The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course ‐ edited by Phillip Hammack and Bertram Cohler

PART 1. Time, Place, Story: Introductory Perspectives on Narrative and the Life Course 1. Narrative Engagement and Sexual Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Sexual Lives. Phillip L. Hammack & Bertram J. Cohler 2. History, Narrative, and Sexual Identity: Gay Liberation and Post-War Movements for Sexual Freedom in the United States. Benjamin Shepard Culture, Identity, Narrative: Context and Multiplicity in Sexual Lives 3. Stories from the Second World: Narratives of Sexual Identity in the Czech Republic across Three Generations of Men who have Sex with Men. Timothy McCajor Hall 4. Unity and Purpose at the Intersections of Racial/ethnic and Sexual Identities. Ilan H. Meyer & Suzanne C. Ouellette 5. Bisexuality in a House of Mirrors: Multiple Reflections, Multiple Identities. Paula C. Rodriguez Rust 6. Narrative Identity Construction of Black Youth for Social Change. Mollie V. Blackburn PART 3. Identities in Process: Stories of Risk and Relationships 7. Between Kansas and Oz: Drugs, Sex, and the Search for Gay Identity in the Fast Lane. Steven P. Kurtz 8. (My) Stories of Lesbian Friendship. Jacqueline S. Weinstock 9. Emergence of a Poz Sexual Culture: Accounting for Barebacking among Gay Men. Barry D. Adam 10. Connectedness, Communication, and Reciprocity in Lesbian Relationships: Implications for Women's Construction and Experience of PMS. Janette Perz & Jane M. Ussher 11. Postcards from the Edge: Narratives of Sex and Relationship Breakdown among Gay Men. Damien Ridge & Rebecca Wright Making Gay and Lesbian Identities: Development, Generativity, and the Life Course 12. In the Beginning: American Boyhood and the Life Stories of Gay Men. Bertram J. Cohler 13. The Role of the Internet in the Sexual Identity Development of Gay and Bisexual Male Adolescents. Gary W. Harper, Douglas Bruce, Pedro Serrano, & Omar B. Jamil 14. Focus on the Family: The Psychosocial Context of Gay Men Choosing Fatherhood. David deBoer 15. Midlife Lesbian Lifeworlds: Narrative Theory and Sexual Identity. Mary Read 16. The Good (Gay) Life: The Search for Signs of Maturity in the Narratives of Gay Adults. Laura A. King, Chad M. Burton, & Aaron C. Geise 17. Generativity and Time in Gay Men's Life Stories. Andrew J. Hostetler 18. From Same-Sex Desire to Homosexual Identity: History, Biography, and the Production of the Sexual Self in Lesbian and Gay Elders' Narratives. Dana Rosenfeld Concluding Perspective 19. Lives,Times, and Narrative Engagement. Bertram J. Cohler & Phillip L. Hammack

Book review: The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course

Researchers and practitioners in psychology and the social sciences are increasingly recognizing the value of narrative and life story approaches to understanding lived experience (McAdams & Pals, ...

The story of sexual identity: narrative perspectives on the gay and lesbian life course

Gender and sexual identity play a significant role in the lives of developing youth. The developments of gender and sexual identities are shaped by a variety of factors including, but not limited to, biological, cognitive, and social elements. It is crucial to consider that gender and sexual minority individuals face additional complexities in the two processes of gender identity and sexual identity development. Cisgender identity development is most commonly understood with the help of early cognitive and social theories, although biological components play a part as well. Specifically, the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg, Sandra Bem, Alfred Bandura, and David Buss have made significant contributions to the understanding of cisgender identity development. Modern transgender identity development models are helpful in exploring transgender identity formation with the most popular being the Transgender Emergence Model founded by Arlene Lev. Similar to cisgender identity development, heterosexual identity development is typically understood with the help of early psychosocial theories, namely that of Erik Erikson. Sexual minority identity development is often comprehended using stage models and life-span models. Sexual minority stage models build off the work of Erik Erikson, with one of the most popular being the Cass Model of Gay and Lesbian Identity Development. Offering more flexibility than stage models and allowing for fluid sexual identity, life-span models, like the D’Augelli model, are often more popular choices for modern exploration of sexual minority identity development. As both sexual and gender identity spectrums are continuing to expand, there also comes a need for an exploration of the relationship between sexual and gender identity development, particularly among sexual minority populations.

