‘You have to coin new things’: sexual and gender identity discourses in asexual, queer, and/or trans young people’s networked counterpublics

Abstract

Emergent gender and sexual identity discourses that circulate on social networking sites in spaces organised around non-normative genders and sexualities (i.e. networked counterpublics) challenge dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality. These emergent discourses increasingly represent sexual and gender identities as pluralistic, potentially infinite, and able to be tailored to the individual. Using interviews with asexual, queer, and trans young people (AQTYP; n = 16), we examined how AQTYP in networked counterpublics appropriate hegemonic norms of identity construction to creatively articulate new sexual and gendered subjectivities. We employ thematic discourse analysis to trace how AQTYP use these labels to navigate and complicate sexual and gender self-labelling imperatives in counterpublic contexts. We conclude that AQTYP engage with gender and sexual identity discourses in online counterpublics in ways that challenge many, but not all, parameters of hegemonic identity discourses. Ultimately, we argue that new understandings of sexuality and gender in AQTYP’s networked counterpublics are a form of queer world-making in which the feelings and relationalities that constitute sexual and gendered subjectivities cannot be considered self-evident, stable, or universal.