Queering Cuba Aff
History
Queers and The Rev
"Perversions" were wiped out during the revolution. History glosses this over. New
revolutionary potential lies in queers.
Green '1 (James N.: Assistant professor of Latin American history at California State University, Long
Beach. "Queers in Revolutionary Cuba," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4, 2001 // LVL)
Crucial to the revolutionary macronarrative about pre-Castro Cuba is the image of Havana as the
center of decadent foreign tourism, resplendent with gangsters, gambling, prostitution, and assorted
manifestations of "perversion," including male prostitution and homosexuality. In the early years of
the new regime, so the revolutionary discourse goes, the government cleansed the nation of these
[End Page 650] remnants of imperial domination, offered healthy and productive occupations to
prostitutes and pimps, and campaigned to eliminate the antisocial behavior of male homosexuals and
others through their forced participation in Military Units to Aid Production, which were ultimately
shut down in 1968. Besides cheerleaders for the regime, there are many progressive individuals who
oppose the U.S. embargo designed to strangle the Cuban economy and who maintain sympathy for the
concrete amelioration in the life conditions of the country's poorest through improved health care and
education. However, both groups generally gloss over the regime's antigay policies as excesses of the
early years of revolutionary rule. Opponents of Castro's version of communism point to the
government's policies regarding homosexuality as an example of the antidemocratic, bureaucratic,
and authoritarian nature of the regime. Lumsden's discerning work offers a sophisticated, variegated
analysis of the complexities of these issues. While clearly sympathetic to the idealistic goals of the
Cuban experiment, Lumsden pulls no punches in his criticism of the ways in which government policy
makers from Fidel on down have often been driven by antihomosexual prejudice, inherited from the
Catholic Church and a patriarchal culture that privileges and perpetuates male supremacy. Lumsden
begins his work by offering insights into Cuban society in the post-Soviet period, during which the
country's economy has taken a nosedive. Pervasive forms of everyday corruption, black marketing,
prostitution, male hustling, the reliance on tourist dollars, and the global reach of consumerism have
undermined support for the regime and created new pockets of privilege and social discontent. In
recent years gay European, Canadian, and, to a lesser extent, U.S. tourists have flocked to the island for
sun, fun, and gay-for-pay boys who will offer their services at the going rate of twenty dollars a night,
the equivalent of a month's wages in pesos for a factory worker.
Gender Identity Construction before the Rev
Green '1 (James N.: Assistant professor of Latin American history at California State University, Long
Beach. "Queers in Revolutionary Cuba," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4, 2001 // LVL)
Lumsden, however, is quick to point out that the current conditions of Cuban homosexuals cannot be
fully understood without examining the ways in which sexuality and gender identity were constructed
prior to the revolution. Central to his argument is that the patriarchal sexism of Spanish colonial
society (and, after 1898, of U.S. neocolonialism) constructed gender as a rigid bipolarity that
marginalized manifestations of effeminacy among men. The conflation of virility, masculinity, military
prowess, and anti-imperialist fervor embedded in the struggle for Cuban independence in the late
nineteenth century found continuity in the guerrilla ethos of Che, Fidel, and the ragtag band of fighters
from the Sierra Maestra who overthrew the Batista regime in 1959. Consonant with traditional
gendered [End Page 651] constructions of same-sex eroticism in other parts of Latin America, when a
Cuban man penetrates an effeminate male partner, he generally maintains his status as a "real man."
Thus homosexuality is equated with effeminacy and passivity. Certain Afro-Cuban traditions have
mitigated this overall system with more fluid notions of gender identity. Likewise, some
postrevolutionary improvements in the status and rights of women have weakened patriarchy's grip.
Nevertheless, masculine domination over women and maricones still shapes the country's sexual
economy. The regime's fetishistic support for the cult of a virile, romantic, hypermasculine Che and his
vision of the revolutionary "New Man," the emphasis on military prowess as a means of defending the
revolution from foreign invasion and offering international solidarity in Africa and Latin America, and
the embrace of Soviet communism, including Stalinist notions of the "bourgeois decadence of
homosexuality," all only reinforced the antigay legacies of Cuban culture. Lumsden contributes to the
discussion of the Cuban government's policies toward homosexuality by placing them in this broader
context. Homophobia was firmly rooted in Cuban society prior to 1959. The new regime has merely
layered new forms over these traditional cultural and social values.
Reshaping Cuban politics key to next queer revolutionary agenda
Green '1 (James N.: Assistant professor of Latin American history at California State University, Long
Beach. "Queers in Revolutionary Cuba," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4, 2001 // LVL)
The future of the Cuban Revolution does not bode well for the island's gay citizens. The nation's
economic crisis and the struggle for individual survival absorb the daily energy of many. The
authoritarian political culture does not encourage self-organization. Groups of lesbian and gay men
with a political agenda to fight homophobia, discrimination, and sexism have yet to materialize, as
they have throughout the rest of Latin America. Nevertheless, Cuban gays have [End Page 652] shaped
a vibrant nightlife and forged important social networks, in spite of continued state regulation of
sexuality and its opposition to manifestations of homosexuality. Lumsden's perceptive study of the
intricacies of gay life in Cuba is an essential text for those attempting to understand the complexities of
gender, sexuality, and homosexuality in modern Latin America.
Queer Mistreatment existed in the revolution- Critics deny it
Halatyn ’12 (Justin Halatyn, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 8/24/12, “From Persecution To Acceptance? The
History Of LGBT Rights In Cuba”http://www.coha.org/from-persecution-to-acceptance-history-of-lgbt-in-cuba/) JRW
Homosexuality in Cuba Under Castro: The Cuban Revolution seemed to present hope for improved living conditions for the many afflicted members of the community, and hope for a new
Many gay men were in favor of the Revolution and even supported
Fidel Castro. However, despite professed egalitarianism, Castro’s government in reality
outlook on old social mores quickly spread across the island.
longtime Cuban President
was no kinder to the LGBT community than the pre-revolutionary governments . Castro and the other
leading revolutionaries considered homosexuality a devious product of capitalism,
which had to be rooted out
Che Guevara’s definition of the socialist “New Man” in part necessitated a strong
and unambiguously heterosexual male. This view was not unique to the Castro regime, and could be found in the
entirely from society. For example,
ideologies of many leaders from other communist countries. For example, the USSR and China routinely persecuted the LGBT community. As ironic as it may seem, communist thinking at the
The Castro government continued to enforce the Public Ostentation Law
following the Revolution. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, gay men were routinely imprisoned for
soliciting sex in public locations, government workers lost their jobs because of their homosexuality,
and homosexual artists were censored. From 1965 to 1968, openly homosexual men were rounded up
and incarcerated in UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) camps designed to turn them into the
time consistently ignored the LGBT community.
heterosexual ideal. Critics have since denounced UMAP camps as nothing less than military labor
camps , which were described by some internees as brutal facilities, complete with physical and verbal mistreatment, dirt floors, and a chronic shortage of food. Though Castro
himself has denied that they were forced labor camps, he recently acknowledged that gay men were mistreated in certain
camps.
In another case of historic persecution
, the infamous Mariel Boat Lift of 1980, the Castro regime expelled
thousands of homosexual Cubans he considered among other “undesirables.”
Impacts
Homo-Eradication
The Cuban nation forces bonds upon the queer and strange, policing all forms of
disidentification in an attempt to create a homo-eradicated society.