Changing language, changes lives: Learning the lexicon of LGBTQ+ health equity.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality. Benjamin Kahan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+242.Dustin FriedmanDustin FriedmanAmerican University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this brief but ambitious book, Benjamin Kahan gives readers a slow-motion history of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named the “Great Paradigm Shift,” when a world of a “thousand aberrant sexualities” (to use Foucault’s phrase) transformed into one where everyone gets sorted into the homosexual/heterosexual binary.1 He describes his method as a “historical etiology” that looks back to dubious narratives of sexual causality to tell the story of modern erotic subjectivity’s emergence. Kahan’s point is that the “minor perverts” of his title did not simply disappear all at once, as Sedgwick’s mocking phrase implies. Instead, he draws on a diverse archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexological and literary texts to demonstrate that various sexual etiologies had surprisingly long afterlives, and that an understanding of sexual identity as congenital, interior to the psyche, and defined by the gender of the desired object has had a stunningly briefer moment of cultural dominance than typically assumed.Kahan’s discussion is organized into an introduction that explains his etiological methodology and situates it among competing historical approaches, five short chapters each addressing a different etiology, and a remarkable final chapter reframing his thesis as a sort of Unified Field Theory for the history of the sexuality. Chapter 1 focuses on situational homosexuality in two contemporaneous lesbian-themed plays, the largely forgotten Winter Bound (1929) by Thomas Dickinson and Lillian Hellman’s much more famous The Children’s Hour (1934). While the notion that sexual practices can be affected by one’s external circumstances—snowed-in at a farmhouse, attending a girls’ school—might seem to challenge the homo/hetero binary, Kahan argues that situational homosexuality actually “help[s] solidify sexual identity” by defining such acts as aberrations that do not affect one’s true identity, now understood to be an unchanging psychological quality that is not necessarily affected by one’s physical activities (35). The second chapter discusses another form of externally determined sexuality that he calls “anthropologis sexualis,” the notion that sexual behavior is influenced by climate. He analyzes the feverish homoeroticism of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) in relation to contemporary sexological texts to discuss how anthropologis sexualis marks a transition from the permeable body of humoral theory, which is radically open to its environment, to the self-contained and stable body of modern germ theory. This change facilitated the transition from a universalizing notion of sexual perversity (anyone could be spurred to indulge in aberrant sexual practices, given their location on the globe) to the minoritizing notion of identity (external circumstances have no bearing on one’s internal sexual self).In his third chapter, Kahan looks at the unlikely trio of Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854–55), the Victorian bestseller Trilby (1894), and the American novelist Paschal Beverly Randolph’s nineteenth-century writings on “sex magic.” He uses these texts to discuss “magia sexualis,” the belief that magical acts such as “occultism, sorcery, supernaturalism, and witchcraft” can conjure sexual acts into being. By positing that the sexual motive was both outside the self, caused by magic, and inside the self, as the result of the magical act, magia sexualis aided the cultural transition from a premodern understanding of sex as part of the external “deployment of alliance (marriage, kinship, inheritance)” to the modern understanding of sex as the psychologically internal “deployment of sexuality (sensations, pleasures, and impressions)” (69). Chapter 4 is notable for its extended focus on one work, Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), as it addressed the sexual implications of the Fordist transformation of the American economy. Anderson’s narratives of small-town life registered anxieties that the system of mass production would standardize sexual object choices in the process of regulating the private lives of workers for maximum productivity and efficiency, thereby flattening the irregularities of desire that thrived in local enclaves. “Weak etiologies” (or “etiolated etiologies”) are the subject of chapter 5, by which Kahan means theories of causality that resist the “clear ordering of cause and effect” embraced by many sexologists that produced the modern notion that “congenital desire leads to sexual object choice” (102). By contrast, weak etiologies of sexuality offer “coexisting possibilities” rather than “truth claims,” occupying the “paradoxical space between choice and compulsion, between voluntarity and involuntarity, and between active and unconscious action” often used to describe substance addiction (101–2)—a parallelism he draws out through readings of two narratives of alcoholism, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) and Charles R. Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944).The final chapter is a tour de force that proficiently synthesizes over three decades of work in the history of sexuality and demonstrates how Kahan’s etiological approach resolves unrationalized contradictions in the field, specifically those regarding the historical location of the Great Paradigm Shift and modern sexual identity’s intersections with race, social class, and gender. These ambitions are supported by immense erudition and scholarly chops. In his account, “the ingredients of homosexuality” all exist by the early modern period—the era some scholars have identified as the origin of modern sexuality—but don’t get “baked together” until notions of congenital sexual identity are formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, the era more commonly identified as the start of our contemporary sexual regime (124). The rise of congenitality, he argues, is also the moment when sexual identity becomes disarticulated from other identity categories. Perhaps the most striking conclusion he proffers is that models of acquired sexuality persisted much longer into the twentieth century than previously suspected. According to Kahan, the homo/hetero binary was indisputably dominant only from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century and is now in the process of transforming into the fissiparous understandings of sexual and gender identity that are beginning to take hold today.Other than the introduction and conclusion, Kahan writes short chapters that move quickly and fluidly among theoretical reflections, historical contextualization, and literary close readings, allowing him to make startling and illuminating juxtapositions between texts. He combines this argumentative swiftness with a deep and varied archive of materials that lend richness and nuance to his discussions. This is indicated by his extensive and discursive footnotes, which take up nearly sixty-five pages. Perhaps more than in other academic studies, these footnotes are worth a read on their own, indicating the vast amount of material he has synthesized and typified in the highly readable and efficient main discussion. Kahan’s prose style is quite strong: he combines long, complex sentences with shorter, colloquial statements that balance conceptual sophistication with clarity of expression. One qualm I had with this volume, though, was the uncertain role literary history plays in his methodology. In a section of the introduction titled “Sexological Modernism,” Kahan states that the blurry boundary that existed between sexological and literary writing at the turn of the twentieth century means that “we should understand modernist literary works as ‘vernacular sexology’ that dispute, amend, shape, contribute to, and work through more institutionalized modes of sexology” (20). While one of the study’s strengths is its historical and national diversity, it is often not clear how the writings he discusses fit into, challenge, or inspire a reassessment of the modernist paradigm. Indeed, references to modernism are made only in passing after the introduction, as literary texts are discussed largely in relation to sexological models of etiology rather than in specifically literary contexts. While this is not precisely a problem, given that Kahan frames his project as a contribution to the histories of sexuality and science rather than literary studies per se, I was still left wondering how modernist aesthetics might have affected the development of sexual etiologies and vice versa. Consequently, this volume will likely appeal more to those working in sexuality studies rather than students of modernism more generally.With that said, this volume is vital to anyone who works on the history of sexuality and/or queer studies. The new paradigm Kahan gives us for understanding the relevance of supposedly superannuated sexual etiologies opens up an exciting new archive for scholars to explore. The last chapter alone should be required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of the competing historical frameworks that have been offered for the genealogy of “our” sexual identity categories, and its bold rewriting of twentieth-century sexuality should have an immediate effect on research and teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This is a necessary, field-changing book that should be read by anyone interested in sexuality in any academic field or historical period. Notes 1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 44; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 44. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 2November 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705695HistoryPublished online August 20, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Emerging adulthood presents a unique developmental milieu for sexual orientation and identity development. Over the past 10 years, a body of research has begun delineating contemporary emerging adults’ understandings of their sexual orientation and processes of sexual identity development. This scholarship has increasingly recognized the complexity and multidimensional nature of sexual identity development among both heterosexual and sexual-minority individuals. This review covers current conceptualizations of sexual orientation and identity, traditional and contemporary models of sexual identity development, and recent empirical literature assessing developmental trajectories, consistency between and within dimensions of sexual orientation and identity, stability of these dimensions, and issues of sexual identity labeling and categorization. This scholarship suggests that increased attention to diversity within and between sexual identity groups is warranted but also reveals notable patterns and categories that should be considered as the field moves forward.

