Contesting the Sacred and the Profane: A Semiotic Analysis of the Logic of Queer Practice

Abstract

This paper uses semiotic theory to analyze the logic of the practices that define queerness in everyday life. To follow this purpose, this paper considers that culture can be defined as a container for the meaning-making strategies and forms of behavior that people employ to carry out their daily routines. Thus, culture itself is one huge code constituting a signifying network that unites individual signs into a cohesive circuitry of intertwined meanings. In advance, this paper also focuses on the genealogical relationships among different disciplines such as semiotics, ethnomethodology, cultural psychology and ideology in Marxist tradition. The reason is this paper insists that semiotic analysis must be in search of outer and inner codes at all kinds of abstract and concrete levels. Thus, the disciplines of ethnomethodology, cultural psychology, and Marxist tradition have an elective affinity with semiotics. Through the relevant semiotics discussion, this paper points out that the sacred and the profane comprise a prevalent dichotomy in current straight and queer cultures. Meanwhile, this paper also does not think this dichotomy is very stable or fixable and emphasizes the power and resistance are the double sides of the same coin. Resistance takes the form of a reverse discourse in the process of contesting the sacred and the profane.