Negotiating Sexual Identity : A Discourse Analysis of Women's Alternative Narratives on Sexual Orientation / Tamar Doorduin

T. Doorduin

In this thesis the author aimed at exhibiting a more complex thinking about sexual orientation than common thinking usually allows, as well as at showing its complex relations to mechanisms of power and inclusion. She did this by answering three interlocking questions. First of all she aimed at mapping the dominant discourse on sexual orientation by analyzing the narratives of relative outsiders to this discourse. Secondly, she looked at the ways these outsiders negotiated within the terms of the current discursive structure in order to articulate their own alternative identity positions. Finally, she wondered how both the dominant discourse on sexual orientation and the alternative discourses related to other intersecting discourses of sexuality, gender, 'race'/ethnicity and transgender identity. The participants in this study were women who felt their sexual identity or orientation to be somehow unintelligible within the dominant discourse on sexuality. Interviewing subjects with a relative outsider status in relation to this dominant discourse enabled the author to sketch a picture of what this dominant discourse approximately looks like. The identity negotiations of the participants in this study provide information about what is currently possible and thinkable within the discursive structure around sexuality, gender and 'race'/ethnicity.