Tag: Sexuality Labels

The other day I was providing advice to some poor soul on FetLife who was feeling isolated by using Social Media. I agree that sexuality is something which is meant to be so liberating but it can be quite isolating at timest. Like this lad, I had spent many hours searching for other people who were similar to me. I looked at their memories and spoke to them on a regular basis. But eventually I became basically depressed because you’d see these groups, people and realise that whilst you knew them, you really never knew who they were at all.

Labels can be so debilitating at times and one of my primary concerns of the queer community is the labeling of other people. You label many people through their gender, you can identify people through their sex and you can label yourself as a subset of culture. Examples of this can be; feminine, butch, masculine, gay, bear, twink, otter, jock, leather, cub, cis-gender, androgynous, asexual, bi-gender, fluid, gender queer, dyke, lipstick lesbian, intersex, pan-sexual and it goes on and on and on. It’s sometimes hard to find a particular label that suits you, and when you do it gets put into the overarching umbrella term of queer. That is both good and bad, dependent on the situation.

One of the other commenters on this fetlife post had discussed the idea of intersectional feminism and I was intrigued by the concept as it was not something I’d been used to. Intersectionalality refers to the ways in which subsets of a particular group overlap, interact with each other through varying social identities and related systems such as discrimination and/or oppression. Essentially, in the case of feminism, it understands that there are different types of women, whether those differences be through performance of gender, sexuality, skin colour, religious beliefs, age etc. It recognizes that an older black woman whose a lesbian will have different issues to a white, cis-gendered middle age woman. What tends to happen in social politics is that these more marginal groups such as lesbians, black women, older women etc, will often get forgotten in the race towards gender equality and their voices will get drowned out.

Similar things happen within the queer community as well. I have long argued that there is Inherent homophobia even within the queer community itself, and it’s one thing to say that they’re pro-gay relationships yet discriminate within their lives/profiles etcs by stating ‘Nothing personal, I don’t like femmes’, ‘masc only’. Etc. Intersectionality acknowledges that there is no singular experience of identity, and just because you are male, queer, female doesn’t mean that you have experienced the same as others within your social group. It is something that social activists often forget, marginalizing the very groups that they’re trying to support, albeit not always realising that it’s occurring. This makes it difficult for social advocacy as it often appears that there are ‘different’ groups essentially fighting for the same, yet different things. It’s difficult to wrap ones head around a multidimensional social platform, but it is an essential discourse to consider in order to approach and effectively support marginilised groups.

We have personalities separated from our sexuality that are so unique and so different. Placing people into labels, takes something away from the unique experience each individual has. Although labeling can group similar people together, it can also create a boundary between people by separating them through stereotypes. Some stereotypes can also be subconsciously connected, this means our brain create a network of links between events and information that we have learnt through our lifetime. For example, if I had a balloon that popped in front of me, my brain could link that to a happy surprise or even a fearful memory. So the next time a balloon is in front of you, you may naturally become scared or happy due to the network that was previously created in your brain.

Is it possible that even though labeling of people exist, that we can personally learn to separate our sexuality from our social identity which will create a more welcoming and open community.