Festivalizing Sexualities: Discourses of 'Pride', Counter-discourses of 'Shame'

Abstract

Festivals have been an important part of social and cultural life for thousands of years. The morphology of festivals is not universal, as they take on different significance, form and meaning in various cultural, historical and contemporary contexts as well as within their own space-time constructions. Turner (1982), for example, argues that festivals function as liminal spaces and ritualized sites of transcendence and communitas. In Falassi’s (1987) classic festival study, festivals are considered to be a means to reinforce the shared values, identities, histories, ideologies and mythologies that bind a community, testifying to the longevity and triumph of a community while also indulging in spectacle and celebration. In Bakhtinian (1984) terms, festivals can temporarily facilitate the playful transgression of authority and the symbolic inversion of social hierarchies through carnivalesque ritual and spectacle. In other words, festivals can function as politicized cultural practices and sanctioned forms of collective dissent, offering a limited means of defying hegemonic culture and social norms of the time. Through temporary public gatherings of ideologically aligned communities and/ or minoritarian people, festivals can at the very least expose cultural boundaries and afford some communities greater visibility. At best, they can command the attention of the majoritarian public sphere, making visible what is usually suppressed and generating a collective voice of resistance to cultural authority. Contemporary gay pride festivals, it could be argued, perform all of these functions. A now-ritualized practice of subjugated sexually non-normative communities, pride festivals can be understood as ‘a means by which the imagined gay community can be materialized in space through publicly celebrating their culture, pride, traditions, symbols, and mythologies, which for much of the time remain hidden from public view’ (Waitt and Markwell 2006: 217). In times and places where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) bodies have been denied public visibility and performance, pride festivals