Lehnen 13 (Leila Lehnen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico, PATRICIDAL
PASSIONS: ASSAULTING THE FATHER/MOTHERLAND IN
REINALDO ARENAS’ EL ASALTO AND JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL’S A CÉU ABERTO,
http://revistas.fw.uri.br/index.php/literaturaemdebate/article/viewFile/548/1010, anuss)
Therefore, beyond
rejecting all genealogical bonds, the protagonist also rebuffs all linkage to a larger
community, including the oppressive national one. For the main character, the nation is a perverse extended
family. He becomes a member of this family only in order to ultimately subvert it. In El asalto, negative
metaphors of the family abound and extrapolate from the private into the public realm. The citizens
of the dystopian nation to which the protagonist belongs are stripped of their adult status and,
concomitantly, of their legal (as well as human) rights and become children of a malevolent dictator
father, the Reprimero or Reprimerísimo. Mimicking the rhetoric of familial speech and a patriarchal political demagogy, the tyrant has the
habit of addressing his subjects in mock benevolence as “hijitos míos.” The representation of the dictator-figure as the
“father of the nation” remits the reader to the national romances of the nineteenth-century that,
according to Sommer, privileged the formulation of the nation in patriarchal and hierarchical terms. I n El asalto,
the patriarchal and hierarchical configuration of the national arena is taken to perverse extremes, ensuing in a nightmarish police state. The
citizens, “sons” and “daughters” of the nation, are held not by affective ties to the national
community but by the tyrannical state apparatus that deprives them of individual and social freedom.
Beyond the infantilizing of the national populace, the very concept of the family becomes the simile of
the autocratic organization of the nation. Thus, the national space is divided into “polifamiliares.” In an
obvious dig at the social policies of the Cuban Revolution, these “homes” are simulacra of
communitarian living where the citizens are allocated a minimum space in which all their daily rituals
and necessities are performed in perverse proximity. For Ríos Ávila, in El asalto “[t]he domus becomes the prison of harmony,
the hell of enforced rhyme” (ÁVILA, 1998, p. 113-4). In the context of enforced co-existence, living becomes an
ongoing enactment of basic human necessities in front of an antagonistic public, a continuous exercise
in humiliation. At the same time, the forced community of the polifamiliares functions as a control mechanism that employs citizens as
informers. The home, traditionally seen as the space where the individual can retreat from the scrutiny of
the public gaze is altered into a depraved panopticum, where personal actions are the object of public
interest and where any deviance from the norm set forth by the hegemonic norm is castigated. An
example of the authoritarian structure of the nation is made evident in the creation of the “Gran Tropa de la Reconquista Moral Patria,” whose
purpose is to rid the national body from the transgression of non-sanctioned (i.e. homosexual) desire. The agent of the “Gran Tropa” enérgico,
con sus esbeltas piernas y con su andar marcial y provocador ha de pasearse, elevándose por sobre las cabezas rapadas cuyas fosforescencia
oscila o parpadea entre las barreras. Si la alimaña vil está sola, el agente, que en ningún momento podrá evidenciarse como tal, podrá, para
estimular el criminal, sobarse con su garfía las entrepiernas. Si la alimaña vil dirige su cabeza hacia el radio [between the knees and the waist]
ya señalado, podrá ser aniquilada al instante y luego remitir su caso para el aniquilamiento burocrático (ARENAS, 1991, p. 93). Thus, in El asalto,
tyrannical power manifests itself in both a modern guise, through the mechanisms of surveillance that
follow the citizens of the dystopian island everywhere; but also assumes its pre-modern form, in the
spectacle of punishment inflicted upon the bodies of the nation’s deviant sons and daughters. Because of
this oppressive milieu, the individual has no choice but to isolate itself in order not to become a victim of the familial/state violence.
Consequently, despite the forced co-existence in depraved mimicry of the extended family, any affective ties are obliterated since, “el
desconocimiento del otro – excluyendo naturalmente, a los agentes de la contrasusurración – es casi total” (ARENAS, 1991, p. 54). The
polifamiliares parody not only the repressive state apparatus but, as Rebecca Biron points out, they also ridicule “the Cuban government’s
rhetoric of social planning and organization, along with its denial of a disintegrating infrastructure in the 1980s” (BIRON, 2000, p. 127). In
addition, the polifamiliares are also a bitter satire of the neighborhood defense committees that are, in the words of Brad Epps “only the most
popular manifestation with seeing and revealing, detecting and denouncing. That what is detected and denounced includes particular sexual
identities…” (EPPS, 1995, p. 234). The polifamiliares of El asalto combine the coercive structure of the neighborhood defense committees and
the discursive mechanisms that limit individuality in a hubristic parody of intimidation. Additionally, through the metaphor of the polifamiliares,
the perception of the state as the benevolent “parent” that satisfies its citizen’s social needs is
invalidated. Instead, it is the citizen who becomes enslaved to the needs of an omnipresent,
omnivorous state that devours the (re) productive energy of its citizens. These dehumanized, literally
reduced to swine and cows, farm animals that perform endless labor for the advantage of the institutionalized
order (“Durante toda la tarde las vacas e los cerdos han trabajado febrilmente” [ARENAS, 1991, p. 22]). In the dystopian and repressive realm
that the protagonist of El asalto inhabits, the citizen is coerced into an endless cycle of productivity that, in theory,
exists to benefit the greater national good. Leisure and pleasure are abolished and transformed into
compulsive production. In this frame of reference, sexual intercourse is not only strictly regimented but it also
is performed only in conjunction with procreation. The participants are therefore bestialized and
transformed into breeding animals. Not only are individuals identified and treated as such by the
state, but they also perceive themselves in these terms. In this framework, intercourse becomes grotesque. Arenas’
depiction of sexuality as a state sanctioned “(re)productive” act parodies the ideology of individual
sacrifice required by the Cuban Revolution.
Violence
Transphobia is rooted in a violent colonialist mindset- western epistemology
constructs a gender binary system and propagates violence against the queer body.
Irving 13 (Dan Irving, Dr. Dan Irving's research is located within Transgender Studies, Masculinity Studies and Critical Political Economy, he
works at the Carleton University in Canada, Against the grain: Teaching Transgender Human Rights, 5/10/13,
http://sex.sagepub.com/content/16/3-4/319.full.pdf, anuss)
To challenge singular identity-based categorizations, the focus shifts from understandings of one’s self
towards subjectivity. In so doing, I seek to examine the relationship between liberal democratic
conceptualizations of the private and the public. Trans autobiography and other narratives often
present sex/gender alterity as emerging from one’s physiological, spiritual or psychic essence. This
understanding is demonstrated through definitive ‘I’ statements often articulated by members of marginalized
communities. Self-understandings of transsexuality, two-spirit and transgender are privatized; however,
gender is a ‘shifting and contextual phenomenon, [it] does not denote a substantive being, but a
relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations’ (Butler, 1999: 15). The framing of
trans people as intelligible and thereby positioned to make a rights claim to protect gender identity
draws from the logics of interlocking relations of power ordering society. Transgender/transsexual
subjectivities are constituted within a colonialist framework. Student’s attention is directed back to our ‘trans 101’
discussions. Trans identities were defined through the sex/gender system – a rigidly bifurcated mode of
thinking indicative of western epistemology. Sex/gender binary systems were, and continue to be,
naturalized through repeated processes to discredit or eliminate indigenous knowledges. Individuals
who were visibly sex/gender variant were celebrated within some indigenous societies through
extending to them key roles as ceremony leaders, teachers and healers. European colonizers posited
‘the West’ as civilized and progressive through condemning sex, gender and sexual fluidity as
emblematic of savagery. Indigenous peoples who are presently referred to as two spirit were often amongst the first slaughtered in
colonial genocidal campaigns. Given the oral nature of indigenous cultures, such acts of terror obstructed
teachings concerning those whose embodied sex, gender and sexualities were irreducible to dualistic
categories (Seguin, 2008). Colonialism is not an historical phenomenon. The eradication of diverse performances of sexes, genders and
sexualities through cultural genocide was continued by the residential school system, the Canadian Indian Act (1876) and incarceration within
mental asylums and prisons. The
lateral violence against two-spirit people living on reservations and against
those who are members of urban Aboriginal communities also fragments and weakens indigenous
societies. Critique of the human rights paradigm will inevitably illuminate contemporary colonial relations. In so doing, educators, students,
and trans organizers are encouraged to question processes of colonial rule through epistemic violence. Non/trans identities only
make sense according to the western binary system; therefore, trans subjects are held captive(ated)
by this dichotomy. Rooted in horizontal movement across the sex/gender binary, or the rejection of
such lateral mobility (i.e. genderqueer), trans becomes embedded within this logic. In addition to rendering
trans identities possible, this western dualism shapes trans political claims to sex/gender selfdetermination. Such assimilationist efforts obfuscate the ways colonialism operates according to this register. Adopted during the 1990s,
the term two-spirit emerged as a way to reclaim sex, gender and sexual variance as an integral component of many indigenous cultures.
