I¹ve been thinking about Jim¹s friend¹s essay on the term "homophobia" for awhile. Yoshie says it in a way I wouldn¹t have thought of but actually seems to me to summarize what I felt. I first heard the term I think about 1975, and I remember thinking what an odd way to attack the social issue. The term homophobia in those days 25 years ago seemed like an awkward and obscurantist path to make points about a phobia since technically only a very small percentage of the population really has phobias. It seemed so tangential to the attack. But over time it was one of those terms that seemed to grow into something like Yoshie says:
Yoshie I think that most people use the word homophobia to mean 'anti-homosexual bigotry,' not its cause. I agree that there's an unfortunate psychologizing connotation to it (due probably to its medical origin, as your friend helpfully notes), but you have to admit that it's shorter than 'anti-homosexual bigotry' or even 'anti-queer bigotry.'
Doyle At any rate I thought that in other ways working class folks will use electric guitars, and technology to get the point across concerning working class music culture. Or cars, or computers, why not use medical terminology to our purposes? It is hard to put some of the whole social repression and oppression of homosexuality into traditional class terms. Or how capitalism works in such a way that one can understand class affects sexuality. Not impossible, but why not clear up the confusion that your friend believes is there when we "medicalize" the anti-homosexual bigotry? I would hope that in doing that that being gay does not disappear into the term worker so that we would lose the meaning that is involved. But I am sure you understand that having removed the medical from things to make the class nature of the system clear the debate must be even more stark and clear to all how things are. Regards, Doyle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990120/b9dc9315/attachment.htm>