Betydningen av seksuell erfaring, tiltrekning og identitet for ...

precise self-understandings congruent with individual lived experience.
Identities and cultural typifications are products of discourse – old and new.
In 1996 Stuart Hall called for a reconceptualisation of the notion of
identity by focusing more specifically on identification: the process through
which a person steps into, incorporates and articulates subject positions and
discourse (Hall, 1996). To focus on identification is to analyse the content of
the identity, the discourses that shape the available subject positions and the
way the individual articulates these discourses (Hall, 1996): ‘Actually
identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and
culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or
‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have
been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’
(p. 4). Focusing on identification is to say that you want to focus on a
process that is never quite completed, a process where the individual
constructs himself/herself and is constructed as a subject: becoming a
subject for discourse. In the context of gay youth, the question of identity
may then be reformulated to a question of becoming gay – how an individual
constructs a gay identity and a gay subjectivity in the meeting point between
discourse, practices and available subject positions. By focusing on the
histories of individuals, we should be able to identify discourses related to
the category of ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’, and get closer to describing the
identification process in relation to these different discourses and the shifts
in subject positions that are made possible by them.
Judith Butler in the same essay also wrote that ‘the discourse of
“coming out” has clearly served its purposes, but what are its risks?’ (1991
p. 15). The risk mentioned by Butler is not the risk of negative social
reactions, but rather the risk of subjection to discourse. Gary Taylor (2002)
claimed that discursively constructed gay identities may have a negative
impact on the psychological well-being and behaviour of gay men. During
the last couple of years, there has been a growing body of research evidence
showing that young gay, lesbian and bisexual people are at risk for suicide
attempts (Wichstrøm and Hegna, 2003; Remafedi, French, Story, Resnick
and Blum, 1998), mental health problems (Fergusson, Horwood and
Beautrais, 1999) and drug abuse (Sandfort, de Graaf, Bijl and Schnabel,
2001). Taylor sees these psychological and behavioural difficulties as a
result of negative cultural representations of homosexuality that ‘have been
of primary significance in the construction of the male homosexual and
appear to continue to inform the identities and practices of at least some gay
men’ (Taylor, 2002 p. 162). According to Taylor, these negative
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