When enfolded into the gender identity rights category to be enshrined in constitutional law and
penal codes, two-spirit is reduced to a private sex/gender/sexual identity. Trans human rights approaches
reinforce colonialism by lending legitimacy to the state’s paternalistic role as protector of ‘its’ Aboriginal people. Rights approaches stifle decolonial projects through de-emphasizing the different socioeconomic, political and epistemological contexts that render sex, gender and sexual
plurality within indigenous societies possible. Constructing
trans subjects via notions of ‘transphobia’ illustrates
another way that trans subject formation reproduces colonialism given that ‘words, language and
categories do more than describe the world – they create it too’(Valentine, 2007: 233). Trans subjectivities
are shaped in significant part through understanding violations or violence against the self (Valentine,
2007: 223). Efforts taken by many trans human rights activists to remedy trans phobia, such as those working on anti-discrimination campaigns,
lend themselves to the production of a trans subject rooted in a western colonial mindset.
Various impacts to heteronormativity—violence, rape, death, in order to justified by
proving heterosexuality
Bridget ’96 (Jan Bridget 1996 “EFFECTS OF HOMOPHOBIA ON HETEROSEXUALS”
http://www.lesbianinformationservice.org/hetspap.htm)
Homophobia has various effects on heterosexuals. For instance, it
means that heterosexuals do not internalise a
stigmatised identity in relation to their sexual orientation - although they may belong to other stigmatised groups. This
means that they have fewer obstacles to overcome during the developmental processes of adolescence i.e. achievement of identity, selfesteem, and social skills (Erikson, 1963, cited in Zera, 1992). It means that heterosexuals
develop a feeling of superiority
towards homosexuals and that heterosexuals have a stronger self-identity and higher self esteem. In
turn this means that heterosexual youth will be less vulnerable to emotional ill health (depression,
suicide), alcohol or drug abuse. Homophobia means that many people (heterosexuals and
homosexuals) are obsessed with proving they are heterosexual. They do this through exaggerated
stereotyped female/male role playing, i.e. being macho/femme; and an obsesssion with heterosexual
sex which leads to rape, sexual abuse, phobias about sex, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases,
teenage pregnancies, early marriages and high rates of divorce, etc. Sex is addictive (West,1983) and some people,
because of poor self-esteem and weak identity, use sex as a coping method (i.e. to shore up their identity). Homophobia also affects peoples'
attitudes towards homosexuals and homosexuality. There has been little research in Britain concerning attitudes towards homosexuals and
homosexuality but substantial research has been conducted in the U.S.A. Herek (1984) discovered some broad patterns among people
who hold negative views: they had less personal contact with lesbians and gays, less (if any) homosexual
behaviour, conservative religious ideology and they held traditional attitudes about sex roles. Those with more negative attitudes were more
likely to have grown up in rural areas and small towns, to be older, and less well-educated. Studies have questioned whether male and female
attitudes differ. Many suggest that men are more homophobic than women and have worse attitudes towards gay men than towards lesbians
(Larsen, Reed, & Hoffman, 1980; Young & Whertvine, 1982; Hong, 1983; Aguero, Bloch, & Byrne, 1984; Coles & Stokes, 1985; Braungart &
Braungart, 1988;; Clift, 1988; Schatman, 1989). Some have found, for example, that female guidance counsellors were more homophobic than
their male counterparts (Sears, 1992); whilst opinion polls report no differences between the sexes. (Irwin & Thompson, 1977, Schneider &
Lewis, 1984. Other studies suggest that men have worse feelings about gay men than lesbians and that women have worse feelings about
lesbians than gay men. (Laner & Laner). This latter point certainly has serious implications for lesbians when we consider that most 'caring'
professionals, e.g. counsellors, nurses, social workers, are female. Muller (1987) found many examples of parents, in particular mothers, being
far more accepting and supporting of their gay sons than their lesbian daughters. For example, she found that the most positive partent-son
factor was 30% more positive than the most positive aprent6-daughter factor whilst, at the other end of the scale, the most negative parentdaughter factor was 16% more negative than the most negative parent-son factor. Muller also noted that that those daughters who had been
younger than twenty-two made up the most negative parent-child relationship groups. The British Social Attitudes survey of 1992 found that
58% of adults believed that sex between adults of the same sex was wrong. There has been substantial research in the USA which has found
that social workers hold homophobic views (Berger, 1977, Hall, 1978, Tully & Albro, 1979, Potter & Darty, 1981, Gramick, 1983, Wisniewski &
Toomey, 1987, Newman, 1989). Indeed, de Crescenzo and McGill (1978) found that social workers hold more homophobic attitudes than either
psychiatrists or psychologists. Whilst we have yet to pursue this level of research in Britain, one or two articles have appeared in the social work
press which suggest that the situation is the same here (Sone, 1993, Hancox, 1993). American researchers have also carried out surveys in
relation to homophbia and educationalists (Sears, 1988, Geller, 1990, Sears, 1991, Norris, 1992). Again, there has not been any comparable
research in Britain, and Clift (1988) notes: "Beyond the work of gay activists, the studies of Trenchard & Warren and the political debates over
left-wing council policies, however, serious research on lesbian and gay issues in education is non-existent." Clift refers to a 1986 Times
Education Supplement/MORI poll of teachers' attitudes which found that 34% of teachers of 11-16 year olds rejected the idea that
homosexuality should be presented in school as an acceptable way of living (31% had no opinion); 92% did not consider homosexuality a
suitable issue to discuss with junio children, although 58% thought it should be introducted between 12 and 14 years. Clift found, in his study of
80 first-year students that men were significantly less A survey of clinical medical students in 1993 found that only one in two thought that
homosexuality could form part of an acceptable lifestyle. ("Homosexuality and Mental Health Services," British Medical Journal, 1994, cited in
Sexuality and the State, Liberty, 1994). One survey found that 29% of the heterosexual undergraduate students felt that university would be a
better place without lesbian and gay students; nearly half of the study group called same-sex behaviour 'wrong.' (D'Augelli, 1993). Research
suggests that nurses tend to possess conservative attitudes about homosexuality (Webb & Askham, 1987) and that nurses are particularly
intolerant of lesbians and gay men (Jones, 1988, both cited in Irwin, 1992). Individual Heterosexism
challenged their homophobia
(and most haven't),
Unless individuals have
their attitudes will affect their actions ; their
homophobic beliefs will turn into heterosexist actions (discrimination). Individual heterosexism can
find expression in verbal, physical or sexual abuse, whilst those people in positions of power, e.g.
teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, youth workers, M.P.s, the police, parents, employers, etc., knowingly or unknowlingly,
use their positions to discriminate against homosexuals. Homophobia, an individual's internal fear and hatred of
homosexuals, becomes heterosexism, an external act of discrimination. Take the following as a few examples:- "One student nurse described
how a lecturer presented homosexuality as a perversion akin to bestiality and sado-masochism and treated it as a joke; his views were difficult
to challenge. When the student did challenge him, the lecturer played on the prejudice of others in the class, humiliating the student and finally
telling the student to leave the class." (Rose & Platzer, 1989). A significant minority of nurses say that they would refuse to care for a patient
who is homosexual (Platzer, 1993). When news that scientific research had found that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition and that a test
may soon be available to discover whether a foetus is predisposed to homosexuality, Lord Jakobovits - ex chief rabbi - recommended that Jews
should have the test and abort the foetus if it is homosexual. The British Muslim leader, Dr Kalim Siddique, has called for homosexuals to be
eliminated. A recent Stonewall (1993) survey of 1,845 lesbian gay and bisexual respondents in Britain found that 48% had experienced
harassment at work because they were known or suspected of being lesbian or gay.
This took the form of phycial violence,
threats, aggressive questions, homophobic abuse, jokes or teasing. Staff at Ashworth Special Hospital forced one
patient to wear a placard bearing the word "homo." (Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Complaints about Ashworth Hospital, Vol 1, 1992,
HMSO, p151. Cited in Sexuality and the State, Liberty, 1994). An Appeal Court judge commented, in regard to a lesbian custody case, that her
lifestyle was "abnormal" and that it was "simple commonsense to say that the children ought to have a more normal life, in a more normal
family amongst less vehemently minded people." (W v W unreported Court of Appeal 17 June 1980, cited in Sexuality and the State, Liberty,
1994). In March 1993 a Chief Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police described a group of women delegates at a police training college
domestic violence conference as "a bunch of lezzies. There was not a normal one amongst them." (Cited in Sexuality and the State, Liberty,
1994). In early 1994 a University lecturer distributed literature that linked homosexuality with child abuse and bestiality. (Cited in Sexuality and
the State, Liberty, 1994). "...under no circumstances ought homosexuality to be regarded as anything other than a destructive habit system."
G.P. (British Medical Journal News Review, 19th November 1993, cited in Sexuality and the State, Liberty, 1994). In December 1987 a local
authority Conservative leader stated, after watching a film on safe sex: "The film said how to avoid AIDS, but it did not say specifically stop
being queer. It's disgusting and diabolical. As a cure I would put 90 per cent of them in the ruddy gas chamber. Are we going to keep letting
these queers trade their filth up and down the country?" Wolverhampton Express and Star, "Shoot all gays says councillor", 17th December
1987 (cited in Sexuality and the State, Liberty, 1994). Monday, 10th January 1994, BBC early evening news, Valerie Riches, Family & Youth
Concern, said: "Heterosexual activity, even amongst 16-year-olds, is at least a normal activity. Homosexual activity is not normal, it is
unnatural." Again on the same day, on BBC television, Lord Hailsham said "I think it [homosexuality] is a corrupt and corrupting vice."
Homophobia causes death and violence—hate crimes to show that the aggressor isn’t
actually gay, and suicides
Cozza ‘1 (by Steven Cozza January 1, 2003 Steven Cozza, who co-founded Scouting for All when he was
12, is a Realtor for Frank Howard Allen in Petaluma, Calif. “The Causes and Effects of Homophobia: You
Can Make A Difference” http://www.scoutingforall.org/data/archives/aaic/2003011401.html)
Homophobia is the fear and hatred of homosexuality, homosexuals and of people perceived to be homosexual. Homophobia exists everywhere
and anyone can be homophobic: a priest, family member, doctor, teacher, friend, relative, Boy Scouts of America, celebrity, and even the
President of the United States of America can be homophobic. No
matter how much we want to ignore it, homophobia
exists and it is affecting everyone, not just homosexuals. There are unique contributing factors that attribute to why
people become homophobic even though it is difficult for me to understand, why human beings would choose to be so deliberately hateful
towards a group of people. Mental Health professionals feel that some men feel they need to be homophobic in order to prove their
heterosexuality and masculinity to others. These
people are seen bashing and hassling others they think are gay or
lesbian as a way of showing they aren't gay themselves. Studies have shown that people with homophobic attitudes,
often have same sex attractions themselves. People who start to notice that they are homosexual may go into denial and start to make
Homophobia affects some gay people and causes
them to be in denial about their own sexuality or forces them to mask their homosexuality for the
fear of other homophobic people finding out they are homosexual. It is tragic to know that some people feel they
homophobic remarks in order to hide their own sexual orientation.
have to deny their sexual orientation. The effects of hearing homophobic remarks and hatred towards homosexuals causes them to not like
who they are and hide it by sometimes trying to live a heterosexual lifestyle. Certain groups in our society are influenced more than others into
becoming homophobic. People who grow up with a religious background, (particularly religious fundamentalists and Mormons ), tend to be
more bias towards homosexuals.
Salt Lake City, Utah is one of the most homophobic places on this planet and
that is because of the Mormon influence there.
You cannot be openly homosexual and be in the Mormon Church. If they
find out that you are gay, they will excommunicate you from their church and community. Many religious people not only fear and hate
homosexuals, but they have intolerance to homosexuals. These people strongly believe that the Bible claims that being homosexual is a sin. It
seems as though persons who grow up in areas with greater tolerance, tend to have positive attitudes towards homosexuals. If you are raised
in an open-minded family, you will most likely be open-minded yourself and not homophobic. Youth tend to believe the same way their parents
do, so if your parents are homophobic, most likely you will have the same values. Studies show that people with more education are less likely
to be homophobic.
Ignorance is what breeds homo phobia. People that are uneducated believe every homosexual stereotype out
there, causing them to be homophobic. Some
uneducated homophobic people believe that homosexuals are the ones who
created HIV or that all homosexuals are child molesters; that it is a choice to be homosexual or gay people are
feminine and all lesbians are masculine. If homophobic people were to just take the time to actually meet and get to know who
homosexuals really are, they would learn that they are people just like everyone else. Many Americans were racist towards African Americans
until other Americans protested and educated others. If people were to simply educate themselves there would be much less homophobia. The
AIDS pandemic was a crisis that contributed to more people being homophobic. Those living with AIDS during the AIDS pandemic, faced
homophobia by being discriminated against. In America AIDS hit the homosexual community first. This caused homophobia to develop and
those living with AIDS were rejected. Gay
men were blamed for "causing" AIDS. Gay men, prior to AIDS, were mostly a hidden
community. As a result to the AIDS pandemic many more people became homophobic, some gay men with AIDS were even murdered, family's
that had children with HIV were run out of town and their homes were burned. The AIDS pandemic was definitely another reason why people
became so homophobic. But there is also a flip side to AIDS and homophobia. As people who were not gay began to take care of those gays
who had AIDS they began to see that gay men are just like anyone else. So while the first reaction to AIDS was to stir up hatred and
homophobia as the pandemic continued and people began to know gay men as people the homophobia began to decrease in our society. So
while AIDS brought out the worse in us as a people it also brought out the best in us as a people.
