactionist sociology generally; as Plummer (2000: 194) says:

A key concern for interactionist sociology is with the manner through which human beings go about the task of assembling meaning: how we define ourselves, our bodies and impulses, our feelings and emotions, our behaviours and acts; how we define the situations we are in, develop perspectives on the wider social order, produce narratives and stories to explain our actions and lives; how such meanings are constantly being built up through interaction with others, and how those meanings are handled, modified, transformed, and hence evolve through encounters.

In particular, it draws on interactionist work on categorization and the manifestation of social roles, notably what came to be known as the ‘homosexual role’. Prior to the postmodern turn in the eighties, this approach to social theory was central to anti-essentialist thinking on sexuality. It was typified in the work of feminist, lesbian and gay sociologists, who inspired this book, particularly that of Ken Plummer, Barbara Ponse, Stevi Jackson Martin Levine, Diane Richardson, Carol Warren and Richard Troiden.

The symbolic interactionist theory of sexuality was built on early labelling theories, like Erving Goffman (1963) and Howard Becker’s (1963) work on deviance, Mary McIntosh’s (1968) account of the ‘homosexual role’, and John Gagnon and William Simon’s (1973) sexual scripting theory. The focus on categorization and meaning that underpinned this work was developed to enquire about the social nature of sexuality, and the stigmatization of non-normative identities. At the heart of this was the belief that sexuality was social and that people become sexual not as a result of sexual essences, but due to how they established and maintained identities through available categories (Richardson and Hart, 1981). By locating sexuality in processes of meaning-making, those using symbolic interactionism contested theories of homosexuality that saw it as a psychological or biological deviance, focusing instead on the productive role of social categories (Plummer, 1981a).

Towards the end of the 1980s however, sexuality studies was dominated by queer theory, which contested identity making, in favour of the subversion of identity (Butler, 1990). In the process, sexual theory moved out of lesbian and gay studies’ confines into the cutting edge of cultural studies (Stein and Plummer, 1994). Whilst a strong body of interactionist work continued during this period – with well-regarded writers like Plummer (1995) and Jackson and Scott (2010a) continuing to champion it – their arguments are often overshadowed by deconstructionist approaches. Their work is nevertheless worth considering if we want to understand how people ‘make’ meaningful, enduring identities. The discussion of categories and selfhood that follows reflects this. It establishes a dialogue with a body of social constructionist literature that is now over three decades old, in order to think about its relevance to contemporary identities.

Homosexual categories and the homosexual role

Categorization, Richard Jenkins (2008: 105) says, is a ‘routine and necessary’ part of ‘how we make sense of, and impute predictability to, a complex human world’. For David Maines (2000: 579), the most consequential meanings ‘pertain to fundamental categories of human group life’ that get ‘incorporated into the ongoing cultural and social structural arrangements of a society’. Categories are influential in the way they shape subjectivities and social structures. In terms of identity, a category is secured by how we conform to what it proscribes through acting out roles which, as Goffman (1969) noted, become entwined with our sense of who we are, as the way we make ourselves intelligible through available social forms.

In the interactionist study of sexuality, the relationship between categories and roles is important. On what basis, the interactionists asked, are people sexually categorized, and what implications do categories have for conduct. Mary McIntosh (1968) originally said that homosexuality is not a condition, but an effect of medical categories that designated the homosexual role to some but not to others. Categorization marked out a group of people who came to be seen as having an innate condition. Where that condition was seen to be immutable and pathological, McIntosh sought to challenge it on the basis of it being a social construct. Drawing on anthropological research and the studies of sexual behaviour by Alfred Kinsey, McIntosh argued that homosexuality was not confined to a distinct minority, but was spread across groups. Nevertheless, she observed, homosexuality was constructed as a deviant type. She said:

In modern societies where a separate homosexual role is recognized, the expectation on behalf of those who play the role and of others, is that a homosexual will be exclusively or predominantly homosexual in his feelings and behaviour. In addition there are other expectations that frequently exist, especially on the part of non-homosexuals, but affecting the self-conception of anyone who sees himself as homosexual. These are the expectation that he will be effeminate in manner, personality and preferred sexual activity, the expectation that sexuality will play a part of some kind in all his relations with other men, and the expectation that he will be attracted to boys and very young men and probably willing to seduce them.

