COVER PRESENTATION – OUTLINE

1. OLD VS NEW GENDER & SEXUALITY TAXONOMIES

1.1. Taxonomies: schemes of classifying people into groups, schemes for “reading” the world
1.2. Old taxonomies
• Origin: Victorian Era
• Binarisms: man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual
• Conservativism: convenient to stick with binarisms since they offer “certainty”
1.3. New taxonomies
• Origin: Contemporary Era, Digital Era
o Generationalism: the creation of new categories lies on young people
• No binarisms: proliferation of new identities that surpass binarisms
• Non-conservativism: more representation of identities, but more “fluidity”
2. DOMINANT VS EMERGENT TAXONOMIES
2.1. Dominant: normativities (homonormativity…)
2.2. Residual: ways of being that cannot be expressed in terms of dominant culture
2.3. Emergent: new categories that are subjected to be surpressed or reincorporated into the
dominant
3. ASEXUALITY AND/AS AN IDENTITY
3.1. Historical meanings: frigidity (past), identity / pride (present)
3.2. Ace pride can shame sex-positive attitudes (the personal as political)
3.3. Asexuality as a “orientation” rather than as a “identity”
4. PERFORMATIVITY AND IDENTITY CATEGORIES
4.1. Both old and new taxonomies are regulatory ideals (they demand an identification)
• Why are we stuck with categorization?
• Because it produces subordination (to the category) but also the continuation of
existence (as subject)
4.2. Reconstitution: new categorizations, identities, practices can emerge
5. ANTI-LABELLING PRACTICES
5.1. Origin: sense of no fitting in categories or fitting in more than one
5.2. Consequence: either looking for new categories or defying categorization altogether as
being too narrow
5.3. In-class question: Would it be possible a world without labels?
6. CONCLUSIONS
6.1. Queer Theory: Fluidity de-naturalises the categories of identity
6.2. No rejection of taxonomies but a revision of them