The effects of homophobia on
society can be deadly . Homophobia is a sheer killer and can cause lots of destruction towards
homosexuals. Society's homophobic views of homosexuality leave many gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender youth feeling confused, ashamed, guilty, afraid and alone putting them at a greater risk
for suicide, drugs and alcohol abuse, homelessness, and sexually transmitted diseases. Gay, Lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens are
two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual youth because of homophobia. The leading cause of death for gay youth is
suicide, which can
be attributed to our homophobic, intolerant society. If a youth is kicked out of his or her home for
being homosexual, many resort to suicide. Every time a homosexual hears a homophobic hate word, like faggot, they come that much closer to
killing themselves. The Boy Scouts of America's policy discriminating against gays only encourages hatred towards gays and tells them that what
they are is wrong. It
is homophobia that causes homosexuals to commit suicide, not being gay.
Homophobia escalates into hatred towards homosexual people. Homosexuals are the most frequent
victims of hate crimes in the United States. One such hate crime was against Matthew Shepherd who was a college student in
Wyoming and was beaten to death by two young men because he was gay. Both of those boys were very homophobic and were both parts of
homophobic organizations. One of the killers was an Eagle Scout and the other was a Mormon. Not to blame these organizations for Matthew
Shepherd's death, but since they teach hatred by discriminating against homosexuals they definitely contributed. It all comes down to your
surroundings. I cannot blame some people for being homophobic because of where they live and learn from. I was very fortunate to have two
very open-minded parents who taught me that everyone was created for a reason and that we should all be treated equally no matter what our
differences are. They taught me we as a people are like a rainbow, with many colors. It is that diversity that we should cherish. No matter what
the reasons are for people being homophobic, ignorance can only be an excuse for so long. Someday, I hope for the sake of gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered people, that everyone will be loving and accepting of all the people in the rainbow. But that will never happen
unless you speak out. Make a difference for human rights. We only have a short time on this earth to make a difference to help make the world
a better place. Don't wait any longer. You can help make the rainbow become a reality in all of our lives.
Dehumanization
Homosexuals have long been extirpated by Cuba—homosexuality is seen as
contagious
Murray ’10 (Stephen Murray, Jun 17, 2010 PhD University of Toronto in sociology, Berkeley postdoc in
anthropology “Heteronormative Cuban Sexual Policies: "Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo,
Homosexuality, and AIDS" http://voices.yahoo.com/heteronormative-cuban-sexual-policies-sexualpolitics-6237642.html?cat=75)
Marvin Leiner, now an emeritus professor of education at Queens College (CUNY), and his family lived in Cuba in 1968-69, and revisited the
island periodically since then. In 1978 he published Children are the Revolution, a book on Cuban daycare programs. A democratic socialist in
the I. F. Stone and Michael Harrington tradition, Leiner admires the dramatic and effective extensions of literacy and healthcare to the masses,
while believing that "socialism without democracy is a contradiction... lead[ing] to horrendous abuse of power" (p. xiv). It is as a "friend of the
social revolution" that Leiner criticizes repression of dissent and the ongoing history of persecution of males judged insufficiently masculine
(this is the official and folk Cuban construction of male homosexuality). Women-women relations have not been an official or social concern.
Extirpating male homosexuality, on the other hand, has been an enduring preoccupation of the
regime. Toughening effeminate boys (assigned to "Yellow Brigades") through a variant of aversion therapy began early. "At no time
did social scientists or educators consider homosexuality as anything other than 'feminine' behavior
by males, in accordance with common cultural stereotypes" (p. 34), and reinforced by psychiatric notions of mother dominance. This
model of causation was accompanied by a belief that effeminacy/homosexuality is infectious. This
justified removing effeminate boys from regular schools and barring "homosexuals" from jobs in education, medicine, and the mass media,
where they might "infect" youth with their "incurable disease." With the help of the block-level Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,
those regarded as deviant by their neighbors were forced into "rehabilitation" work camps from 1963 until
1967, when these military-run concentration camps were closed in response to international pressure. The view of male
homosexuality as an "incurable disease," and the eagerness to isolate its carriers where they could
not infect others were recapitulated when HIV was recognized in Cuba: another incurable disease
reactivated the response of massive surveillance and quarantine of those identified as "diseased." In
addition to the equation of gender variance and homosexuality, another tenet of machismo is relevant to the strategy
for dealing with AIDS that Cuba developed. This is the widespread Latino assumption that men will
fuck anything they can any time. Similarly, men who like to get fucked are at least as sexually voracious as those who fuck. That is,
whichever role they take, men can't control their desires. In this widespread view, male sexual compulsivity is part of nature, not amenable to
education, so stopping
sexual transmission requires quarantine of those afflicted with incurable diseases,
even of those macho "good revolutionaries" who volunteered for Cuba's African military adventures. Indeed, the latter had
already demonstrated their masculine incorrigibility by becoming infected by "fraternizing" in Africa (presumptively with African women).
Rather than use the highly developed educational system and the CDR structure to ensure that HIV+ people knew about and practiced safe sex,
Cuban public health officials mandated life sentences to concentration camps ("sanatoria") for healthy HIV+
people (three-quarters of them men, one third of whom are estimated to be "homosexuals"). There are twelve camps, only the model one of
which foreign apologists (including a "60 Minutes" crew) visit. Leiner is well aware that married heterosexuals receive the best treatment in the
camps, and are much more likely than homosexual "degenerates" to be considered "responsible" enough to be furloughed out occasionally.
Ever ready to reinforce cultural prejudices, psychologists administer "objective" tests to assess
maturity (with which homosexuality is prima facie incompatible). Leiner is critical of the Cuban government's enduring
authoritarianism, machismo, heterosexism, and how the latter two have blocked sex education and a
more humane AIDS policy. Although there is less than one would expect from his own long-running observations and interviews,
Leiner marshalls a range of data from published and unpublished sources about official policies. More in sorrow than in anger, he criticizes
Cuban sex education, persecution of homosexuals (and of the effeminate boys regarded as proto-homosexuals), and the lifetime incarceration
of HIV+ persons (which since his book has proved to be too expensive). While ably analyzing cultural roots of sexual politics, Leiner's book gives
practically no sense of what it is like for men or for women to live in Cuba, in or out of its concentration camps.
