‘You will always have to “out” yourself’: Reconsidering coming out through strategic outness

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.

Understanding and Responding to Homophobia and Bullying: Contrasting Staff and Young People’s Views within Community Settings in England

“…This has recently been described as strategic outness (Orne, 2011). Like Orne, I see coming out as a form of identity management, rather than the traditional (psychological) view of coming out as a stage of identity development.…”

“…The issue of working or specialising in the field being understood as a 'clue' to individuals' sexual identity has been noted elsewhere (Orne, 2011). Whilst heterosexual staff members' identity management may become more apparent when their sexual identities are perceived to be under threat by association, LGB staff constantly manage their identities, choosing what to present or share at work and/or with young people.…”

Sexual Disclosure among College Students in the American Deep South: Toward a “Sexuality as Structure” Approach

“…Future research on this topic would benefit from a qualitative approach, one that would allow us to get at more of the moving parts of the on-going disclosure process -a process that may have a beginning, but often has no end [10,46]. That way Southern GLB college students will be able to express in their own words their motivations and experiences.…”

“…Typically, the students had disclosed to none, or at most just one, family member, usually their mother or a sibling [43][44][45]. Thus it seems that the southern closet is an institution dictated by social context and relationships, used by men and women and by Whites and Blacks alike [23,46] 7 . Even so, we found evidence supporting sex and racial differences; both male privilege and White privilege are exerted in sexual disclosure -in that, men were less closeted than women [29] and Whites were less closeted than Blacks.…”

Ambivalent Ambiguity? : A study of how women with 'atypical' sex development make sense of female embodiment

“…The article's examination of the three narratives demonstrates that coming out about uterine and vaginal agenesis is a continuous processes, which is not confined to a single event in time (see also Orne, 2011;Rust, 1993), and which may not be simply cathartic but can be construed as inevitable and prompted in the light of an envisioned future pain. Furthermore, the storyline demonstrate how norms and beliefs, as expressed in descriptions of actual or envisaged interactions and relations, make certain bodies and lives difficult to talk about and respond to, even in the allegedly open and tolerant Swedish context.…”