Homophobia, disgust and the body: Towards a psychosocial approach to sexual prejudice

Abstract

AbstractTheoretical and empirical approaches to homophobia (and other forms of sexual prejudice) have tended to remain polarised between individual and societal/cultural levels of analysis. For example, much psychological work has relied upon psychometric understandings of individual prejudice, while sociological and cultural studies approaches have focused upon the social construction of sexual identity and the overarching impact of heteropatriarchal structures. In this paper I outline a psychosocial approach in which I argue that a focus upon the ways in which cultural/structural processes are linked with embodied ‘experience’ provides a means to unite some of the different levels of analysis mentioned above. Thus, I consider the ‘experience’ of embodied emotion as one key site through which social and cultural processes have their individual effects and go on to examine the role of embodied emotions in sexual prejudice – in particular shame and disgust – such that we may begin to map some of the complex ways in which individual prejudice and societal/institutional oppression are profoundly interrelated.