SEMINAR: ANTHROPOLOGY / SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES, SEMESTER 1, 2017

Co-creative digital practices are recently playing a central role in fostering opportunities for youth and young adults to participate in the production of new, emergent discourses that define, label and categorise new norms and counter-norms for gender and sexuality. Through digital cultural practices, recent figurations of sexuality and identity have emerged that present a widespread range of sexualities and genders challenging traditional masculine/feminine, hetero/homo dichotomies or LGBTQI labels that describe a more specific categorisation of identity practices. For example, this emergent taxonomy includes many new terms such as heteroflexible, asexual, homoflexible, sapiosexual, nonbinary, a-romantic and others, including multiple combinations. New practices of categorising and living sexualities/genders have significant implications for social theories of gender and sexuality, minority, health and mental health practices, community services, public facilities and family law. Two available approaches for understanding the emergence of new social formations of gender and sexuality include, firstly, a generational rejection of labels of earlier epochs, seeking instead a specificity for more ‘accurate’ descriptions of deeply-felt attachments, expressed principally in online settings as post-identity queer fluidity. Secondly, as a set of “micro-minoritisations” competing on a ladder of greater-or-lesser marginalisation, surveiled and policed through online interactivity afforded by the sociality of digital cultures. Drawing on nascent analyses of data collected as part of an ARC Discovery Project on queer youth support and belonging across two generations, this presentation accounts for the digital emergence of “micro-minority” taxonomies of sexual/gender identity, theorising new social practices in terms of digital affordances, while presenting a framework for understanding the implications of new, meaningful languages of identity categorisation for social theory.