Originally Posted by razoredge
the word homophobia to me is nothing more than a diminutive weapon used againt those unwilling to accept IN YER FACE homosexual activity. Nothing more, nothing less. Phobia = irrational persistant fear. No one is a feared of homos = bogus term. I guess it makes the term itself a phobia because its a totally irrational name to call people... used by people that are afraid of straight people firm in their beliefs of what is appropriate behavior.
Homophobia is a bogus term, however "queer" is not because that is exactly how most straight people feel inside upon observing same sex, sex acts.... yet out of decency we have dropped the term and adopted the term "gay" which only 30 years ago meant something totally different and was in common use under its origional defination.
It is not that you are ‘unable’ to accept homosexual behaviour in your presence, but simply that you are ‘unwilling.' I would like to suggest that this unwillingness is, in a sense, phobic, but not in the reductive sense of a
homophobia but rather of an expanded anxiety of gender and sexuality.
Gender and sexuality do not exist as fixed ontological essences but are instead conditioned as constructs of performativity within a social episteme (cultural way of knowing/ordering). Even a cursory genealogy of gender or sex will reveal the errors of essentialism when one considers the differing historical meanings of ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual.’ These differences are not definitional but culturally hermeneutic; we do not gain knowledge of what it means to be a ‘man’ from a dictionary but by encountering ‘men’ in their worldly situation.
With gender and sexuality this epistemic conditioning (into a cultural world of being) takes place by what Judith Butler calls an act of interpellation. Below I'll summarise some Butler's ideas on gender. I'll give notes and summary of the Routlege Guide (passim). Gender and sexuality exist in the peculiar category of interpellations that occur without the acceptance of the subject. When a child is born and the doctor proclaims “It’s a girl” he is acculturating the baby into the performativity of a gender, conditioned and determined by the discourses of its cultural world. This is why de Beavouir notes that “one is not born a woman but becomes one.’ The biological body and its genitals do not meaningfully exist prior to this act of interpellation.
Because of this predetermination of interpellation, when one designates behaviour as “homosexual” one is not automatically summoning a “homosexual” subject to answer to that designation. Ethical interpellation must allow the voice of the summoned, of the Other, to respond, in the same way that, when summoned in public by a policeman yelling “hey, sir!”, you confirm your subjectivity by turning to face him. Criminal acts (including criminal sexual acts) may be defined as those towards which there is no ethical requirement to allow a mutual affirming of the act of interpellation (note: when criminals
do take the opportunity to plead guilty they are treated more favourably)
Because of the primordial violence of their interpellation, there are no fixed ‘male’ or ‘female’ subjects. ‘Heterosexuals’ and ‘homosexuals’ are not stable subjective identities. Rather, these roles do not exist outside of their performative occurrence. A subject does not perform ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ acts; these acts are themselves the sole criteria of the sexual designation and are not stable but subject to the vicissitudes of discursive flux.
The term ‘queer’ is suggestive of continuing movement, and becoming. It comes from a Latin root meaning ‘across,’ which in turn derives from the Indo-Latin
torquere, to twist. This continuing process beautifully describes acts of gender subversion that point to the ‘truth’ of gender (and sexuality): that neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality are ‘natural’ fixed identities but that the field of human sexuality must remain plural and open, never being confused with the identity of a subject.
To borrow from linguistics, sexual acts are not perlocutionary, constative utterances of description, describing a sexual subject in the same way that we might describe the weather as being “a sunny day” but are illocutionary in their perfomative utterance; revealing sexuality in their very performativity. (See Salih, and passim for the above paragrraphs)
The fact that you find the term “homophobia”
diminutive while expounding upon its danger as a weapon against perceived heteronormativity bifurcates your hostility to a structure of ‘self’ and ‘Other,’ or ‘Normal’ and ‘Deviant.’ like Zizek's argument that extreme right wing nationalists identify a “threat” from immigrants that are supposedly both lazy and hard working at the same time (simultaneously able to “take our jobs” and “sponge on welfare”
, the simultaneous belittling and fervent denouncement of the term “homophobia” creates a mythical Other against which to better define the self.
That this Other is apotropaic is revealed by the wider phobia that it wards against. A phobia of the instability of sexual identity and the arbitrary and unnatural construction of heterosexuality. When revelling in their queer, performative instability it would seem that homosexual acts still carry the power to subvert. I would therefore encourage the rampant outbreak of homosexual acts of kissing in public, particularly in fast food outlets, and can already suggest the advertising slogan: “A visit to McDonalds makes it gay!”
