Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity by Tim R. Johnston

Author:Tim R. Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

A child is faced with a more open and indeterminate future, and contains more potential personalities, than an older person. When I look back upon my life I can understand how choices I have made, and those that were made for me, have resulted in my being where and who I am today. I can remember wanting to be an astronaut, a novelist, an Olympic figure skater, a linguist, and a wealthy entrepreneur. As I grew into a bookish young man, my imagined astronaut self was abandoned in the realm of unrealized possibility; my aspirations of becoming wealthy died when I entered graduate school.

We come to identify with these past possibilities as markers in our personal history, and we have emotional ties to “the remains of all that we began to be.” They become spatialized markers on the timeline of my experience, and they affirm back to me a linear narrative of my experience. We think of what “could have been” as a part of who we are today, especially when we consider how those past decisions have structured our current situation and future possibilities. This is an intellectual spatialization of my personality. I cast my life out onto a timeline, marking certain decisions as watershed moments and tracing an etiology of my present state. I identify myself with the decisions that have created my current situation, and I have emotional attachments to those possibilities abandoned in my past. I can identify in a similar manner with my anticipated future. In this way our personal histories, and our hopes for the future, come to shape and affirm how we understand ourselves in the present.

Likewise, I can create a static self-conception by spatializing my experience into a thing, a state, or a disposition. That is to say, I can abstract and spatialize aspects of my experience into a kind of static matrix or a lens that I think influences all my behavior. If I say “I’m a very positive person,” what I mean is that when I go through the day my reactions to life tend to be positive. I have a spatialized concept of myself that says I am a positive person, and this concept becomes a lens that colors my experience, and indeed may make my reactions more positive. I create a psychological affirmative feedback loop, where this particular concept that I have of myself comes to steady and solidify behavior that matches this self-conception.

This is not a strictly personal or idiosyncratic process; it is also at work on the macro or social level. For example, historical accounts of the concept of homosexuality demonstrate how stigmatized sex acts became solidified into an identity and ontologized into a kind of being called “the homosexual.”8 No longer do individuals commit homosexual acts; homosexual acts reflect a homosexual being. Rather than understand ourselves as beings whose personalities are being created in each action, we see ourselves as having a personality that influences our actions. Thinking back to Lindemann’s discussion of large social

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