NEW IDENTITY

LABELS
TOWARDS A NEW SEXUAL AND GENDER TAXONOMY - ROB COVER (2019)

ISABEL RODRIGUEZ PASTRANA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Old and new taxonomies
3. Emergent identities and new categories
4. The struggle between the dominant and the emergent taxonomies
5. Asexuality and/as identity
6. Performativity and identity categories
7. Anti-labelling practices
8. Conclusions: queer theory’s fluidity
INTRODUCTION

• Context: proliferation of sexual and gender identities

• Why? Need of accurate representation, traditional framework is limited (gender and

sexual binary)

• Consequence: new taxonomies as an “emergent” cultural practice (rooted in the digital

realm) that have social and political implications
OLD AND NEW TAXONOMIES

• Old taxonomies: sexual discourses of late Victorian era

• Old taxonomies as “convenient” sometimes

• New taxonomies challenge the old but can rely on conservativism

• Sapiosexuality vs bisexuality: mind/body dualism
• vs Queer Theory: certainty vs fluidity - classification vs de-classification

• Taxonomies are historical and challenged -> language is a process

OLD AND NEW TAXONOMIES

• “Variety of languages”: conflicting meanings of gender and sexuality

• Ex. Gay men in rural/urban areas
• Linkage between acts and categories (world-subjects-language)

• “Violating interpellation” / linguistic violence: classificatory colonisation of other cultural

settings
• Ex. Native American “berdache” status
• Problems of translation

• New languages come to feel like the most rightful and legitimate explanatory discourses
EMERGENT IDENTITIES AND NEW CATEGORIES

• Old framework is stuck with us: would it be possible to put an end on sexual and gender
binaries?

• New identities: individualistic and absurd vs collective and “deeply felt”

• New categories: embraces practices that replicate the norms of subjectivity

• Over-surveillance and border policing

• New categories: product of practices of generationalism

DOMINANT VS EMERGENT TAXONOMIES

• The sense of the emergent taxonomies: cultural production of a new “structure of feeling”
(the residual, dominant and emergent)
• The residual: ways of being that cannot be expressed in terms of dominant culture
• Ex. “Gay agenda”-> truce between the dominant and the residual

• The dominant: culture of liberal “tolerance” (through commodification)

• Homonormativity

• The emergent: new configurations of practices etc.

DOMINANT VS EMERGENT TAXONOMIES

• The emergent: reincorporated or suppressed

• Ex. “language of the Internet”, “alphabet soup”, “swelling acronym” (LGBTQ…)

• There is no “deeply feeling / attachment” to new taxonomies

• Bell suggests that new taxonomies are unreal, unlike the old

• There is a “deeply feeling / attachment” to new taxonomies

• Cover suggests that we need a perspective that incorporates concerns around what is ethical
ASEXUALITY AND/AS IDENTITY

• Question the dominant ways in which we understand sexuality per se

• Historical meanings: frigidity (past), identity / pride (present)
• Ace pride can shame sex-positive attitudes (the personal as political)
• Continuum of the experience of sexual attraction
• Asexuality as a “orientation” rather than as a “identity”
• Romantic vs sexual
• New taxonomies aren’t based on hierarchicalisation
PERFORMATIVITY AND IDENTITY CATEGORIES

• New identities have not shifted us beyond the dominant frameworks in terms of the
cultural demand for identity itself

• 2 wings of Queer Theory:

• Sedgwick: contingency, alternative representations
• Butler: gender performativity

• Identity is performed ‘in accord’ with the available discourses BUT representations can
shift towards our new categories -> new discourse emerge, “reconstitution”
PERFORMATIVITY AND IDENTITY CATEGORIES

• New taxonomies are regulatory because they demand an identification with categories per
se
• The subject is impelled to go on with performing a category with coherence, intelligibility
and recognizability to self and to others
• Both old and new taxonomies are regulatory ideals, truth regimes
• Why are we stuck with categorization?
• Produces subordination (to the category) but also the continuation of existence (as subject)
ANTI-LABELLING PRACTICES

• Origin: sense of no fitting in categories or fitting in more than one

• Ex. Bisexuality

• Consequence: either looking for new categories or defying categorization altogether as

being too narrow
• “Labels are for cans”
• New taxonomies compete with dominant frameworks and with anti-labelling practices
Would it be possible a world without labels?
CONCLUSION: QUEER THEORY FLUIDITY

• Queer Theory:
• No point in expanding categories of gender that produce new identity norms in greater number
• Need for moving beyond regimentary gendered ontologies
• Fluid sexualities that are based on contextuality, contingency and polysemy

• 1970s Gay Liberation:

• “End of the homosexual” -> “New human”

• Fluidity de-naturalises the categories of identity (Sedgwick) and the regimentary practices expected of
coherent identification (Butler)
• No rejection of taxonomies but a revision of them