‘Putting a face on a community’: Genre, identity, and institutional regulation in the telling (and retelling) of oral coming-out narratives

Abstract

AbstractPublic and scholarly discourse has established the ‘coming-out story’ as a culturally significant narrative genre for gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying (LGBTQ) individuals. Yet what happens when this genre is disciplined and managed for institutional ends? This study examines the process of how several LGBTQ individuals learn to narrate their coming-out experiences through trainings for a university's LGBTQ-themed speaker panels. Data include ethnographic observations and audio recordings related to training activities such as practice tellings and peer feedback sessions. Analysis focuses on the discursive practices through which training participants manage a pair of narrative dilemmas that stem from an institutional variation of the coming-out genre. This article contributes to literature on narrative and genre by demonstrating how a regulated form of personal narrative is learned and enforced to achieve the larger ideological aims of an institution. It also contributes to knowledge about identity as a fluid concept. (Coming-out story, genre, narrative, identity, ideology, performance, LGBTQ)*