Technologies and Stories of Authenticity
Today, I present an article that I found helpful regarding gender and sexual diversity. Hammack & Manago (2024) published “The Psychology of Sexual and Gender Diversity in the 21st century: Social technologies and stories of authenticity” in American Psychologist. Here are extracts from the article:
The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumptions about gender and sexuality have been challenged. This article situates these changes in the historical context of 21st century social technologies, which challenge traditional sources of authority about information and provide enhanced opportunities for individuals to experience authenticity in gender and sexuality. We frame authenticity as a master cultural narrative in the United States characterized by feeling a heightened sense of self-authorship and alignment between inner experience and embodiment of gender and sexuality. Five narratives now circulate in the United States, four of which support sexual and gender diversity: (a) gender as self-constructed; (b) sexuality as plural, playful, flexible, and fluid; (c) sexuality and monogamy as cultural compulsions; and (d) intersectionality as central to the experience of sexuality and gender. A fifth narrative seeking to legitimize hierarchies (e.g., patriarchy) is hostile to sexual and gender diversity but remains anchored in a metanarrative of authenticity and has benefitted equally from the affordances of social technologies. This historical moment provides researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to more intentionally ground their work in lived experience, challenge normative thinking about sexuality and gender, practice affirmation, center the phenomenon of diversity over discrete identity categories in an ever-exclusionary acronym (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and more identities [LGBTQ+]), and embrace fluid and nonlinear narratives of social change.
Nearly a quarter into the 21st century, the pace of cultural change in the understandings of sexual and gender diversity in the United States has been extraordinary. At the turn of the century, only 35% of Americans supported same-sex marriage (McCarthy, 2023). Such unions were legally recognized in 2015 by a Supreme Court decision, and today, 71% of Americans express support (McCarthy, 2023). Over this same period, cultural visibility of gender diversity, including transgender and nonbinary identities, increased in popular media reports, and young people are identifying with new language associated with sexual and gender diversity at an accelerated pace (Jones, 2022; Watson et al., 2020). Understandings of sexual diversity have also broadened with heightened cultural visibility of asexuality, kink, and consensual nonmonogamies such as polyamory in popular media reports. At the same time, opposition to these changes has been highly visible and resulted in the formation of new subcultures and violent social movements seeking to restore hierarchical thinking about gender and sexuality (e.g., Campbell, 2022).
The 21st century in the United States can be distinguished from the 20th in the technological affordances for constructing personal narratives perceived as authentic. . . . These changes have resulted in a flourishing of new narratives centering on the imperative of authenticity—the call to “be real” and “be true to yourself” (Marwick & boyd, 2011; Santer et al., 2023).
Although the concept of authenticity invokes essentialist thinking about identity —the notion that there is some underlying core “truth” to be made manifest in self-expression (Newman, 2019; Rivera et al., 2019)—our view is grounded in a constructivist perspective on human development in which authenticity is itself a master narrative (Hammack, 2008; McLean & Syed, 2015). This view of authenticity is consistent with recent perspectives in psychological science that frame the experience of authenticity as one in which individuals view themselves as acting in a manner congruent with their inner beliefs, values, feelings, desires, or perceived dispositions. Our view is most consistent with W. S. Ryan and Ryan (2019) who describe authenticity as the way in which “a person experiences … actions or communications as self-authored” (p. 99). In other words, authenticity is a form of narrative identity in which the individual tells a story of alignment between inner experience and outward self-expression, unconstrained from the limits of social context. As we will describe, the extent of alignment depends on context and affordances of communication technologies.
To develop principles and practices for a new paradigm, we first examined incongruities between accumulating information related to diversity in gender and sexuality and current research and clinical paradigms. By identifying “anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 6), we formulated a new set of commitments for research and practice in which this diversity in gender and sexuality could be rendered sensible. Our analysis as applied researchers in this area guided us to develop these five principles that take seriously the power of narratives and that follow the logic of new worldviews emerging with the spread of authenticity master narratives. Below we specify these principles and offer concrete implications for research and clinical practice.
Principle 1: Ground Psychological Science and Practice in Lived Experience
Principle 2: Challenge Normative Thinking About Sexuality and Gender
Principle 3: Practice Affirmation, Not Suspicion
Principle 4: Center the Phenomenon of Diversity Over Discrete Identity Categories
Principle 5: Embrace Fluid and Nonlinear Narratives of Social Change
Following the maxim of mutual constitution (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 2010) and a narrative approach to human development (e.g., Hammack, 2008; McLean & Syed, 2015), individuals develop psychologically by making meaning of their inner psychological experience using the linguistic resources available in cultural settings. Before the advent of social media, those stories were mostly constructed by traditional sources of authority, such as religion and science, and interpreted through mass media, such as television and film.
In the 21st century, the cycle of mutual constitution has been altered by the affordances of new social technologies. New to the current era is the nature of the tools we have to make meaning at maximum lateral collaboration—that is, in a manner in which the authority to imbue language with meaning has expanded to maximize the potential of any one individual to alter the status quo. Social technologies afford novel opportunities for individuals to participate in the mutual constitution of culture and mind. The psychology of sexuality and gender in the first quarter of this century demonstrates this alteration in the culture cycle, whereby the agency with which individuals participate in remaking master narratives is amplified. The result is a rapid expansion of language and new narratives to understand gender and sexuality (Cover, 2022). While the content of these new narratives has distinct elements, they are united in a core premise that the imperative of the present is to align the inner experience of gender and sexuality with the external presentation of the self within a new master narrative of authenticity.
Although this article has focused on the United States, social technologies also significantly contribute to processes of globalization and the permeability between constitutions of cultures and minds. More global perspectives are needed that examine narratives of gender and sexuality outside the United States and how the narratives we described may be spreading, adopted, or rejected around the world. Of particular interest is how individuals negotiate authenticity narratives for gender and sexuality given unique cultural constraints such as language in which a binary gender is embedded in the grammar.
Psychological science also exists as part of the culture cycle. The knowledge produced and its application in real-world settings serves as a discursive tool to provide sensemaking at a time of destabilization, fragmentation, and polarization in the narratives available to the individual. When its paradigms are refined to meet the cultural moment, the discipline maximizes its ethical potential to promote positive human development and well-being. Understanding sexual and gender diversity as anchored in a set of new stories, all of which emphasize the alignment between inner and outer worlds through a narrative of authenticity, provides a new sense of fidelity to the cultural moment and can anchor the science and practice of the century in principles that center lived experience, embody affirmation, and embrace fluidity and nonlinearity in social change.
This is a longer than usual post but I found many ideas expressed here very helpful in understanding the power of new technologies to alter the means whereby authenticity is established.