Heteronormativity dehumanizes those that don’t fit into its social constructs because
there the shame and prejudice pervades the conscious—internal homophobia is a
result of heteronormativity
Williamson ’98 (Iain R. Williamson School of Behavioural Studies, Nene University College
Northampton, Park Campus, Boughton Green Road, Northampton September 17, 1998. “Internalized
homophobia and health issues affecting lesbians and gay men”
http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/1/97.full)
This paper investigates the concept of internalized homophobia in both theory and research relating to lesbian and gay health. It offers a
contemporary and critical review of research in this area, and discusses a range of recent findings relating to a range of health issues including
HIV and AIDS. Whilst the concept has a resonance for gay men and lesbians, and is widely used in `lesbian and gay-affirmative' interventions,
the paper demonstrates that research findings have been equivocal and
the term is often used without full consideration
of its sociopolitical consequences. The paper concludes that the concept does have a valuable role to play in health promotion
work with lesbians and gay men but invites further discussion and examination of the construct. Introductory remarks This paper aims to
present both an overview and critical evaluation of the usefulness of the concept of internalized homophobia1 in explaining health difficulties
affecting lesbians and gay men. It has been argued by a variety of lesbian and gay social scientists that internalized homophobia has a central
role as a predisposing and perpetuating factor in various aspects of ill-health, and may affect both the progression of illness and health-related
decision-making processes with significant effect on the prevention of illnesses such as HIV infection. However, a number of theorists have
argued that internalized homophobia
is both frequently used uncritically with regard to its conceptualization
and operationalization, and without due concern for its sociopolitical consequences (i.e. to repathologize the
`sick' lesbian or gay individual and focus attention away from the more salient issues of cultural and institutionalized heterosexism). My aim is
to provide a synthesis which examines research suggesting an important relationship between health and internalized homophobia whilst
deconstructing the concept and offering a discussion of the potential effects on gay and lesbian communities in contemporary British society.
Previous Section Next Section Defining anti-gay and lesbian prejudice and its internalization There has been considerable discussion within
lesbian and gay academic circles about how best to conceptualize the nature of anti-gay and lesbian prejudice. Whilst the term `homophobia'2
is most widely used within British society, there appears to be a consensus amongst queer3 academics that the term is in many ways unhelpful
and inaccurate for a variety of reasons. These
include the emphasis on the affective (fear) component of
prejudice at the expense of anti-gay and lesbian cognitions, and the contextualization of prejudice within the individual
rather than in society and its structures.4 Alternatives that have been suggested include `homonegativism' (Hudson and Ricketts, 1980), which
is a multidimensional construct that focuses more clearly on the belief and value systems of prejudiced individuals, and `heterosexism', which
now features widely in gay and lesbian literature, and refers to an underlying belief that heterosexuality
is the
natural/normal/acceptable or superior form of sexuality. In common with research into other forms of prejudice,5 many
individuals within lesbian and gay communities may internalize significant aspects of the prejudice experienced within a heterosexist society.
This process is consistent with Allport's (Allport, 1954) theory of `traits due to victimization'. He
argues that stigmatized
individuals engage in defensive reactions as a result of the prejudice they experience. These mechanisms
may be extroverted, including exaggerated and obsessive concern with the stigmatizing characteristic, and/or introverted, which include selfdenigration and identification with the aggressor. The second of these mechanisms equates more readily with contemporary understandings of
internalized homophobia. Many writers believe that this is a normative or inevitable consequence because all children are exposed to
heterosexist norms, and research suggests
that most gay men and lesbians adopt negative attitudes towards
(their) homosexuality early in their developmental histories (Isay, 1989; Davies, 1996). Despite the wide-scale
ambivalence of academics and gay-affirmative psychotherapists regarding the term `homophobia', the concept of `internalized homophobia' is
widely cited in most writings on the subject—perhaps because this is more easily understood by clients within the therapeutic milieu.6 A
number of definitions of internalized homophobia have been suggested. Meyer and Dean [(Meyer and Dean, 1998), p. 161] offer `the gay
person's direction of negative social attitudes toward the self, leading to a devaluation of the self and resultant internal conflicts and poor selfregard'. Whilst Locke [(Locke, 1998), p. 202] suggests `the self-hatred that occurs as a result of being a socially stigmatized person'. Plumer
[(Plumer, 1996), p. 89] also highlights the impact of stigma upon an evolving identity: `The awareness of stigma that surrounds homosexuality
leads the experience to become an extremely negative one; shame
and secrecy, silence and self-awareness, a strong
sense of differentness—and of peculiarity—pervades the consciousness'. The term has become widely used within
lesbian and gay studies, especially within gay-affirmative psychotherapeutic models which understandably typically place the concept at the
centre of explanations and interventions around mental health issues faced by lesbians and gay men. As a concept the idea of internalized
homophobia strikes a chord within almost all gay men and lesbians, and a number of contemporary pieces of qualitative research provide
evidence of consistent and coherent narratives of the phenomenon (Stokes and Peterson, 1998). Participants in Cody and Welch's ethnographic
study of rural gay men frequently talked of having experienced intense feelings of shame and guilt. One participant had believed `I was the
embodiment of all those nasty things that have been said about gay people' [(Cody and Welch, 1997), p. 60]. However, internalized
homophobia has not proven to be such an easy concept to validate and operationalize as an acceptable theoretical and research-orientated
concept, particularly for larger scale quantitatively oriented investigations. Wagner et al. [(Wagner et al., 1994), pp. 91–92] also discuss the lack
of precision and reliability which has often accompanied research in this area. `Internalized homophobia as a psychological phenomenon has
attracted little systematic research despite its destructive impact on the mental health of the gay community... As a result little is known about
what predicts or precludes internalised homophobia.' Previous Section Next Section Validating and measuring internalized homophobia As
Shidlo argues in his seminal article on conceptual and empirical issues in measuring internalized homophobia [(Shildo, 1994), p.176], `the
construct...can serve as a central organizing concept for a gay and lesbian affirmative psychology'. He
suggests a number of major reasons for the significance of the construct which include the role played
by internalized homophobia in psychological distress in lesbians and gay men, and the internalization
of anti-gay and lesbian prejudice as a developmental event which is essential to understanding
models of developing lesbian and gay identities. Internalized homophobia, he argues [(Shildo, 1994), p. 177], `can be a
heuristic construct that organizes factors unique to lesbians and gay men in the areas of development, psychopathology, psychotherapy, and
prevention'. Shidlo also argues that the generation of psychometrically efficient scales to measure levels of internalized homophobia are of use
in examining the extent (and domains) of internalized prejudice, and therefore potentially assessing risk to the individual and evaluating the
success of therapeutic or preventive interventions. Few lesbian and gay academics, therapists or health professionals would dispute the
importance of internalized homophobia. Indeed a number of valuable and sophisticated models exist which coherently outline the mechanisms
and potential consequences of the internalization of anti-lesbian and gay oppression [e.g. (Bremner and Hillin, 1993)]. However, if approached
from a more hard-nosed, empirical-based perspective, the conceptualization and operationalization of internalized homonegativity is less
satisfactory. Traditionally, internalized homophobia was equated with an ego-dystonic7 form of being lesbian or gay and research typically
included only one or two items allowing participants to express their degree of satisfaction regarding their sexuality. A number of more
sophisticated models have been produced during the last 25 years. The two most widely cited in research are those by Martin and Dean (Martin
and Dean, 1987) who developed a nine-item scale for gay male participants based on the criteria for ego-dystonic homosexuality when it was
last included in the APA's DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) and Nungesser's (Nungesser, 1983) scale. The Nungesser
Homosexuality Attitudes Instrument (NHAI) is lengthier, and comprises three subscales which are attitudes towards one own's sexuality,
attitudes towards homosexuality per se and a disclosure scale which measures degree of comfort with others knowing one's gay or lesbian
sexuality. Shidlo (Shildo, 1994) has revised the NHAI, removing or changing the least valid or most ambiguous items and adding a number of
new items to one of the existing scales. He also suggests an optional extra 15-item subscale which measures internalized homonegativity in
