Racism against the abnormal? The twentieth century Gay Games, biopower and the emergence of homonational sport

Abstract

This paper focuses on the first two decades (1982–1998) of the Gay Games, in which an important story unfolds about normalisation and how that contributes (paradoxically) to further racism and sexual oppression. Following McWhorter’s (2009) important analysis of Foucault’s ‘racism against the abnormal’, I suggest the Gay Games have worked hard to distance themselves from the ‘abnormal’ from their very inception. The paper discusses how the early Gay Games are a homonormative leisure formation seeking mainstream acceptance through such examples as: the development of a commodified and conventional sporting spectacle; the individualising and privatising impulses to the AIDS crisis; the granting of a US immigration waiver in 1994; and the consumption of exoticised and racialised bodies in 1998. Moving beyond the celebration of lesbian and gay affirmation, I argue that the push for normalisation at the games produces them as a biopolitical technology of whiteness, class privilege and racism. The paper concludes by suggesting that the homonormative discourses of the twentieth century Gay Games functioned as a condition of possibility for the twenty-first century Gay Games to be mobilised homonationally, that is, as a form of post-9/11 (homo)sexualised racism that semiotically contributes to sustaining a global ‘war on terror’ (Puar, 2007).