Abstract
The transnational ex-gay movement is an important context affecting lesbians and sexual minority women around the world. In 2015, the UN Human Rights Commissioner called for all nations to ban conversion therapies. This research investigates a neglected area of scholarship on the ex-gay movement by deconstructing and analyzing the implications of ex-gay discourses of female homosexuality in a global context. The ex-gay movement originated in the United States and has proliferated to nearly every continent. We argue that it is the main purveyor of public, anti-lesbian rhetoric today, constructing lesbianism as sinful and sick to control women’s sexuality, enforce rigid gender roles and inequality, and oppress sexual minority women. Guided by Adrienne Rich’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality and Barbara Risman’s gender structure theory, we analyze how, in ex-gay discourse, lesbianism is demeaned and demonized in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of the gender structure. Finally, we examine the impact of ex-gay discourse on sexual minority women in global context.
Highlights
The transnational ex-gay movement, which originated in the United States in the 1970s, profoundly affects, both directly and indirectly, the lives of LGBTQ people and sexual and gender minorities around the world
We show how ex-gay discourse singles out lesbianism as a grave public threat that requires political action
We focus on the how the movement uses its discourse of female homosexuality to promote its public policy agenda, identifying some of the most significant ways that the transnational movement singles out lesbianism as a grave social threat that requires political action, and misuses social science research on sexual minority women
Summary
The transnational ex-gay movement, which originated in the United States in the 1970s, profoundly affects, both directly and indirectly, the lives of LGBTQ people and sexual and gender minorities around the world. We deconstruct and discuss the implications of the ex-gay movement’s discourses of female homosexuality in a global context, a neglected topic in scholarship on the ex-gay movement, as well as the scholarship on sexual minority women. We contend that the transnational ex-gay movement is the main purveyor of public, anti-lesbian rhetoric today and that it openly demeans, stereotypes, and demonizes lesbians and lesbian relationships as a way to control women’s sexuality, enforce rigid gender roles and inequality, and oppress sexual minority women around the world. Applying Risman’s scheme in the present study allows us to compare our findings with similar research on ex-gay discourses of male homosexuality This movement is more focused on male homosexuality, its ideology and policy agenda are virulently anti-lesbian, and its anti-lesbian rhetoric is useful to the movement’s anti-LGBT and anti-feminist politics. We indicate ways in which the movement’s policy agenda may pose additional harms to lesbians and a range of sexual minority women whose relationships and experiences fall within what Rich termed a “lesbian continuum.”
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