(McIntosh, 1968: 184–185)

For McIntosh, the medical professions had delineated the homosexual role, as a deviation from a (heterosexual) norm, and consequently it had to be ascribed. For people to be homosexual required that they be placed in that category. The question was, on what basis was it ascribed and how did it shape the conduct of those who it was ascribed to? McIntosh’s belief was that this category was a mechanism of control, to which, once labelled, people conformed.

McIntosh’s emphasis on external control was rejected by those who saw self-labelling as a more critical problem (Plummer, 1981a). Whilst symbolic interactionists are not interested in individual definitions per se, for these writers it was, nevertheless, more realistic to ask how people came to adopt the homosexual role on their own terms. Responding to this, Plummer (1981a: 69) said that the adoption of the homosexual role involved a conversion of doing into being as people scanned their ‘bodies, group involvements, feelings and behaviours’ for signs of homosexuality. These ‘doings’, he suggested, were then connected to the ‘accounts’ of sexuality available in people’s social worlds. For Plummer, this would entail a shift in people’s interactions with others and with themselves as they came to identify with a socially stigmatized category.

The transformation of doing into being was considered to be particularly significant to young people. In several stage models of homosexual identity formation, adolescence appeared as a period of confusion and signification, a time when people became aware of their ‘different’ desires and scripted them within available sexual categories (Plummer, 1975; Troiden, 1989). The notion of scripting came from Simon and Gagnon (1986) who spoke of a socio-cultural moulding of identity through ‘interpersonal’ and ‘intrapsychic’ scripting. The script was their metaphor for the organized sexual plots and narratives that enable people to ‘become’ sexual. Underlying this was the privileging of heterosexuality, which created the grounds for experiencing oneself as different, and thus being different, in relation to a wider set of rules and proscriptions around sexual being and doing. The heterosexual assumption, Ponse (1978: 58) argued, was consequential for how people interpreted feelings and experiences not immediately coded as heterosexual.

The homosexual role was, in this way, less an ‘essential’ state of being that existed across time and cultures, and more what Richardson (1984) described as a ‘state of identification’. Being, Richardson said, was established by naming sexuality. There are affinities with Foucault (1979) here. He said that the homosexual was not a type of person until that category was created by psychiatrists in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the interactionists saw the homosexual role as productive of homosexual persons. For both, homosexuality is socially constructed. This was also about power: the homosexual role, and the ideological conditions in which that role emerged, created the possibility for the belief in homosexual persons.

The body and the sexual self

The availability of the homosexual role, it was argued, created the conditions for the emergence of a distinct homosexual state of being. A key concept this relates to is that of the ‘self’. The roles that we adopt inform the sense we make of ourselves, and as a result become part of that self through the shaping of individual conduct. As Lawler (2008: 106) says ‘knowing, more or less consciously, the repertoire of behaviours associated with our roles, we do those behaviours over and over again: they become second nature. We are constantly playing various parts, but what those parts add up to is ourselves’. For interactionists, the roles we play are central to the development of a self, and form part of what Jane Flax (cited in Jackson, 2007: 7) calls a person’s ‘going-on-being’, the continuity people feel as they move through life.

But what is the self? In contrast to the psychoanalytic understandings of writers like Flax (1990) and Judith Butler (1990), interactionists see the self not as an underlying structure, but as a process. This comes from George Herbert Mead (1934) who saw the self as arising in symbolic interactions through a person ‘taking the role of the other’. This can be understood with reference to Mead’s linked ‘stages’ of the self, the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘me’, which stand in a temporal relation to one another. For Mead, the ‘I’ is a socially embedded embodied subjectivity; it is the perspective of a person located in, looking out on, and reacting to a world around them. The ‘I’ is not something that is experienced, rather it ‘observes’ (Carreira da Silva, 2008: 119). On the other hand, the ‘me’ represents the distinct social role a person acquires in interaction with others. It is that which is ‘observed’. The ‘other’ is important, Mead argued, as it is through being with others that we come to see ourselves as having a role. By taking that role into our own conduct, which we alter through our own intellectual and emotional responses, a self emerges.

