Homophobic Discourse Research Articles

Paradoxes of new media: Digital discourses on Eurovision 2014, media flows and post-Soviet nation-building

This article explores the contradictions inherent in new media representations of sexual minorities in two bordering post-Soviet countries, Belarus and Lithuania. These nations are divided by their non/membership of the European Union and, being at the western periphery of the former Russian imperial centre, remain directly affected by the Russian mediascape and its information flows. While both countries’ state media closely adhere to the Russian establishment’s homophobic discourse, the role of new media remains largely uncharted. This article uses discourse analysis to (a) examine the influence of Russian media on each nation’s digital discussions about sexual minorities and (b) explore new media’s potential to mediate the intersection of sexual minorities and nation-building in two post-Soviet states. The analysis is centred on a set of online media publications (including their ‘comments’ sections), generated by the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 being won by Conchita Wurst, a drag performer with a beard.

The hate that dare not speak its name?

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.

“We Are Doing Just Fine”: The Children of Australian Gay and Lesbian Parents Speak Out

This article foregrounds the public voices of children of gay and lesbian parents in Australia. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship about these children but its focus is one that has been only partially explored. It begins by showing how children's welfare continues to be the ground on which both homophobic and pro-gay public discourse stakes territory. The article documents the emergence in Australia, since the early 2000s, of a new self-defined subject position, evident in a range of Internet sources. The article analyzes the ways in which the voices which speak from this position are both constituted by the pro-gay discourse and also speak back to it. Three themes are identified and analyzed: resistance to the binary opposition of the child at risk versus the prospering child, responses to heteronormativity and homophobia, and the “love makes a family” discourse. While the children of gay and lesbian parents are not immune to the public discourses that create them as objects of debate, attention to their self-consciously political voices reveals that they also resist the norms of the pro-gay position (and the homophobic position) and begin to create space for a more diverse picture of their lives.

The persistence of homophobic discourses: Narratives of a group of gay men in Cape Town, South Africa

abstractHomophobia and ‘hate crimes’ against the LGBTI community have been widely documented in South Africa, notwithstanding huge advances that have been made to protect the right of sexual orientation post-1994. This article draws on a larger qualitative study within contemporary South African contexts, following constitutional and legal changes in this respect. A qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 15 participants, a sample of self-identified gay men aged 20–46 years, drawn from a local university in the larger Cape Metropole, was conducted. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed through thematic and narrative analysis, drawing on the listening guide of Gilligan and co-authors (2003). The narratives that were shared by participants highlighted how homophobia continues to exist within different spheres of society (home, school and tertiary education). Some gay participants were emboldened to subvert or challenge power relations, particularly when facing homophobia at institutions of higher education. It is recommended that regulatory ‘enforcers’ of compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity have to be challenged at different levels through enactment of the laws that protect gay men as well as education be given on alternative identities and practices.

TRANS-SAHARAN TRADE: THE ROUTES OF ‘AFRICAN SEXUALITY’

AbstractThe idea that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ is widely regarded, at least among Western scholars, as a myth concocted during the colonial era. The evidence adduced to support this consensus is largely convincing, but it does not account for all the features of contemporary African leaders’ homophobic discourses. In particular, it does not account for differences between Christian and Muslim rhetorics with respect to a putative ‘African sexuality’. Historical, ethnographic, and literary evidence suggests these differences can be traced in part to the trans-Saharan slave trade, which gave rise to racialized sexual tropes of blacks and Arabs that circulated and continue to circulate on both sides of the Sahara. In Nigeria and perhaps elsewhere, it seems that sexual stereotypes of Arabs and black Africans derived from both the trans-Saharan trade and European colonial rule have been respectively, if unevenly, mapped onto Muslims and Christians, in a way that hinders national integration. This is so even when the leaders of both groups seem to be in agreement, as when they join forces to condemn homosexuality. To ignore such religious, racial, and sexual contradictions is to ignore some of the major cultural faultlines within contemporary African nation-states and the continent overall.

‘Aid for gays’: the moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi

ABSTRACTIn recent years, ‘African homophobia’ has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that ‘homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion – partially expressed through homophobic discourse – in Malawi. The article analyses the cascade of events that led to a moment of political and economic crisis in mid-2011, with special focus on how a 2009 sodomy case made homophobia available as a new genre of social commentary. Employing discourse analysis of newspaper articles, political speeches, the proceedings of a sodomy case, and discussions about men who have sex with men (MSM) as an HIV risk group, I show how African homophobia takes form via interested deployments of ‘cultural’ rhetoric toward competing ends. This article lends a comparative case study to a growing literature on the political and social functions of homophobia in sub-Saharan Africa.

