homophobia

rc&am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Wed Jan 20 22:50:53 PST 1999


yoshie is right to point out that homophobia is a term that is used to denote a range of things, including a pop-psychology version of what makes people do what they do and a as a reference to bigotry against queer folks.

and, the article from 'living marxism' was kinda interesting, for me at least in the way in which it picked up on the mirroring of a medical-psychiatric model in queer politics, how 'pro-family' politics is the terrain of such 'bigotry'. something to explore, for sure. i would probably add that there is a kind of mirroring of 'pro-family' discourse in queer politics as well - the necessary changes that this understanding of 'the family' has to make notwithstanding - which goes unnoticed in the article. and, i would think that the preference for 'bigotry' sounds too much like prejudice, which has its own innumerable problems as a description/analysis.

what nonetheless has gone completely unremarked is that 'living marxism' has as, its generative condition, a hostility to identity politics - which it reserves for 'those people' - thereby making heterosexual (in this case) subjectivity the standard case. moreover, pop-psychology is not the same thing as psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity. the mirroring of a dominant discourse, living our opposition through the categories of a dominant discourse, is something that happens in most cases you care to name, and it is one of those things that psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity seek to account for rather than promulgate. you may not like how they explain it, but it remains to be explained (for instance) why 'the family' remains such a tenacious pole of attraction - even in this 'urbanized society which enables homosexuality'. (this last theory of the existence - rise? -of homosexuality in the article would be funny if it were not so obviously wrong, an echo (mirror) of those who want to 'return to the past' where there were no poofters.) mode of production explanations i would like to see, but this does not work in the slightest; and nor does affirming urbanisation for making it possible to do the dirty with those of the same sex work enough for me as an explanation to now turn to celebrating technology as liberatory, as 'living marxism' would bid us do.

angela



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