ABSTRACT
In John Irving’s novel, In One Person, the bisexual narrator, echoing a line uttered by his first love, the transsexual librarian Miss Frost, says “please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” (Irving 2012, 425). It is a sentiment increasingly shared by queer women college students on our campus, the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rather than call themselves “lesbian” or even “bisexual,” many are embracing identities as “pansexual,” “queer,” or “fluid,” or refusing to adopt any label at all. In this way these students reflect the research on and popular understandings of the sexual fluidity of women: women’s openness to bisexual attractions and behavior; the lack of fit among desire, behavior, and identity; and the shifts in women’s desires, behaviors, and identities across their lifetimes (Diamond 2008; Golden 2006). Although we set out to study women who identified as anything other than heterosexual, some of the students identify as “genderqueer” rather than as women, so technically the population consists of female-bodied individuals. We use the gender-neutral pronouns “ze/hir/hirs” or “they/their/theirs” for individuals who prefer to be referred to in that way. We analyze the stories of these college students from the perspective of queer theory, which emphasizes the anti-essential and fluid nature of gender and sexual identity (Butler 1990; Carrera, De Palma, and Lameiras 2012), and collective identity theory, which points to the ways that social movements and other groups create collective self definitions that draw boundaries between “us” and “them” (Taylor and Whittier 1992). We draw on these perspectives both to explore the meaning of fluid sexual and gender identities and to understand how these students come to embrace identities consistent with sexual fluidity or, in a few cases, to reject an identity altogether.