‘Unnatural’, ‘Un-African’ and ‘Ungodly’: Homophobic discourse in democratic South Africa

On 28 November 2006, South Africa’s legislature passed the Civil Union Act (No. 17, 2006), which legalised same-sex marriages or civil partnerships. While South Africa was fifth in the world to recognise the right of people of the same sex to marry, the country is by no means free of homophobic attitudes. However, we argue that an examination of the discourses embedded in the public discussion of gay marriage shows that the post-1994 period has not simply been a case of homophobia as usual. The altered context has given rise to the need for new ways of homophobic discourse to position itself. The rights enshrined in the Constitution represent a powerful set of ideas about the distinction between the democratic state and its apartheid predecessor. These ideas provide the dominant framework for political debate in the current context and it is therefore within this overarching framework that anti-gay sentiments must find a way to express themselves that has legitimacy. Our finding is that the reinscription of homophobia in an era of the ascendancy of human rights discourse has been chiefly in terms of three potent legitimising tropes – homosexuality as ‘unAfrican’, ‘unGodly’, and ‘unnatural’. It is only by deepening our understanding of the terms in which homophobia is being articulated in the current period that we can develop effective counter discourses

Children speak out: Gender and sexuality in treacherous school journey terrains

abstractThis Article provides a critical analysis of the role of gender and sexuality in children's navigation of treacherous school journey terrains in one Lesotho rural primary school. It draws on data generated with 12 children (male = 6; female = 6) who travelled an average distance of 10–15 km to and from school every day. The study employed creative participatory and visual research methodology (for instance, route mapping, diamond ranking and photographic technique) to document the challenges that the children experienced as they traversed the treacherous terrains of their school journey. The findings denote how children resourcefully exploited the dominant discourses of gender and sexuality to mitigate the dangers of passing through dense forests with herd boys, muthi murderers and Basotho traditional circumcision initiates. Children's agency in navigating these obstacles and (albeit life-threatening) challenges included travelling in protective gender-based groupings, getting involved in heterosexual walking relationships and creatively harnessing the dominant homophobic discourses in these contexts in their favour. By foregrounding how gender and sexuality featured as a resource and recourse in how children navigated their school journey, the Article challenges the dominant discourses that view children as immature, sexually innocent (or asexual) and unable to determine their lives. It provides insights into why actively involving children in matters that affect their lives and foregrounding gender and children's sexuality could become a potential catalyst for policy and social action aimed at improving the schooling experiences of rural children.

The Origins of Senegalese Homophobia: Discourses on Homosexuals and Transgender People in Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal

Abstract:This article traces the history of homosexual and transgender behavior in Senegal from colonial times to the contemporary period in order to demonstrate the flimsiness of the claims, made by many political and religious leaders and scholars, that homosexuality is “un-African.” Such claims, which appear as reactions to neocolonialism and Western intervention in African affairs, usually are homophobic discourses that invoke patriotism, cultural difference, and morality in order to justify the subjugation of homosexual and gender nonconforming individuals (goor-jiggens) living in Senegal. In an attempt to understand the roots of Senegalese homophobia, the article analyzes several depictions of homosexuals and transgender people in contemporary Senegal and traces them to similar representations in European writings of the colonial period. As this approach reveals, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal, from colonial times to the present, have been constructed as scapegoats, first of the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) and then of Senegalese political and Islamic backlashes. Although they have always cohabited with the rest of the society, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal have been treated largely as strangers in their own land. By analyzing the discourses of both French colonials and Senegalese, one finds a persistent binary opposing the West and Africa and denigrating sexual and gender variances and subcultures in Senegal as pathological European imports.

“I Wish our Gender Could Be Dual”

This paper explores the embodiment and expressions of femininity in seven young Ghanaian men studying at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. First, I examine the role of the participants’ mothers in their feminization. Second, I explore their gendered, as well as their intimate and sexual experiences with both men and women. It appears that, for the participants, gender is perceived as a natural inclination, which can be masculine or feminine regardless of the person’s sex. I suggest that the “biologization” of gender facilitates a certain acceptance of femininity in Ghanaian males. However, the young men experienced tensions between hegemonic forms of youth masculinity and their own effeminacy, especially since the recent increase of homophobic discourses in the media. They constantly re-negotiate their (feminine) masculinity according to the contexts they find themselves in and the interlocutors they face.

