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My aim with this blog is simply to give me a space to whitter more or less (although hopefully more) comprehensibly about half baked theories that come into my head, that I don't have time to research properly. Or let me explore in text any ideas that I think I should reflect on which I've come across in whatever I'm reading at the time.
Starting a blog when you're over tired is never a good idea. So without further procrastination, here are some half-baked theories that I've got saved in random files on my desktop.
A Queer Theory
That the homosexual identity is self-fulfilling and holds back sexual liberation, as does identity politics in general.
Our minds have been socialised into binaries, as far as sex and gender are concerned. The male/female and homo-/heterosexual binaries are symbiotic off of one another, and both reinforce the other.
If a gay-identified man has sexual and romantic urges almost exclusively towards men but then starts to get feelings towards a woman in and among his male crushes, I theorize that he will likely ignore it as it upsets his homosexual identity. If he were to embrace these urges to a woman, he would have to re-evaluate his sexuality and would not be legitimately part of the gay and lesbian community that welcomed him and helped him evade stigma last time. As such being gay-identified whilst allowing this man sexual freedom with respect to homosexual relationships, it also impedes this liberty by problematising heterosexual relationships.
The man of course has the option of identifying as bisexual, ... so why wouldn't he?
Genealogical Theory for why Transsexed people associate with the LGB community
Assumption: many (hetero) transsexed people will question their sexuality before questioning their gender, and as a result may adopt and live a homosexual identity before realising that they are transexed.
Hypothesis: That Transsexed people are involved in LGB communities not just because of analogous experience in coming out, but in concrete shared experience - having come out as homosexual, before revaluating their assumption that they are cisgendered and realising they are a heterosexual transsexed individual.
Justification: If Troiden is right, and in identity assumption and commitment, the LGB community plays a large role in the process of an individual accepting their sexual identity, particularly people who use group alignment as a stigma-evasion strategy. In those TS people who did adopt and live a homosexual identity, a function that group alignment fulfilled was to provide a space in which same-sex attraction (whether as a result of homosexuality or in a homosexual identified pre-transsexed individual) was normalised and as such the stigma of being homosexual was avoided. The LGB community therefore provided the individual an accepting space, albeit on a false assumption. When TS people question and re-evaluate their gender identity, they think that they will be able to once again evade stigma by staying within the same group where they found acceptance in the first space.
Questions i need to explore:
- Why does the community as a whole accept them still? [Emapthy for the difficulty of not conforming to gender expectation?]
- Transphobia from within the LGB community and it's underlying reasons? [Challenge to the concrete Gender binary and gender essentialism] and therefore the meaningfulness of a heterosexual/homosexual divide. Idea that homosexuality is not essential either and that this accepting space is a fabrication?]
- Why, in spite of this transphobia do the trans people st
ill persist in being willing to belong to LGBT groups? [Also face transphobia from wider society, and analogous shared experience with homosexuals makes the proportion of transphobia smaller within the LGB community?]
Queer representation in student lead activist groups
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Queer destablises the homo-/hetero-sexual binary in a similar way to “[t]ranssexuality [which] can in some cases be seen as a space beyond gender binarisms” (Monro 2007, p128). Queer can be used as a label by people who inhabit a void between the sexuality extremes. Whilst bisexuality is in it own right a widely recognised and accepted label, identities such as pansexuality, asexuality and polyamory are far less understood among those people who do not identify as such and so many people who these labels fit simply identify as Queer. People that identify as Queer for this reason are marginalised and oppressed by both and encounter stigma attached to their sexuality. Whilst Queer works as a management strategy for the individuals involved insofar as it gives a communal set of ideals that legitimise the individual’s specific sexually deviant practice (back up with interviews), the Queer community has traditionally been excluded from heteronormativity and LGBT communities alike (although in recent years LGBTQs are becoming more prevalent).
This is largely the way that Queer has been presented to the NUS LGBT campaign at its conferences. The NUS however on the whole sees this as an empty signifier to allow an assortment of ‘sexual practices’ (as opposed to sexual identities – a sexual practice is seen as a lifestyle choice) into the campaign who it deems to be oppressed for something they could just avoid doing such as BDSM or multiple relationships. This points to a possible reason that the NUS continually refuses to ‘add the Q’ – that Queer threatens the idea of sexual essentialism. In doing this, the legitimacy of people’s homosexual identity is also challenged and thus Queer provides threatens to dissolve that which LGBT people use to manage the stigma attached to their own sexual deviancy.
Tyson Hayes
24 Dec 2008 01:33
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Tags: Gender Homosexual Lgbtq Queer Sociology
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