Emerging adulthood presents a unique developmental milieu for sexual orientation and identity development. Over the past 10 years, a body of research has begun delineating contemporary emerging adults’ understandings of their sexual orientation and processes of sexual identity development. This scholarship has increasingly recognized the complexity and multidimensional nature of sexual identity development among both heterosexual and sexual-minority individuals. This review covers current conceptualizations of sexual orientation and identity, traditional and contemporary models of sexual identity development, and recent empirical literature assessing developmental trajectories, consistency between and within dimensions of sexual orientation and identity, stability of these dimensions, and issues of sexual identity labeling and categorization. This scholarship suggests that increased attention to diversity within and between sexual identity groups is warranted but also reveals notable patterns and categories that should be considered as the field moves forward.

Sex and related questions of sexual reproduction and coupling have been an important focus for the social sciences since the 1960s and 1970s when sociologists, gay activists, and feminists first began to argue that sexuality is socially constructed, and not innate. The discipline of urban studies adds to such accounts by demonstrating that sexuality is also spatially constructed, with peoples’ sexual identities and desires influenced in various ways their upbringing, surroundings, and neighbourhood of residence in the city. Additionally, it brings to the fore the idea that cities offer more freedom than traditional rural communities in terms of possible sexual lifestyles, with larger cities exhibiting a diverse range of sexualized spaces (e.g., adult entertainment centers, sex clubs, gay bars, brothels) which act as the focus for sometimes niche sexual practices and identities. The way these different sexualities are made visible (or not) in the cityscape is revealing of the way these sexualities are regarded as either ‘normal’ or in some way ‘deviant.’ This noted, the study of sexuality in urban studies has generally been eclipsed by more traditional preoccupations with class and race. However, there has been gradual—if sometimes grudging—acknowledgment that questions of sex and sexuality matter when addressing the complexity of urban processes. This is most obvious in those studies of lesbian, gay, and bisexual life which have honed in on the importance of specific neighborhoods in LGBTQ life. Here studies of LGBTQ residence in a range of Western cities (notably San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Sydney, and Amsterdam, but also some smaller cities and towns including Provincetown, US and Hebden Bridgem UK) highlighted the importance of neighborhood spaces in the social, economic, and political life of those whose lives fall outside the heterosexual ‘norm.’ In time, the realization that many of these spaces of residence were also key sites of gentrification helped to bring the investigation of sexuality into dialogue with unfolding debates in urban and regional studies about the role of culture and lifestyle in driving processes of capital accumulation. Beyond the explication of changing LGBTQ residential geographies, ‘queer theory’ has also contributed to urban studies by foregrounding the importance of LGBTQ sexual identities and practices in processes such as global city migration, city branding, and urban tourism, engaging with debates on urban encounter, race, and gender in the process. Although still small in number, studies have also begun to explore the way that different heterosexualities are distributed across the public and private city, from the quiet spaces of suburbia to the ‘hot’ adult entertainment districts where varied—and sometimes criminalized—sexual pleasures can be bought and sold. In all of this there is an increasing focus on the mediated nature of sexuality, based on the understanding that urban sexual encounters and relationships are often arranged or conducted in the online realm via dating apps and platform technologies.

In relation to the commonly-used sexual identity labels ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’, bisexual is often the most invisible category. This invisibility and lack of recognition of the needs of bisexuals across the life course is important to address in the practice of social workers. Taking a life course approach, bisexuality is particularly illustrative of the complex and changing relationships between sexuality and sexual identities. As we shall discuss, it can also make bisexual identities across the life course more visible even if people don’t use the identity label of bisexual. Social work has a key role to play in tackling inequalities and their impact in people’s lives. In this chapter, we highlight why bisexuality is an urgent matter for social workers to engage with and outline recent empirical evidence that bisexual people are at higher risk of poverty and poor mental health across the life course than lesbians and gay men (Fredriksen-Goldsen, Shiu et al. 2017). This chapter begins with a brief discussion of existing theoretical perspectives on bisexuality. We then introduce empirical research focusing on the lives of bisexual people (albeit it is sparse in contrast to bodies of empirical work addressing the lives of lesbians and gay men). In particular, we focus on what is known about the life course effects of bisexuality and finally we outline the implications for social work practice.

Perspectives on gender, gender expression, sexuality identity, and sexual orientation differ within and between generations given the great extent to which these concepts are embedded within social, cultural, and historical context. Across contexts, questions of authenticity are critical. This research compares generational perspectives about authenticity, gender and gender-related constructs, and sexuality. Through semi-structured interviews with a nonprobability, purposive sample of heterosexual and LGBTQ younger (aged 18–22) and older (aged 65+) adults, how a sense of authenticity is experienced and the degree to which individuals experience authenticity around sexual and gender identities are compared. Data were analyzed using the constant comparison method of analysis, and results indicate that while younger adult respondents held expansive terminology and knowledge related to sexual and gender identities, older adult participants lacked such fluidity, and that lack was an inhibiting factor in older adults being able to name and embody their authentic sexual selves. In conclusion, both position in one’s life course (age) and one’s generational cohort (historical, cultural, and social context) influence how individuals experience authenticity around gender and sexual identities.

Researchers have begun to explore and identify various gradations in sexual orientation identity, paying attention to alternative sexual identity categories and attempting to clarify potential subtypes of same-sex sexuality, particularly among women. This study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative data to explore the behavioral experiences and identity development processes among women of a particular sexual identity subtype, "mostly straight." Participants were 349 female college students whose primary sexual identities included exclusively straight, mostly straight, bisexual, and lesbian. Results indicated that, on most behavioral variables, mostly straight women fell directly between and were significantly different from exclusively straight and bisexual/lesbian women. Mostly straight women were also distinct from exclusively straight women but were similar to bisexual women and lesbians on several quantitative measures of identity. Narratives about sexual identity development for mostly straight women revealed the complexities of sexual identity exploration, uncertainty, and commitment within this population. As a whole, this study encourages researchers to begin to recognize and examine mostly straight as a distinct sexual identity subtype in young women.

