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🍃 Branches (key topics): Queerness, Life Course, Narrative as Identity
🍂 Roots (Status): #seed
🌰 Source: Cohler BJ, Hammack PL. The Psychological World of the Gay Teenager: Social Change, Narrative, and “Normality.” Journal of youth and adolescence. 2007;36(1):47-59. doi:10.1007/s10964-006-9110-1

Field Notes

"A new generation of youth, with the support of a new cultural discourse on sexual identity diversity, appears to enjoy same-sex relationships without recourse to concern that their same-sex desire makes them 'abnormal'" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 48)

• In some ways I think this has become only more normalized, although I'd like to explore some data on this.

"We suggest that divergence in conceptual accounts of gay adolescent development emerges from a failure to fully acknowledge the salience of context—including cohort, geographic location, and the larger socio-historical context of development—in understanding the relationship between identity and lived experience" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 48)

• The idea that identity is informed by lived experience and by what we see around us. Both in a linguistic way and in less concrete ways — having language for your experience and a model for your experience, but also just existing in a milieu with intangible feelings of what is or is not okay.

"We review these two competing narratives of adjustment and normality among sexual minority youth. The first narrative, which we term the narrative of struggle and success, depicts gay youth as the victims of harassment and internalized homophobia, accompanied by serious mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. But this narrative also suggests success in spite of struggle, revealing the process of gay identity development, realized through social practce in the larger gay and lesbian culture ... as a triumphant model of resilience in a heterosexual world." (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

• The idea that only certain narratives are available in a given community.

"The second narrative, the narrative of emancipation, reveals the increasing fluidity in self-labeling among youth with same-sex desire, depathologizes the experience of sexual identity development among these youth, emphasizes the manner in which sexual minority youth cope with issues of minority stress (so significant as a factor accounting for personal distress among these youth), and extends the concept of normality as developed by Offer and his colleagues to the study of sexual minority youth" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

"Our aim is to make explicit the implications of narrative multiplicity for the identity development of youth with same-sex desire and, in the process, re-envision a conception of normality in adolescent development" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

"Unfortunately, although the life-course perspective offers conceptual tools for understanding the collective impact of historical change, there has been relatively little study of either inter-cohort or intra-cohort variation in the ways in which socio-historical circumstances are related to particular lives. Life-course research has demonstrated that members of a given cohor react in diverse and often unpredictable ways to social and historical circumstances" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

"Further, subgroups of individuals may hold many of the basic values and commitments of their generation-cohort and yet have a somewhat different outlook relative to their larger cohort. Rosenfeld (2003) has referred to such groups as 'identity cohorts'" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

"A life-course approach to the study of sexual identity development is particularly useful, as the connection between socio-historical context and sexuality is highly significant for matters of self-understanding and identity formation through the shaping of discourse" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 49)

"If it is during adolescence that the personal narrative that constructs the identity of an individual ... obtains its ideological setting..., then it is during adolescence that the individual comes to internalize the discourse of identity available in a particular cultural context" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007:49–50)

"If language mediates experience ... and if discourse serves to frame a culture's conception of sexuality ... then a personal narrative specifies the language of self which constructs an identity and informs subsequent thought, feeling, and behavior" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007:50)

• gets into the argument that language informs thought and vice versa.

"As levels of heterosexism decrease with greater understanding of sexual diversity (in part provided by studies of gay youth and their struggles), narratives of sexual identity development for gay youth must accommodate a changing discursive context for human development in which same-sex desire need not presage a particular identity such as 'gay'" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 52)

"constructing a relatively monolithic narrative of gay youth development, early work suggested the homogeneity of gay youth through the cultivation of a master narrative. Youth with same-sex desire who might not fit into this narrative subsequently had yet another obstacle to overcome in their identity development" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 52)

• Rutgers MCM capstone

"The primary task of the gay adolescent, in this narrative, is to overcome the inherent struggles of a spoiled identity, to transcend the inevitable internalization of heterosexism and homophobia, and to reclaim gay identity as a positive index of relational and sexual being. It is only through the process of coming out— acknowledging and accepting same-sex desire as congruent with other aspects of the self—that acceptance into gay culture occurs, and with this new cultural frame of reference, a new set of symbolic meanings, rituals, and social interactions distinct from a heterosexist normative culture" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 52)

"The success portion of this narrative revealed that, despite the inevitable struggle for identity in the context of stigma and rejection, gay youth could come together to create a positive community as a 'minority' culture within a larger hegemonic context. Suffering was not interminable but confined to a developmental moment: the transition to full identity synthesis through the reconciliation of inner desire and outer rejection during adolescence. This narrative, though emphasizing suffering (perhaps to give voice to a previously silenced group), is ultimately an empowering one. Where it becomes problematic, though, is precisely its reification of a developmental trajectory interwoven with and dependent upon a larger discourse on homosexuality in the dominant culture" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 52)

"This narrative fails to capture the normal development of gay youth in a changing historical context— a context in which gay life is less stigmatized and more readily accepted as a legitimate social identity category, despite the endurance of heterosexism" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 52)

"the emerging narrative of emancipation, though, is tied not only to a dissatisfaction with the science of normal gay adolescence previously undertaken. Rather, it is linked to shifts in the larger culture, particularly for youth growing up in more affluent and sophisticated urban and suburban communities who, emboldened by positive internet accounts and the media, assume leadership in establishing gay-straight alliances in schools and feel empowered to live a diverse sexual lifeway outside the boundaries of a conventional taxonomy" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 54)

"We argue that the narrative of emancipation has not supplanted but rather supplemented the narrative of struggle and success, creating greater heterogeneity in the developmental trajectories of youth with same-sex desire" (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: 54)