Journal article
‘You will always have to “out” yourself’: Reconsidering coming out through strategic outness
Sexualities, v 14(6), pp 681-703
Dec 2011
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Increasingly, researchers casually use the concept of coming out. After tracing its conceptual inflation, this article shifts the lens from identity development to reconsider coming out as identity management. I develop the perspective of strategic outness – the contextual and continual management of identity – to emphasize the role of social context in sexual identity disclosure. Using data from open-ended essays, I explore three aspects of strategic outness: strategies, motivational discourses, and social relationships. My participants discuss using multiple strategies to manage who knows about their sexuality, cohesively describe multiple motivations for controlling that information, and emphasize the role of social relationships in their decision-making. Strategic outness reconsiders how coming out is used with sexuality research, providing researchers with an explicit perspective to consider the social context of sexual identity disclosure in their analyses.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- ‘You will always have to “out” yourself’: Reconsidering coming out through strategic outness
- Creators
- Jason Orne - University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
- Publication Details
- Sexualities, v 14(6), pp 681-703
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications; London, England
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000301062700005
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84857750879
- Other Identifier
- 991014878068804721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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Source: SDGs in the Output
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- Web of Science research areas
- Sociology