Emergent Identities - new book worth knowing about....
Reviewing Rob Cover’s (2019) Emergent Identities: New sexualities, genders and relationships in a digital era.
Routledge has launched a new book series, Gender and Sexualities in Psychology, and the series is edited by Elizabeth Peel and Elizabeth Stokoe.
Rob Cover’s book is the first book in the series. The book takes a sociological approach to the question of why there are so many gender and sexuality identities and categories proliferating today. In particular, the book takes a deeper dive into asexuality and non-binary gender, but touches on sapiosexuality, kink, demisexuality, among others. The book also examines how the Internet has impacted the creation of these categories. Overall, the book uses a queer theory lens to examine what is happening.
Some highlights include:
emerging identities might challenge an old binary framework, but they still embody and facilitate the “cultural demand for identity itself”.
That cultural demand for identity is part of the demand placed on people that they be intelligible, coherent and recognizable. or else they are rejected as not being authentic.
The “cult of authenticity” is about demonstrating or proving the coherency of the self.
While the proliferation of emergent identity labels and categories is a challenge to the old binary frameworks, it also is not deeply subversive : it doesn’t challenge or confront the underlying norms. It does, however, allow for greater nuance and expression of people’s deeply felt experiences, in an effort to belong, and to claim the right to belong.
Cover proposes that the ethical principle that lives are “livable” - that they have livability - as a criteria for judging an emergent identity (category or label).
This is why sexual identities like kink, asexual, greysexual, skoliosexual, etc. are important for highlighting the gaps of the dominant categorization discourse. - the gaps are filled with this polymorphous diffusion of eros, polymorphous perversity fills the gaps.
Cover notes that the discourses of polymorphous perversity and queer theory / fluidity are two ways to attempt to translate or discuss what is in the “chora” (gap, chasm, black box - word from Derrida) of sexuality and gender. p. 83
I am still going over sections of the book again, because there is a lot packed in here. It is worth a read for those studying kink and other alternative sexualities. And while there is a nod and several sections on relationships, the focus is not there, despite the title.
— Richard Sprott, Ph.D.