The Importance Of Identity In Granted Indiana

Before I moved to the city, I never paid too much attention to the thought of sexuality. For me growing up in a small, conservative town in Indiana, exploring sexual identity was not a question. In my town, I only ever saw boy-girl relationships. Boys and girls went to dances together, boys and girls held hand and boys and girls kissed. There was an overwhelming representation of heterosexuality and consequently I presumed everyone expressed the same sexuality. I became so accustomed to seeing and experiencing heterosexuality as a norm, that when I moved to Chicago it was an eye opener to the ignorance of not only my hometown, but western society as a whole regarding the reoccurring dominance of heterosexuality. Granted Indiana contains a controversial

Developed by social structures such as race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality, identities contain multiple aspects. While people pick and choose which are more important in context to them personally identity includes a great deal of externality. Social interactions, shared symbols and ways in which people desire to be perceived, influence, pressure and structure certain identities one acquires. Moreover, identity combines both self and public image (Woodward). The ways a person view themself is often reinforced by the opinion of others. Simply, there is an invisible link regarding identity between personal and social that is overlooked. Consequently, there is a failure to understand, identity is not entirely subject to agency. Concepts such as race, gender and sexuality are identified with, but without exercising much choice, rather they are repetitively imposed onto a person at birth through social construction. Echoes of labeling structured by society deem what is the “norm” or default and what is excluded. However, this process of omitting marks who is different, thus enabling the knowledge of categorization and identification of what is deem as the societal norm. Yet this normalization is overlooked and unseen by society and its structuring of identities. Key elements of identity, such as sexuality are frequently regulated in western society. As, Foucault states, “the body, in general, and

Sexuality is often deemed as biological and contingent rather than conditioned. Much of this belief is due to the word confusion with sex. Today, the terms sex and sexuality are thought to be intertwining, in that one’s sexual activities dictates their sexual identity. The concept of sexuality is assumed to derive from the instincts or animal ancestry desire for sex, thus reducing the concept of sexuality purely to the urge of reproduction. Moreover, seeing as though the only way to reproduce is to engage in heterosexual relations, the theory sexual identity is based upon the law of nature is argued. This perspective, also known as biological essentialism gives way to the ideology sexual relations is “’natural’ in the sense of being ‘god given’”(Jackson and Rahman 203). Furthermore, sexual identity has been deduced to the simplistic explanation that heterosexuality is developed in accordance to the basic instinctual, natural and biological root of people’s desires. This word connotation between sex and sexuality has developed that normalization of heterosexuality because it thought to derive from a person’s