The Contexts of Marguerite Duras's Homophobia

This article proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a much younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. My contention is that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared with Andréa to be a misfit one — one that we can to a certain degree recognize in practice but that we have no easy discourse or category to capture and/or to denote. Misfit sexualities, I argue, exist mostly in context, in interaction, in the relations between texts and the interactive processes that produce them. To attempt to contextualize a work such as The Malady of Death in this way is not to rely on or to take up any literary theory or practice of intertextuality. Rather it involves attempting to reconstruct something of the social world (mainly a part of “literary” Paris from the 1950s through the 1980s) in which such a work intervened, and attempting to understand the particular cultural concepts for understanding various ideologies and practices of sexuality it invoked, and in which it was implicated.

Feminist ecocriticism: the new ecofeminist settlement

Taking into account the material feminist theories of agency, matter, and body, this essay examines to what extent material feminisms and trans-corporeality can be productive models for conceptualizing feminist ecocriticism, an anti-phallogocentric ecocritical theory that analyzes the complex dynamics of material agencies across human and nonhuman bodies. By contesting gendered dualities and bodily boundaries, it opens up new ecocritical pathways to deconstruct the sexist, speciesist, and homophobic discourses of nature which served as a rhetorical strategy to associate female and queer human beings with animals/nature. Feminist ecocriticism is also a form of literary criticism that examines these issues in literary texts. Richard Powers novel Gain provides a palpable example as it highlights the permeability of bodily natures.

The God of the Middle English Cleanness and His Erotic Exhortations of Purity

Abstract The Middle English Cleanness is a poem unique in the medieval context in that it couples its homophobic discourse with a powerful vindication of sexual pleasure and its role in relationships without referring to the procreative telos of marriage. In fact, Cleanness does not even stress that the only proper arena for erotic desire is the marriage bed, with the narrator emphasising the mutuality of pleasure instead. The article investigates the text’s rhetorical interplay between the vilification of homosexuals and the divine endorsement of heterosexual lovemaking. Going beyond the established critical consensus on the issue, it argues that the contrast between the two serves not only to allow the author to vent his homophobic prejudice but also connects with the epistemological concerns of Pearl, the text that precedes Cleanness in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript.

Witnesses on the periphery: Young lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer employees witnessing homophobic exchanges in Australian workplaces

Social divisions on the basis of sexuality are continually reinforced and contested in organizational environments. Previous studies have focused on the workplace as a problematic environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer-identifying (LGBQ) workers. In this article, I examine young workers’ experiences of witnessing the exchange of homophobic expressions, commentary and humour at work. Qualitative findings are presented from an exploratory study of young LGBQ people’s experiences in Australian organizations. Three core themes are discussed: (i) young workers’ location as periphery witnesses to homophobic exchanges, discussions and humour; (ii) the constraints experienced by young LGBQ workers in having to ‘manage’ their sexuality at work; and (iii) young workers’ attempts to refute and reject homophobic discourse in work relationships. Based on these findings, I conclude that witnessing the exchange of homophobic commentary can constrain how young workers express their sexuality at work while also mobilizing young workers to question homophobic discourse.

Constructions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer identities among young people in contemporary Australia

This paper focuses on young people's construction of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) identities in contemporary Australia. Through the perspectives of young people, it seeks to position their understanding of LGBQ identities alongside current theoretical and empirical debates about the individual and social significance attached to these identity frames. In this qualitative study, 28 young people (aged 18 to 26 years) shared their stories of identifying as LGBQ through online, face-to-face or telephone interviews. The findings highlight how varying elements of LGBQ identities continue to have currency within this group and how young people adopt and refer to these terms interchangeably and in tandem. This is balanced alongside an awareness of both the limitations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer identity categories and of the homophobic discourses informing these subject positions. The paper concludes by arguing that health and social care professionals have a integral role to play in supporting LGBQ youth through a process of co-authorship – to work in partnership to construct more enabling self-stories that transcend restrictive identity frames.

