New Literary History

Abstract:

New names for sexual selves drop daily online. How do we make sense of this apparently novel proliferation of terms? Most of our models for thinking about sexual self-nomination derive from the history of homosexuality and its imbrication with print cultural networks of circulation and conversation. But unlike earlier terms—butch or femme, fairy or molly, sissy or stud, uranist or invert, or any number of other vocabularies of sexual selfhood that sexuality studies has seized upon as historiographic waystations in the tale of emergent sexual modernity—our lexicon today appears to issue from a different substrate of culture. It circulates on different media and implicates us in different systems of self-disclosure, social exchange, and scientific capture. It is not just novelty nomenclature—the narratives, discourses, and names that organize the social sense of sexual selves—with which we must contend but also the media environments from which they issue and in which they circulate. How do we make sense of the convergence of liberatory vocabularies of gender self-determination and the mechanics of mass personalized data capture? How does this moment fit into the history of sexuality at large, punctuated as it is by many moments of taxonomic irruption?