Fractured narratives, fractured identities: cross-cultural challenges to essentialist concepts of gender and sexuality

Abstract

Narrative understandings of identity have gained prominence in recent years, and much of the distress people take to counsellors or psychotherapists may be conceived of as narrative breakdown. When I am no longer able to tell myself and others a coherent, unified story about my life, my sense of self may feel threatened. Attempts by sexual-minority individuals to create a unified narrative-of-self are often undermined by the incompatibility of competing, intersecting narratives. The potential limitations of language to adequately narrate lived experience are thus revealed. This article explores the impact on a British Indian Sikh gay man of colliding narratives (of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, gender and sexuality) which threaten an existing stable sense of self. His struggle to achieve unity in his narrative-of-self is hampered by contradictory narratives of same-sex attraction and behaviour in his ‘home’ Indian culture and his ‘adopted’ white, British culture. I explore some implications of adopting a queer perspective – encouraging and cautionary – for therapists working cross-culturally.