Queering Constructs: Proposing a Dynamic Gender and Sexuality Model

• In Event: 50 Shades of Gay: Past, Present, and Future of Research on the Spectrum of Sexuality and Education

Abstract

Higher education educators commonly understand social identities, including gender, to be fluid and dynamic. Conceiving of gender as socially constructed has been useful in myriad interventions and scholarship in the field, including working with college men (Harper & Harris, 2010), understanding culture’s role in observing gender (Jessup-Anger, 2008), and discussing the needs of trans* students (Beemyn, Curtis, Davis, & Tubbs, 2005). Regardless of how higher education educators may view identity, higher education institutions, like many social institutions with which people interact, determine people’s identities administratively through admissions forms, rosters, residential facilities, and so forth (Spade, 2011). This process of creating and maintaining administratively determined identity categories endangers people who do not fit into them, putting them at risk of violence, harassment, lack of proper health care, and both invisibility and hypervisibility.
In addition, the campus experience of trans* students exists within an institutionalized oppression system of genderism, a system that assumes and regulates gender as a binary that is essentialized and based on sex assignment at birth (Bilodeau, 2009). Genderism underlies trans* students’ experiences on campus, contributing to a myriad of negative experiences and outcomes. To empower and see trans* people as capable contributors and leaders on campus and transform higher education from a hostile to a liberatory environment for all genders, restrictive binary gender systems must be undone (Marine, 2011). To do so, it is imperative to examine assumptions of the fixedness of these constructs and place them in temporal and cultural contexts.
Torres, Jones, and Renn (2009) identified the role of postmodern and poststructural theories in furthering this notion by positing that “identities are . . . constantly under construction and reconstructed” (p. 581) and called for expanding the use of postmodern, queer, and critical theories in practice and research. This article uses a framework that incorporates postmodern feminist theory, queer theory, and critical postmodern theory to examine Lev’s (2004) model of four components of sexual identity that many use to demonstrate the fluidity of sex, gender, and sexuality, and their relationship with each other, discussing its strengths and critiquing its limitations. Additionally, utilizing the aforementioned framework and by centering trans* students, this article proposes a more dynamic model for gender and sexuality that destabilizes the assumed fixedness of those constructs is necessary to examine these systems holistically, rather than from an individualistic and binary perspective.

Author

• T.J. Jourian, Loyola University Chicago