Networked Sexuality: Boundary-Making under Unsettled Categories

• In Event: Structure and Meaning: Linking Social Networks and Cultural Life

Abstract

Prior research often treats sexual identity as cultural. But how do different cultural dispositions emerge, given the same identity category, especially when institutional anchors are weak, and boundaries remain unsettled, cognitively and relationally? Drawing on interviews and content analysis, this paper develops a networked explanation for divergent boundary-making strategies, especially under conditions of limited LGBTQ institutionalization. In this context, networks substitute for institutions: social ties become the main settings where identity categories are named, contested, and classified. These patterns reveal how network embeddedness constrains what I call boundary-making strategies—how one moralizes, crosses boundaries, disclose, or self-identify—and how through four mechanisms these strategies stratify across bisexual-embedded, lesbian-embedded, and doubly isolated positions. I theorize networked sexuality as a portable framework for analyzing unsettled categories that explains how symbolic affiliation and social embeddedness can align or diverge, and how this divergence produces durable inequality and varied strategies of belonging. This framework travels within and beyond sexuality, in authoritarian and democratic contexts alike, given the era of political volatility.

Author

• Ann Jiang, University of California San Diego