ABSTRACT
This chapter considers issues of language with which researchers and participants describe sexual and gender identities as a site of important methodological consideration. By engaging with the processes through which sexual and gender identities circulate ‘in the field,’ and across multiple languages, this chapter follows Marcia Ochoa’s (2008) invitation to carefully consider “the particularities in the genealogies and usage of the names and categories that emerge in a given social context” (p. 149). It addresses the challenges and opportunities faced by students and administrators at a private university in Mexico mobilizing to institutionally recognize and support the first organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. As this chapter suggests, participants’ strategic conflation of gender and sexuality in this context simultaneously opens institutional forms of recognition while also entrenching specific discourses of sexual and gender difference. The possibility of recognizing an LGBT organization in this context, for example, is in part due to the obfuscation of these identities through taxonomies that are legible in English rather than Spanish, as well as the willful collusion of sexuality under initiatives seeking to further ‘equidad de género,’ (gender equity). Rather than regarding these approaches as deficient understandings of gender and sexuality as ontologically distinct formations, this chapter suggests that these activities constitute forms of deliberate confusion. In doing so, this chapter also engages with previous scholarly work connecting issues of modernity and imperialism in the formation of taxonomies of sexual identities across borders (Binnie, 2004; Cantú, 2009).
