Populist contestations: Cultural change and the competing languages of sexual and gender identity

There has been a vast proliferation of categories, descriptors and labels used to describe gender and sexual identity over the past few years, with terms now numbering in the hundreds. Many terms, such as heteroflexible, asexual, demigirl and sapiosexual actively contest masculine/feminine and hetero/homo binary arrangements of identity, and LGBTQ minority rights discourses and arguably represent an epochal shift in gender/sexual knowledge frameworks. The cultural conditions that make such change possible have yet to be explored. This paper draws on theoretical approaches to populism to analyse the role of popular culture, digital communication and contestation of institutional and expert knowledges in driving the emergence of new gender and sexual terminology.