"Out Gay Boys? There's Like, One Point Seven Five": Negotiating Identity in Superdiversity

• In Event: 53.037 - Is Superdiversity the Way Forward for Educational Linguistics?

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend discussions of super-diversity beyond ethnicity through an explicit focus on gender and sexuality. The paper argues that super-diversity offers the theoretical move toward a study of engaging language and identity as fluid, complex, and dynamic processes that extends beyond the simple proliferation of identity categories. This paper builds on this dynamic view of identity to examine the ways intersecting lines of identification are given meaning, delineated, and entwined discursively in the production of gender and sexuality. It shows how contemporary identity practices related to gender and sexuality draw on semiotics to make meaning, to read and articulate difference. In super-diversity, how are boundaries and boxes drawn around identity categories? How are students’ performances of stylized presentation read and used pragmatically in the negotiation of identity?

The paper aims to answer these questions through a description of an ethnographic study at a super-diverse high school. It illustrates the ways that these emergent identities are shaped by “qualities of enoughness” that youth use to identify as authentic members of particular groups. Students highlight that boundaries around identity categories are ambiguous and not concrete, open to interpretation of what counts as Asian, Latino, or gay enough. Yet, such boundaries around heteronormative binary gender and Whiteness are contested, and transgressions are granted varying amounts of leeway depending on the context and participants. Identity categories shift across contexts, depending on participants’ stances and purposes.

Taking seriously the call by super-diversity scholars for more nuanced representations of diversity, the paper adopts an intersectional perspective that acknowledges that individuals do not belong to one identity category at a time but rather live with multiple and overlapping identities that should not be separated for analytical purposes but must instead be understood in relation to one another. To this effect, the paper connects the micro-level everyday language practices youth engage in around qualities of enoughness with macro-level processes of race, sexuality and gender to better understand how identity is constructed through language and how power is negotiated along intersecting axes of difference. In this way the paper seeks to represent the fluid nature of gender and sexual identities while also making central the power relations that determine how the gender and sexual identities of students are interpreted by others.

Author

• Susan Walker Woolley, Colgate University