Lesbian and Gay Identities Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This sample Lesbian and Gay Identities Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need help writing your assignment, please use our research paper writing service and buy a paper on any topic at affordable price. Also check our tips on how to write a research paper, see the lists of research paper topics, and browse research paper examples.

Ever since its arrival in academia during the 1970s, lesbian and gay studies have been haunted by the identity problem. Without doubt, it has consistently been one of the big themes for understanding ”lesbian and gay lives” historically, comparatively, and contemporaneously.

Broadly, research on gay identity has highlighted six questions:

What is the nature of the lesbian and gay identity? – the essentialist/phenomenalist question.
How did the identity of lesbian and gay emerge? – the historical question.
How do people come to acquire the lesbian/ gay identity? – the question of stages and processes.
How do people manage the lesbian and gay identity? – the coming out/outing/passing problem.
How is the identity changing?
What are the political uses of lesbian and gay identities? – which highlights the politics of identity and the issue of citizenship rights.

During the 1970s, a social science literature emerged which suggested the processes in which a person came to build up different kinds of sexual identity. These writings often delineated stages. Plummer (1975), for example, suggested the stages of sensitization, signification, subculturalization, and stabilization. Nowadays, such models are seen as perhaps having relevance for the 1960s and the 1970s when homosexuality was heavily stigmatized; however, these days younger people are experiencing much more flexible ways of relating to the category of homosexual.

By the 1980s it became clear that many sexual and gender identities were coming to be political categories. Increasingly both the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement came to center around a pivotal (and usually essentialized) identity. Indeed, without such identities becoming extant, much of the politics of the new social movements would not be possible.

Gay identity became a political tactic. It also allowed rights to be attached to the identity.

But there have also been a number of counter-movements to this. First, critics suggest that categories have oversimplified – even stereotyped and essentialized – complex experiences. Sexual and gender identities, for example, lie at the intersections of many other axes: ethnicity, nationality, age, disablement. These can readily hyphenate identities into ”Asian gay identity” or ”working-class, Native American lesbian identity.”

Second, critics suggest that postmodern times have brought very different and largely unstable identities, as we have seen above: there is no fixed way of being sexual or gendered. These more radical tendencies in identity theory have since the late 1980s been linked to ”queer.” ”Queer” is most definitely meant to take us beyond the boundaries and borders of heteronormativity. Identity is thus seriously questioned. Whether we can live with deconstructed identities in the future remains to be seen.

Bibliography:

Plummer, K. (1975) Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Plummer, K. (ed.) (1981) The Making of the Modern Homosexual. Hutchinson, London.
Troiden, R. (1988) Gay and Lesbian Identity: A Sociological Study. General Hall, Dix Hills, NY.