relation to issues around HIV and AIDS. Wagner et al. (Wagner et al., 1994) also combined nine items from the NHAI with 11 new ones to form
their Internalized Homophobia Scale. The NHAI has been shown to demonstrate convergent validity with Martin and Dean's scale (0.59, N =
159, P < 0.01) in a study by Sbordone (Sbordone, 1993) using a sample of gay fathers. Furthermore, research by Shidlo (Shidlo, 1987) using a
sample of 59 found significant relationships with measures of a range of related concepts including self-esteem (–0.59, P < 0.01), depression
(0.37, P < 0.01), stability of self (–0.35, P < 0.01) and loneliness (0.62, P < 0.001).8 However, recent research using Shidlo's modified version of
the NHAI and Rosenberg's widely used Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) with a community sample of British gay men found no relationship
between the two sets of scores (–0.05, N = 127, P = non-significant) (Williamson, 1999). This study also found mixed results for the internal
reliability of the three subscales of the test. Attitudes towards one's own sexuality and disclosure subscales produced significant Cronbach α
values of 0.68 and 0.76, respectively, but the measure of attitudes towards homosexuality generated an α score of only 0.07. Further analysis of
responses to items on this subscale may identify certain `rogue' items which could be removed although such inconsistencies may to an extent
accurately represent some of the ambivalence and inconsistencies experienced by some lesbian and gay individuals, perhaps particularly as
they `work through' their internalized homophobia. A more recent scale to measure internalized homophobia amongst gay men has been
developed by Ross and Rosser (Ross and Rosser, 1996), and suggests four dimensions to the construct: public identification as being gay,
perception of stigma associated with being gay, degree of `social comfort' with other gay men and beliefs regarding the religious or moral
acceptability of homosexuality. Ross and Rosser (Ross and Rosser, 1996) report a series of significant associations for male participants between
scores on the scale and a variety of other measures potentially relating to a healthy adjustment to a gay identity. These include affiliation to gay
community groups, relationship satisfaction and duration, and disclosure in personal and work lives. The predictive validity of the public
identification and social comfort subscales appears to be considerably stronger than for the other two. Overall this scale looks promising, but
clearly needs further rigorous testing with regard to demonstrating psychometric credibility more fully. Perhaps partly because research with
lesbians has more typically adopted a feminist/qualitative paradigm, there appears to be no scales which have been developed for and widely
used with female participants. Generally, scales have been validated on and typically include items which are directed towards the experience
of urbanized, White gay men and may not adequately reflect heterogeneous experiences of being gay or lesbian. Furthermore, establishing
such measures and operationalizing internalized homophobia has proved difficult because of the considerable overlap with other relevant
concepts (e.g. other aspects of self-esteem), and traditionally a lack of clear differentiation between internalized homophobia itself and certain
intrapsychic or behavioural consequences (e.g. intimacy difficulties, depression, etc.). There is no clear consensus over the most salient aspects
of homophobia and there may also be problems with scales which suggest that discomfort regarding disclosure is a valid measure of
internalized homophobia. Whilst `coming out' is arguably the most salient and powerful process of developing a well integrated lesbian or gay
identity,9 and a valid indicator of reduced internalized homophobia, considerable literature documents the hostile environment within which
many individuals disclose, and the continued prevalence of anti-lesbian and gay violence and victimization. (Herek and Berrill, 1992). In such
circumstances choosing not to come out may to an extent represent an adaptive process. This is especially true for those in isolated areas
where there is little or no lesbian and gay-affirmative social infrastructure and for those within highly homophobic families and communities. It
would therefore appear that whilst these scales are clearly of potential interest and value to health and clinical psychologists, it remains highly
questionable to what extent any of the scales can be considered sufficiently psychometrically robust and universally applicable for unqualified
endorsement. Nonetheless, the development of such scales allows for the measurement of internalized homophobia, and it becomes possible
for social scientists to carry out quantitative analysis to add to the qualitative dimensions of assessing its role in explaining and preventing
health difficulties. Internalized homophobia as `minority stress' A recent development in this area has been to conceptualize internalized
homophobia as a component of minority stress. Following from the work of Brooks (Brooks, 1981) which conceptualizes minority stress as a
psychosocial stress that is derived from membership of a low status minority group, studies by Meyer (Meyer, 1995) with gay men and
DiPlacido (DiPlacido, 1998) with lesbians have found this to be a useful paradigm for the study of internalized homophobia and its relation to
aspects of ill-health. In a detailed and articulate account, Meyer (Meyer, 1995) develops the conceptualization of minority stress within a social
stress discourse, and drawing on aspects of conflict and societal reaction theories and social comparison and symbolic interactionist processes.
He argues, `minority
stress arises not only from negative events but from the totality of the minority
person's experience in dominant society. At the centre of this experience is the incongruence between the minority person's
culture, needs, and experience, and societal structures' [(Meyer, 1995), p. 35]. In Meyer's model, internalized homophobia represents one
(although the `most insidious') of three aspects of minority stress and was operationalized through use of the Martin and Dean scale described
above. The other dimensions of minority stress are perceived stigma and the experience of what he calls `prejudice events'. Meyer argues that
each of these three aspects significantly impact upon psychological adjustment, but there is also an interaction which compounds what he calls
the `psychologically-injurious effects'. Meyer provides evidence for his theory with a large-scale study of 741 gay men in New York recruited
through a combination of network and snowball sampling techniques.10 Using multiple regression analysis and controlling for potential
confounding variables, Meyer found a significant relationship between internalized homophobia and five measures of psychological distress.
These were demoralization, guilt, sex difficulties, suicide (ideation and/or behaviour) and AIDSrelated traumatic stress response . The later includes measures of a range of symptoms of distress relating to effects of the
impact of AIDS on the gay community, and
includes items on daily functioning, preoccupation and nightmares.
Meyer found that whilst both stigma and experience of prejudice events were also significantly related to most of the measures of distress,
internalized homophobia was reliably the most powerful predictor. DiPlacido's research on minority stress also emphasizes the role of
internalized homophobia but her ongoing research is in many ways rather different to that of Meyer.11 The study involves a smaller sample of
lesbians with a significant number (41%) describing themselves as `at least halfway or more in the closet'. Again,
a significant
relationship is reported between internalized homophobia (measured using the NHAI) and salient aspects of
psychological functioning, e.g. positive correlations were found with negative affect and alcohol consumption. Depression also
significantly correlated with the disclosure subscale of the NHAI. It will only be possible to provide a detailed analysis when the survey results
are completed. (DiPlacido aims to provide data from a more heterogeneous sample of 500 lesbians within the New York area.) From a minority
stress perspective, lesbians are seen to experience a dual (or multiple for lesbians from minority ethnic groups) stigmatization (i.e. as women
and as homosexuals) with potentially greater effects of internalized oppression. It is also important to consider the significant role of HIV and
AIDS with regard to contemporary discourse around gay sexuality, and how this may have served to reinforce lesbian invisibility and trivialize
lesbian health issues.12 With regard to internalized homophobia, most recent research has investigated its potential role at various stages of
gay men's health experiences and behaviours, particularly those relating to HIV and AIDS. Previous Section Next Section Internalized
homophobia and HIV Considerable amounts of research have investigated the role of internalized homophobia within HIV processes. These can
largely be reduced into three areas—HIV prevention and safer sex decision-making processes, coping strategies of seropositive gay men, and
whether internalized homophobia has any effect upon viral progression. A relationship between internalized homophobia and riskier sexual
acts seems logical for a number of reasons. Homonegative gay
men are likely to be less affiliated with the gay
community and may therefore have less access to safer sex information and resources. Furthermore,
homonegativity correlates with lower self-esteem which may undermine the individual's desire to
keep themselves safe. Finally, some studies have suggested that greater levels of homonegativity may be related to greater substance
use and alcohol consumption (e.g. Finnegan and Cook, 1984, Glaus, 1988; Meyer and Dean, 1995) which may impair decision-making processes.