Using a national probability sample, we investigate the impact of traumatic events on marital well-being. We argue that traumatic life events such as the death of a child, a life-threatening illness, and physical attack have a negative impact on marital well-being and that this impact is moderated by spousal support. Partially confirming our first hypothesis, we found that physical attack is a significant predictor of marital wellbeing. Respondents who had been physically attacked in the past reported lower levels of marital satisfaction. As predicted, spousal support critically affected the relationship between traumatic events and marital well-being. Key Words: marital quality, marital satisfaction, spousal support, traumatic events. Although several researchers have explored the correlates of marital satisfaction (Broman, 1991; 1993; Crohan & Veroff, 1989; Glenn, 1989; Glenn & McLanahan, 1982; Glenn & Weaver, 1978; 1988; McLanahan & Adams, 1987; Miller, 1976; White, 1983; White, Booth, & Edwards, 1986), much of the research does not address the role of life stress. In this research, we focus on how the role of traumatic life events affects marital satisfaction and happiness. Consistent with the literature on stress, we advance and test two predictions: that traumatic life events have a negative impact on the sense of satisfaction in marriage and that this effect is moderated by spousal support. THE LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE We use a life course perspective as an overarching framework for our discussion of traumatic life events. We argue for the merging of a life course perspective with life stress research as a means to understand the complexity of the impact of traumatic events on the marital relationship. Although the life course perspective and stress research are represented by vast bodies of literature, we have identified themes from the literature that are relevant to our present study. We begin by arguing for a broader conception of as it relates to the life course. Most studies that utilize a life course perspective focus on normative events and transitions such as role occupation (Moen, Dempster-McClain, & Williams, 1989; 1992), employment patterns (McLanahan & Sorenson, 1985), parenthood (Umberson & Gove, 1989), and changes in household composition (McLanahan & Sorenson 1985). By normative, we mean that certain events in a family's life course can be anticipated to one degree or another. For example, we expect to see fluctuations in financial security within a family as it goes through various stages in the life course. Therefore, families save money in times of relative prosperity in anticipation for a rainy day. This idea of normativeness is in contrast to our use of traumatic events, which are uncontrollable and extremely negative. In doing this, we expand the operationalized domain of the life course perspective by focusing on the kinds of life events-like death of a child, criminal victimization, or suffering from a life-threatening illness-that are conventionally investigated in stress research. Even when the focus of life course research is on undesirable events (Conger, Lorenz, Elder, Simons & Ge, 1993), there is still the sense that these events are part of an expected norm of family life course trajectories (such as parent and child conflict, divorce or separation). Traumatic events, which cannot be anticipated, are generally beyond the control of individual family members, and, therefore, are not normative. The second theme we build on is that the past can have very real consequences in the present. We look at the relationship between suffering a traumatic event and its impact on the present marital relationship. Again, this extends the notion of life event because we are dealing with uncontrollable, extremely negative life events that generally are not considered normative. Much of the research that examines the present impact of past events retains a normative definition of events and focuses on issues such as role overload and family conflict (for example, Moen et al. …

In this introductory chapter, I place Bertram J. Cohler's () seminal essay Personal Narrative and Life Course in the context of the history of narrative psychology and developmental theory. I describe four theses from Personal Narrative and Life Course, which impacted developmental theory and research: (a) the self is a narrative project, (b) developmental periods have a distinct narrative character, (c) narratives are always told in (personal and historical) time, and (d) persons strive for coherence. I briefly describe the chapters to follow. However, my main goal is to argue for the implications of narrative for developmental science. Following Cohler, I argue that narrative has a central role to play in understanding human lives and can provide substantial benefit to developmental theory and research. A narrative perspective allows for a complex and nuanced description of developmental phenomena that accounts for the subjective and unpredictable nature of human lives. The narrative interpretation of experience is a primary human activity that alters the meaning of experience and potentially sets development on a new course, rendering the prediction of developmental outcomes a difficult venture. The narrative perspective provides detailed insights into how development unfolds, how persons actually interpret and reinterpret life in time and place, and can help psychologists to engage fundamental questions about the meaning of experience.