Labels Are For Soup Cans (And People Too)

[sciatrix]

I see a lot of people disclaiming the usefulness of labels. (Especially, for some reason, people who have a perfectly good label for themselves complaining about other people making up new words to describe their experiences.)

So I want to talk about why labels are important to me.

My experience growing up as asexual was, I feel, an incredibly lucky one. I found out that asexuality existed and that an asexual community existed absurdly young. I was fourteen when I found the label, and so I essentially went through adolescence knowing that there was a place for people like me, that there was a name for people like me, and that it was okay if I didn’t have any interest in anyone else that way. Note the bit about having the name. It’ll be important later.

I didn’t necessarily take advantage of the community at the time. From about ages 15 to 18, I essentially abandoned the asexual community, such as it was. I was more interested in focusing on my autistic identity then, and was actively posting on WrongPlanet rather than AVEN at the time. Community itself simply wasn’t an issue for me, at least not about my sexuality. After all, I first had a group of friends who didn’t seem to care either, and then I had isolated myself in large part from my peers, and there was no reason for the whole tangled web of sexuality to really enter my life if I didn’t want it to.

No, the important part was simply knowing that the label was there. That it was real, that I had validation to be this way, that there were other people using this label.

I am not entirely sure that I would have been one of the people who independently makes up the term “asexual” without access to a community first. I rather doubt it. My adolescence was a period during which many, many (straight) people seemed to think I was a young lesbian, and were quite invested in trying to draw me out of my closet. And I’m not actually that immune to suggestion. I certainly would have gone through a period of extremely confused questioning, which would have been wrought with anxiety, and I probably would have gone with the flow and come out as gay because at least it was an answer. As it was, I was too terrified to come out of my closet until I went away to college, but at least I knew my label described who I was well enough. Even if I wasn’t brave enough to actually share it with people, I could be pretty sure I knew what I was, and if I changed so be it.

I could not have had that certainty without the existence of a label and a group of people who used it. For me, it was the difference between relative calm and frustrated anxiety. And all for the sake of a single word.

And here’s the other thing that labels do: they give us a community of other people who use that label to connect with. They give us a language to speak to others about ourselves, language with which we can come close to describing our experiences. And they provide a means to connect with one another.

It’s hard for me to think which comes first: the labels or the communities, since discussions within communities invariably lead to ever more finely gradated labels and more complex identities as people seek shorthands for concepts which recur over and over again. That’s what these words are, in essence: useful shorthands to communicate. And if they’re not acceptably fine-tuned, well, that’s a good reason to make a new one.

(Crossposted from my blog at you*hear's request--I'd love to hear your thoughts.)

[murray]

My thoughts are that I agree with you on the importance (to certain individuals, not necessarily to everyone) of self-applied labels and their associated communities. I identify with your feeling of the asexuality label as a sort of safety net. Even when not actively a part of your life, it's comfortable and safe to know that there is a community that you belong to, even on the fringe, and that it's there for you if you need it.

To extend my own anecdotal evidence as to how labels can be useful, I will say that I definitely value mine. I emphasize that they are mine, not necessarily known to everyone, and I will further qualify by saying that I have rarely had the problem of labels being applied to me uninvited. Well, I have, but besides the general "but you're so/too young" type, they were easily ignored incidences.

My labels help me figure out how I work, and where I fit in with others. I've always had a kind of tremulous relationship with the "normal" life procedure, a certain disconnection from the experiences of others. As a child I questioned whether or not I existed. As a result, any sense of common experience or connection with others is useful to me. I view my labels as a way of connecting to a group of people similar--even if it's just one, insignificant way--to myself. I'm homeschooled, I'm intelligent, I'm advanced in my academic career (and yes, there actually were other 14 year-olds in college that I could have a community with), I'm clinically depressed, I'm asexual, a violist, a member of a serious collegiate symphony orchestra and the school rainbow club, a contra-dancer, from the pacific northwest, etc. These all ground me, and if I didn't have them I would be that much more adrift in nowhere land. I don't even have to participate actively or at all in these groups; living on the fringe is enough.

I think it's important to explore where you can belong, and anything that gives you somewhere to be that you are comfortable in, is beneficial in some way.

[ocelotofdoom]

The disclaiming of labels as useful annoys me as well, for much of the reasons you have pointed out. I think a lot of people are well-intentioned, but seem not to differentiate between someone using a label to insult, exclude and stigmatize another person and someone using it to describe themselves. There may also be a component of people worrying that once you label yourself, you're forever closing yourself off from being anything else - which, of course, does not have to be the case.

In particular, I remember one time that I was talking to a very heterosexual, very mainstream-tastes individual about how I lived for three years in a dorm that was full of geeks and queers, and how thus I fit in perfectly there. She immediately said, "I don't think you should label yourself like that," as if I had insulted myself. I told her that for me these things were good, not bad. What I didn't say, because it would have been a longer conversation that I wasn't close enough with this person to have at the time, was that my life would have been much easier if I had been able to identify as a queer geek when I was 13 as opposed to when I was 17 (when I first found out about asexuality) or when I was 20 (when I first started to be close with other self-identified geeks), things would have been much easier for me, as I could have searched out other people like me. As it was, for lack of a label I spent most of middle and high school, and some of college, going "WHAT AM I?" and feeling isolated. Having a label, and be able to say to the world "HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT I'M ____!" made it easier to find others like me and weed out (most of) the jerks preemptively. The same is true of some of my disability stuff, especially the Asperger's, and would have been even more crucial in some ways if I had known at the time.

The other similar phrase to "Labels are for soupcans" that I find annoying is "'Normal' is just a setting on a laundry machine." Generally said by people who have immense amounts of normal privilege. Perhaps they are right and there is no person who fits every part of the (idealized) "normal" mold. However, as I see it, identifying as being outside of what is considered normal is sort of like being an atheist. With atheists, even if they are right and there is no god, god and religion are so important in society that it does mean something to identify as someone who doesn't go along with all of that. Similarly, society has and seems to worship this concept of normalcy, regardless of whether it has any sort of real embodiment, and punishes people who fall outside of it, and those people have every reason to call bullshit on the attempts to shut down discussions about what it means to be an outsider by claiming that there is "no such thing as 'normal.'" And it ALWAYS seems to play like a dismissal and a shutdown when someone says that. </tangent>

[sciatrix]

Murray: Oh yeah. I definitely feel you on labels grounding you, even if you don't have a community of people who share them. I mean, what is a label but an identity-word?

Ocelot, you're absolutely right in that I usually see this coming from people who have a ton of "normal" privilege to begin with, so that even if they don't take on a particular label for themselves--well, the default is welcoming enough for them that they fit okay just from that. Which makes the whole thing even more frustrating--yeah, they're not important to you, because you don't need one!

I hear the dismissal thing about it, too. Especially with newer labels--"you think you're so special that you need a special word?" and that sort of thing.