LGBT Students’ Short Range Narratives and Gender Performance in the EFL Classroom

By means of the analysis of six short range narratives, utilizing as a methodology (Feminist Post –Structuralist Discourse Analysis) FPDA,this paper unveils some significant moments which evidence the way LGBT EFL students draw on different discourses to adapt, negotiate,resist, emancipate, and reproduce heteronormativity. EFL students Methodological FrameworkConstantly shift positions and perform their gender assuming simultaneously powerful and powerless stances in the EFL classroom.The study categorizes the emancipatory discourse as a way to resist, the discourse of vulnerability as a way to reproduce and cope withmarginalization, and the homophobic discourse as a way to position LGBT individuals as abnormal. Finally, the article will reflect on themoments LGBT student mitigate their oral skills and constrain their participation in class, due to the fact that they are frequently evaluatingtheir comments to avoid accidental disclosure of their sexual identity.

“Working Through” as Ideological Intervention

This article considers the ideological significance of homophobic discourse as part of a sophisticated interrogation of homophobic outlooks in the FX series Rescue Me. It posits that a variety of narrative features enable a strategy of “working through” in which characters’ frank conversations and evolving perspectives depict the process of experiencing ideological challenge. Working through emphasizes the need for scholars to fully explore the internally contradictory narratives that are characteristic of the increasing complexity of some television storytelling and defies norms of critical media analysis that argue particular media texts either reinforce or resist dominant ideology. Cogent examination of other instances of working through could reinvigorate stymied intellectual spaces by insisting that scholars consider characters’ process of struggle with ideological perspectives throughout the unfolding of a series.

Inclusive Masculinity in a Physical Education Setting

There is a strong relationship between the cultural practices of competitive, organized youth sport and compulsory physical education. The hyper-masculine, violent, and homophobic culture traditionally found within boys segregated sporting spaces is mirrored when youth are compelled to participate in physical education. However, cultural homophobia is on rapid decline in Western countries. Recent research shows high school and university sport to be an increasingly inclusive environment for openly gay male youth. I explore this cultural shift among high school (sixth form) physical education students in England. Using three months of ethnography, and conducting 17 in-depth interviews with 16-18 year old ostensibly heterosexual boys, I show an absence of homophobia and homophobic discourse, the abatement of violence, the absence of a jock-ocratic school culture, and the emotional support of male friends. Thus, I show that while the structure of sport education has remained the same, the hyper-masculine culture surrounding it has changed.

The bad homosexual: Genet’s perverse homo-politics

Although widely recognized as pivotal texts in the history of homosexual literature, Genet’s novels occupied a largely negative position within gay criticism of the 1990s, by which they were seen to reproduce heterocentric, even homophobic assumptions about same-sex desire. This article argues that Genet’s contentious decision to articulate homoerotic desire within the space of a heteronormative language is one necessitated by the structural constraints of language itself. Metafictively drawing attention to the absence of a language in which to communicate homoerotic desire, Genet represents his narrators and characters as locked in a closet of heteronormative language. His strategic response to this silencing is to appropriate and recontextualize heterocentric and homophobic discourses in ways that problematize their assumed heteronormativity. In contrast to the gay critical focus on whether Genet himself has internalized heteronormative assumptions about his sexuality and subjectivity, Genet’s texts remind us that the question is not simply an individualized one of what the author him/herself thinks, but rather how s/he might articulate expressions of desire within a language that seems designed to erase such expressions of difference.

Mainstreaming Homosexuality in Nollywood: The Efforts and the Challenges

A critical analysis of the attempts by Nollywood, the melodramatic video-film industry in Nigeria, to address and mainstream the notion of homosexuality in Nigeria and across the continent. Using the cultivation theory and the inter-group contact theory, the study explores the notion of mainstreaming of homosexuality by the very popular medium across Africa. How has this particular medium address the issue of homosexuality in society through characterization and plot? Since Nollywood is a highly didactic medium, what messages about homosexuality are being presented and how do these messages contribute to or erode from existing conceptions and misconceptions about homosexuality in Nigeria? Has the medium, in its portrayal of homosexuality, contributed to the moral panic on the issue or help deflect the moral panic? The analysis is done against the backdrop of the ongoing legal, social and political homophobic rhetoric currently engulfing Nigeria and other African nations. The focus of the study is the frequency of reference to homosexuality in the society, the characterization of homosexual persons in the video-films and the narratives of the homosexual person in relation to heterosexuals in the society. The video-films examined are: Emotional Crack (2003); Men in Love (2010) and Mind Game (2010). The results indicate that while more plots and characterization is being done by Nollywood to make homosexuality salient to the society, the characterizations of homosexuality is unsympathetic at best and even dubious in certain circumstances. In the one instance where a strong and sympathetic characterization is employed, the plot is undermined to restore the mainstream socio-religious homophobic discourse.