Who is Woman and Who is Man? : Normativity at Intersections of Gender and Sexual Orientation

Sammanfattning: Current gender norms predominantly construct gender as an expression of binary sex categories that are different but complementary. A performative view of gender instead analyses gender as an emergent feature of social interactions that is created by the constant repetition of acts in relation to discourses of gender. Within these hegemonic discourses, gender is constructed as fundamentally heterosexual. That is, there is an epistemic model of gender that justifies the existence of binary, complementary genders through appeals to complementarity within the structure of heterosexuality. Using an intersectional approach, this dissertation aims to analyse how gender norms of binarity and heterosexuality are expressed in mental representations at intersections of gender and sexual orientation. Study I examined how explicit and implicit stereotype content for groups at intersections of gender and sexual orientation relate to general gender stereotypes. Study II examined the influence of the social ideologies androcentrism and heterocentrism on cultural prototypes of general gender and sexual orientation categories and their intersecting subgroups. Finally, Study III examined how gender non-normativity in organisation communication and applicant gender expression can influence a recruitment situation.Study I showed that the content of explicit, but not implicit, cultural stereotypes for women and men in general only match the stereotype content for heterosexual women and men. Stereotype content for homosexual and bisexual women and men was incongruent with that of their respective gender groups and instead partially gender inverted. Study II showed that cultural prototypes for ‘women’ and ‘men’ are strongly influenced by heterocentrism, as they include an assumption of heterosexuality. The cultural prototype for ‘homosexual people’ was influenced by androcentrism, such that it was more representative of gay men than of lesbian women, but androcentrism showed no direct influence on cultural prototypes for ‘heterosexual people’ or ‘bisexual people’. Study III showed that organisational communication that explicitly moves beyond binary gender can increase perceptions of organisational attractiveness among gender minority individuals, with no measurable impact on gender majority individuals. Additionally, applicants with a non-normative gender expression did not face the hypothesised discriminatory outcomes when assessed by Swedish HR-professionals. This dissertation used empirical, quantitative methods to analyse how gender is structure within a heterosexual matrix of cultural intelligibility and what the consequences are of becoming unintelligible. The findings support the perspective that gender and sexual orientation categories do not represent natural kinds and are instead constructed in relation to each other. Treating gender and sexual orientation as co-constitutive is a break with dominant disciplinary practices in psychological research but doing so would provide a better possibility of analysing how gender influences the lives of those acting within and outside of gender norms.