The language of "sexual minorities" and the politics of identity: a position paper.

In any highly contested political domain, language can be a potent force for change or an obstacle to understanding and coalition building across difference. This is surely the case in the global debates over sexuality and gender, where even those terms themselves have aroused heated conflicts. In this spirit, we want to challenge the uncritical use of the term "sexual minorities", based on a number of historical and conceptual problems with which that term - like the larger thicket of identities and identity politics it signifies - is encumbered. These include: ignoring history, legitimating dubious normativity, fixing biological categories, and recreating exclusions. With this struggle, we seem caught in a modernist dilemma between two desires: to name and honour difference by signifying identities and to avoid exclusivity and hierarchy by reclaiming universals. The insistence of diverse groups on naming themselves and achieving recognition of their distinctness and variety will go on as long as aspirations for democracy exist, because that is the nature and necessity of emancipatory politics. At the same time, our language needs to reflect the fluidity and complexity of sexuality and gender expressions in everyday life and their intricate interweaving with other conditions such as class, race, ethnicity, time and place.