Social Networking and Impression Management by Carolyn M. Cunningham

Author:Carolyn M. Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739178126
Publisher: Lexington Books

It is ironic that Cass would not include the liminality of gays among her themes, particularly since her best known work arguably is her refinement of the stepped model for self-disclosure by sexual minorities. Maurice Lenznoff and William Westley by contrast were occupied with the closet in their studies of homosexuality, arguing that the distinction between what they referred to as “overt” and “secret” homosexuals frequently amounted to whether their sexual identity would be tolerated in the workplace.13 The formation of lesbian and gay subcultures and the proto-queer communities of the early to mid-twetiethth century owed largely to gays’ fear of detection, which compelled them to seek affiliation with others for collective support, social acceptance, and to relieve the anxiety associated with detection. To Laud Humphreys, the liminality of lesbians and gays would be represented in those who self-identified as a sexual minority but who would strategically control information about themselves with the goal of concealing that part of themselves from straight family, friends, and coworkers.14 Tactically this would come to be known as “passing” and would be employed particularly by recently self-identified gays as a stigma-avoidance technique. Richard Troiden sees “passing” as the simultaneous inhabiting of distinct gay and straight spheres by those whose hope was that the two never would collide.15

Echoes of Humphreys’s and Troiden’s practices of control over identity information would later be found in Epstein’s observation that power inheres in the ability to name (or to identify) and that what individuals call themselves has implications for political practice.16 Taken together, this suggests that those who situationally straddle the line between “closeted” and “out” are not acquiescing but instead exercising their power over their identity more strategically.

The power to identify or to self-identify ultimately raises the question of to whom one’s identity belongs. If the power to name essentially can be thought of as a defensive act—preempting external forces who would name by naming oneself—it could also be an aggressive one in that it shifts the balance of power from external to internal. As Sedgwick says,

In many, if not most, relationships, coming out is a matter of crystallizing intuitions or convictions that had been in the air for a while already and had already established their own power-circuits of silent contempt, silent blackmail, silent glamorization, silent complicity. After all, the position of those who think they know something about one that one may not know oneself is an exited and empowered one—whether what they think one doesn’t know is that one somehow is homosexual, or merely that one’s supposed secret is known to them.17

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