Whilst meaningful interaction occurs between individuals, they are nonetheless structured by a wider community. Mead’s (1934: 154) concept of the ‘generalized other’, which he describes as ‘the organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self’, refers to the abstracted community we are part of which we ‘objectify’ ourselves through (Carreira da Silva, 2008: 16). It is by existing in a relation to the generalized other that we make sense of ourselves in the context of a larger social structure, which we position ourselves in and respond to in the establishment of our own self-image. The generalized other provides the social roles and scripts that pattern interaction. Mead’s insertion of the social into the self was particularly influential for the interactionists. Gagnon and Simon (1973), who worked in the same theoretical tradition as Mead, for instance, said that sexuality was not a product of desires reducible to internal drives or instincts, but was instead an effect of people’s location in a wider symbolic sexual system. People became part of this system, they argued, by assimilating available sexual scripts into the self-process (through processes of intrapsychic and interpersonal scripting). This was understood to be a lifelong, process that becomes entwined with other strands of the self (notably gender (Jackson, 1982)).

This notion of the sexual self as social was attractive because it challenged the primacy of the body. Indeed, at the time, the body was questioned as the source of human sexuality. For example, Gagnon and Simon (2005: 198) saw sexuality as ‘subject to sociocultural molding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behaviour’. The feminist social constructionist theorist Carole Vance (1989: 13) argued that sexuality had become ‘the product of human action and history rather than the invariant result of the body, biology or an innate sex drive’. By being positioned against the social in this way, the body was quickly diminished in interactionist theories. William DuBay (1987: 2), for example, said that ‘homosexual feelings play a minor part in becoming gay, which is chiefly the result of adopting the homosexual role’. This would eventually lead to concerns. The absence of the body in interactionist accounts, Plummer (2003b) would argue, obscured the fleshy, emotional aspects of sexuality that make it appear so essential. By denying the body, Vance (1989: 23) warned, our understanding of sexuality risked losing its ‘visceral reality and our own experience of it’.

In contrast to the disquiet around bodies prevalent in many early interactionist theories, this book sees the body as vital. This is in keeping with Mead’s account of the self, which, whilst distinguished from the body, is nevertheless located in it where that body connects the individual to its material and symbolic environment. The self was, for Mead, more than just a symbolic interaction, it was a bodily process that arose from our physical and emotional encounters with the world around us (Shilling, 2012: 32). With regards to the sexual self, this book approaches the body as the means through which we feel and make sense of desire (Tolman, 2002). The body is entangled in the self as something we experience and interpret. As Dennis Waskul and Pamela van der Riet (2002: 488) claim, a ‘person does not “inhabit” a static object body but is subjectively embodied in a fluid, emergent, and negotiated process of being’. The self emerges in a body that is always socially located, and which we interpret through the narratives available to us. Waskul and Phillip Vannini (2006: 11) call this a socially embedded, symbolically mediated ‘socio-semiotic’ body. They argue:

The body as sign-vehicle is an actual lived and experienced body whose signifying and communicating practices represent hierarchies of meaning and value existent in the discursive order of our society … In other words, through interaction the body-material becomes a symbol, but it always remains a special type of symbol, being both a subject (through its relation with a self and others) and an object (to the self and to others) … Bodies reside, therefore, at the centre of a social structure.

Of importance is how sexual meanings permeate the stories young lesbians and gay men tell of themselves, and the implications meanings have for what they make of the body. This echoes Jackson and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Making Sense of Lesbian and Gay Identity
• 2. Embodying Lesbian and Gay Identity
• 3. Explaining Homosexuality
• 4. Getting Over It
• 5. Doing Ordinariness
• Conclusion
• References
• Index