gay bashing and class

[wahneema lubiano]

There's alot of material out there that compares colonization
to feminization--Frantz Fanon is one such theorist
(*WRETCHED OF THE EARTH*, *BLACK SKIN,/WHITE 
MASKS*).  Some of it can be found in the postcolonialist
discourse, especially among scholars doing work on 
19th century British imperialism, and theorists/writers on
Pan-Africanism and Negritude--Aime Cesaire, for example.  
The tie between colonization and being feminized often
is not argued directly, but is more available in the metaphors
and similes of the writers/theorists.

Much of the writing about black nationalism
and the writing of many self-identified black nationalists
(whether or not explicitly homophobic) use the analogy.
And back through the 18th and 17th century some
racist science honed in on black people/African people
in recognizably gendered terms.  

Robert Park, one of the founders of the Chicago school 
of sociology referred to the negro race as the "lady" 
of the races compared to the manly anglo-saxon 
frontiersman race.

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY's
Graduate Center ought to have quite a bit of references
to the above kind of research.

Additionally, there's been other research and arguments
with regard to the present moment that suggest some 
people of color express more explicitly homophobic views 
as a way of making space for themselves within normative
public discussion.  I'm not sure that I find that work com-
pletely convincing; although In my own work with community,
political, and/or church groups in black American communities
I have found many individuals who do say that kind of thing.  But
absent more consistent proof of some kind, I am not ready to
accept arguments for any kind of black American exceptionalism
around homophobia--felt or articulated.

At 01:39 PM 10/20/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Meredith_Glueck at edf.org wrote:
>
>>when talking about the 2 guys who killed Matt Shepard, i really wonder if
>>there is all that much that differentiates them from alot of other people
>>who are prejudiced, there are plenty of people capable of doing this-i
>>don't know if a class based argument would really be valid-
>
>There's something there, I think, at least for men, as a psychological
>defense against marginalization. "I may be a lowlife but at least I'm not a
>queer." I read somewhere recently that some anticolonial discourse played
>with a colonization = ravishment trope, that the colonized man was somehow
>feminized (and no, that is not a, um, backdoor apology for imperialism). I
>don't know what to make of this, does anyone else?
>
>Doug

 

******************************************************************
Wahneema Lubiano
Duke University,  Program in Literature
PHONE:  (919) 681-2843 
FAX:   (919) 684-3598
[Note new e-mail address:  wah at acpub.duke.edu]