Mapping Gender Identity

Due to the complexity of the subject of gender and identity, I decided to create a mind-map to help provide an overview of how we could see the elements of the physical body, sexual orientation and gender identity and the ways in which they correspond with one-another. I should point out that no value judgements are intended by the order or arrangement of the various nodes and sub-nodes.

I also accept that this “map” may not yet be complete or exhaustive and I have left out (perhaps wrongly) other factors that intersect with gender such as social-status/class and ethnicity/race.

In my diagram, Gender feeds into Sexual Orientation as the starting point from which a definition of one’s sexual orientation is taken. Certainly, from a cultural point of view we would tend to define a same gender couple as gay. But is this the only way to think of this interrelation? The Physical Body is seen to feed into Sexual Orientation too, and this is on the basis that the body is a medium for expressing and experiencing our sexuality. Of course, for various reasons many people do not overtly externally express their sexual orientation, but where they do, the socio-cultural environment is a medium other than the Physical Body.

Also, the Physical Body is shown to feed into Gender - again, this is arguably a consequence to some extent of cultural values we place on certain bodies, but without straying into the reductionist territory of biological essentialism, there are indisputably differences in the embodied, lived experiences of bodies that can for example menstruate or lactate versus those that cannot.