Authors

Discussion

Based on 15 interviews with LGBTQ respondents born between 1938 and 1974, this paper asks how non-heterosexual people construct and make sense of their sexual selves in the historical context of socialist modernity and the post-socialist transformation in Lithuania. Informed by the insights from post-structuralist feminist New Biography studies, the analysis pays attention to the temporal, geographical and subjective location of the telling of the autobiographical narrative and the way it informs the representation of the self. The paper inquires how the discursive hegemony of contemporary LGBTQ identity politics challenges the interviewees to conform, reject, or creatively adapt to available cultural frameworks of queerness. It pays particular attention to the categories of gender, class, and generation, and how they inform the differences in self-representation.  Finally, it examines the positionality of the researcher and the projection of expectations on the respondents, regarding a certain adherence to the modern categories of non-heterosexual identity. The paper in the end proposes to interpret the telling of the life-narrative in the context of the research interview as a dynamic part of the (trans)formation and/or revelation of a sexual identity of non-heterosexual respondents.