Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fairchild, Emily

Area of Concentration

Sociology and Gender Studies

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how the identity label ‘queer’ serves queer people, and what interactional processes of identity communication look like given such an allencompassing identity term. Through in-depth interviews with eight queer individuals ages 18-25 residing throughout Florida’s Tampa Bay Area, three themes emerged from the data: 1) Participants claimed queer to acknowledge their range of attraction, to account for previous life experience, and to connect them to a community of other queer people. 2) Participants wished to navigate everyday life as a queer person, so as not to hide important aspects of the self, and therefore desired to inform others of their queer identity in different ways. 3) Two interactional processes were important to participants for contributing to the formation of community. The first involved moments in which participants recognized others as queer, which they were hesitant to do. Regardless, they were still able to pinpoint certain sign-vehicles or presentations of self that they thought signaled a person’s queerness. The second process involved instances in which participants were recognized as queer by other queer people – an interactional occurrence that sparked feelings of excitement, the realization of shared experience, and community building. The findings of this study contribute to symbolic interactionist literature on the self and identity and reveal a particular cultural phenomenon relating to identity communication that merits future inquiry.

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