‘You have to coin new things’: sexual and gender identity discourses in asexual, queer, and/or trans young people’s networked counterpublics

ABSTRACT

Emergent gender and sexual identity discourses that circulate on social networking sites in spaces organised around non-normative genders and sexualities (i.e. networked counterpublics) challenge dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality. These emergent discourses increasingly represent sexual and gender identities as pluralistic, potentially infinite, and able to be tailored to the individual. Using interviews with asexual, queer, and trans young people (AQTYP; n = 16), we examined how AQTYP in networked counterpublics appropriate hegemonic norms of identity construction to creatively articulate new sexual and gendered subjectivities. We employ thematic discourse analysis to trace how AQTYP use these labels to navigate and complicate sexual and gender self-labelling imperatives in counterpublic contexts. We conclude that AQTYP engage with gender and sexual identity discourses in online counterpublics in ways that challenge many, but not all, parameters of hegemonic identity discourses. Ultimately, we argue that new understandings of sexuality and gender in AQTYP’s networked counterpublics are a form of queer world-making in which the feelings and relationalities that constitute sexual and gendered subjectivities cannot be considered self-evident, stable, or universal.

KEYWORDS:

• Asexual
• queer
• social media
• transgender
• youth

Acknowledgments

We thank Katherine Sender for her detailed feedback on multiple early draughts of this paper and her encouragement of this project. We also thank Emily Dibble for assistance with conducting interviews and van Anders lab research assistants Milo Ghering, Elisabeth Silver, Emily Spence, and Julie Thompson Burdine for assistance with transcription.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Individuals can be trans, asexual, and/or queer, such that these are neither mutually exclusive nor completely overlapping categories. We use them here to reference three distinct non-normative social positions: ‘trans’ to refer to gender/sexes that do not coincide with the gender/sex an individual is assigned at birth, ‘asexual,’ to refer to individuals who do not experience sexual attraction to and/or sexual interest in others or do so rarely or in specific relational contexts (‘About Asexuality,’ n.d.), and ‘queer’ to refer to sexualities based on the gender/sex of partners that are not heterosexual. Importantly, common definitions of queer also encompass asexual and sometimes trans, and some definitions inhere specific politics and relationalities. Here, we use ‘queer’ only to refer to a range of marginalised sexualities without re-centering heterosexuality (e.g. ‘non-heterosexual’).

2. Although individuals past early adulthood might engage with gender and sexual identity discourses in networked counterpublics, we focused on young people in our study because only young people discussed it in their interviews.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zach Schudson

Zach Schudson, M.S., is a doctoral candidate in the joint programme in Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. He studies how people’s diverse beliefs about gender/sex and sexuality shape their self-understandings and their perceptions of others.

Sari van Anders

Dr. Sari van Anders is the new Canada 150 Research Chair in Social Neuroendocrinology, Sexuality, and Gender/Sex, and Professor of Psychology, Gender Studies, and Neuroscience, at Queen’s University after spending a decade at the University of Michigan. Dr. van Anders’ research program sets out new ways to conceptualise, understand, and map gender/sex, sexual diversity, and sexuality, and also provides unique tools and theories for feminist and queer bioscience, especially within social neuroendocrinology and studies of testosterone.