[lbo-talk] pansy power

[Carrol Cox]

shag carpet bomb wrote:
> 
> At 11:06 AM 3/1/2009, Philip Pilkington wrote:
> >this, according to
> >Foucault, is the kernel, traceable back to Ancient Greece, of homophobia
> >today and I ask anyone who doubts it to actually sit down and talk to
> >someone who is avowedly homophobic without being a militant, quasi-Fascist,
> >its ALWAYS effeminacy that's the issue, either too much, in men, or too
> >little, in women
> 
> who knew? homophobia as transhistorical phenom. penetrating, forceful stuff!

That the kernel of Q existed in (say) 1500 is no evidence whatever that
Q or anything like Q existed.

The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That does not
make the ape a man. That the kernel of homophobia is to be found in
attacks on effeminacy is irrelevant to the question on when homophobia
itself came into existence. All sorts of kernels of all sorts of social
practices existed in the past, but only a small selection of those
potentials were ever realized. This is the historicist fallacy, the
assumption that the explanation of anything is to be found in its
genesis.

Carrol