Despite widespread knowledge about the risks of HIV transmission, especially through unprotected receptive anal intercourse with multiple
partners, rates of anal sex without condoms remain surprisingly high. Davies et al. (Davies et al., 1993) asked participants who enjoyed
receptive anal sex to explain why. A small group of respondents explained that it helped reaffirm their gay identity. It is possible that this may
apply to a greater extent to homonegative gay men who's sexual identity may be more fragile. In another qualitative study, Gold et al. (Gold et
al., 1994) found that escapism is another motivating factor for engaging in (unprotected) anal intercourse. It may be that homonegative gay
men feel a greater need for escapism than ego-syntonic13 gay men. Interestingly, despite a range of potential theoretical explanations for a
relationship between internalized homophobia and reduced condom usage, correlations in studies have typically been weak or inconsistent
(Sandfort, 1995). Kippax et al. (Kippax et al., 1993) in their study of 535 Australian gay men found that two measures of gay community
attachment (social engagement with other gay men and gay community involvement) were predictors of engaging in safer sex practices. Shidlo
(Shidlo, 1994) found no relationship between internalized homophobia and engaging in anal sex without condoms, whilst Meyer and Dean
(Meyer and Dean, 1995) found a small subgroup of gay men (6%) who appeared to be qualitatively different from their rest of the sample and
who reported very high levels of internalized homophobia, substance use and participation in high-risk acts. A relationship between the two
variables may not affect all gay men equally, but caution should be exercised before it is concluded that no relationship exists between
homonegativity and high-risk sex. As Meyer and Dean (Meyer and Dean, 1998) suggest, other variables such as sexual difficulties and intimacy
issues may interact with these processes. Furthermore, sampling techniques used in studies like these are likely to use gay-affirmative
networks, commercial venues and community centres, and are most unlikely to recruit reasonable numbers of more closeted gay men who feel
alienated from organized gay communities. Other research has looked into seropositive men and how internalized homophobia might impact
upon the selection and success of coping strategies. Nicholson and Long (Nicholson and Long, 1990) in a study of 89 seropositive gay men
correlated scores on the NHAI and a modified version of Folkman et al.'s Ways of Coping Scale (Folkman et al., 1986). High homonegativity was
significantly related to avoidant coping strategies such as resignation or denial, whilst low negativity predicted proactive or active-behavioural
coping strategies such as problem solving and resource seeking. As part of a longitudinal study in New York State, Wagner et al. (Wagner et al.,
1996) asked a sample of gay men to fill in a battery of instruments including a modified version of NHAI, Lazarus and Folkman's (Lazarus and
Folkman, 1984) version of the Ways of Coping scale and a number of measures of psychological distress. Participants14 completed these scales
twice at the beginning and end of a 2-year period with a baseline sample of 142 and a follow-up sample of 97.15 Internalized homophobia
significantly correlated with all measures of self-reported distress (including anxiety, depression and demoralization) at both baseline and
follow-up. However, more detailed analyses demonstrated that a significant correlation between baseline internalized homophobia and followup distress was only found amongst asymptomatic seropositive participants. Results regarding homophobia and coping style were not as clear
as anticipated. `Correlations were weak and inconsistent and internalized homophobia did not predict either avoidant or proactive coping in
regression analyses' [(Wagner et al., 1996), p. 103]. Wagner et al.'s study also tested whether there was a relationship between internalized
homophobia and illness stage and progression. A number of theorists have suggested that notification of seropositive status or AIDS diagnosis
may trigger a re-emergence of feelings of residual homonegativity, especially in gay men who are AIDS-phobic or demonstrate ego-dystonic gay
sexuality (Ross and Rosser, 1996). Equally, it might be anticipated that internalized homophobia and related feelings of distress could impact
upon physiological measures of immunosupression such as CD4 cell count. Neither of these hypotheses could be supported although it was
noted that the sample used was significantly skewed with participants typically demonstrating high levels of resilience and low levels of
homonegativity. This again draws attention to the difficulty of recruiting truly representative samples for health-related research with gay men
(and lesbians) (Harry, 1986; Sell and Petrulio, 1996). Research involving HIV and AIDS represents the largest body of knowledge for testing the
relationship between conceptualizations and measures of internalized homophobia and illness. The research produced has had rather mixed
results, suggesting that the concept may have some empirical value and predictive validity, but the relatively poor levels of reliability and
replicability in studies, even allowing for difficulties with sampling strategies, should advise caution in those employing the construct in their
research. Previous Section Next Section Internalized homophobia and other health issues Some of the potential effects of internalized
homophobia upon affect and psychological adjustment generally have been presented above. A number of other studies have also suggested
that internalized homophobia may be a valid antecedent of a range of psychological problems. One
area that has attracted
particular interest is that of self-injurious behaviours including substance abuse, eating disorders, self
mutilation and suicidality. A number of studies have shown the increased vulnerability of young lesbians and gay
men to suicide generally (Remafedi et al., 1991), and research by Rofes (Rofes, 1983) amongst others suggests that internalized
homonegativity may explain differences within lesbian and gay communities. Hammelman (Hammelman, 1993) found that young lesbians and
gay men were at greater risk of attempted suicide if they discovered their same sex preference early in adolescence, experienced negative
`coming out' reactions from significant others, experienced sexuality-orientated victimization, and used drugs and alcohol to cope with
problems relating to their lesbian or gay identity. All of these findings are consistent with an internalized homophobia hypothesis. Teenagers
who discover and disclose their sexuality earlier may be more isolated, cognitively embedded within heterosexist norms and values, and have
less access to gay-affirmative organizations (e.g. at college, etc.) and individuals. Gonsiorek and Rudolph (Gonsiorek and Rudolph, 1991) refer to
a narcissistic injury which is the significant blow to self-esteem that occurs when the individual is rejected through disclosing significant,
personal information such as disclosing a lesbian or gay identity. Younger adolescents may be particularly vulnerable because they have less
developed coping strategies and fewer coping resources—particularly given the overtly heterosexist culture of most secondary schools.16 It
may also be that significant others (particularly parents, teachers) are more likely to trivialize or dismiss younger adolescents same-sex
attractions. In Hammelman's study most of the participants problematized their sexuality and related behaviours. For example, 59% of those
who disclosed a substance abuse problem directly attributed it to coping with their sexuality. Research strongly indicates that alcohol and other
substance abuse is another predictor of youth suicide, and there may be a powerful interaction which makes a proportion of lesbian and gay
youth particularly vulnerable to suicide ideation and behaviours. Research also suggests that internalized homophobia
may also
be associated with more chronic forms of self-harm. Studies on alcoholism and substance abuse have already been
mentioned. Research on gay men has indicated a strong relationship between measures of ego-dystonic gay sexuality and the NHAI with a
number of measures of eating disturbance including the Eating Attitudes Test (Garner and Garfinkel, 1979) and Garner's (Garner, 1991) Eating
Disorders Inventory #2 (Williamson and Hartley, 1998; Williamson, 1999). The relationship appears to be strongest with measures of bulimia
and this may be consistent with a desire to punish the body for its same-sex urges. In America, work by Brown (Brown, 1987) has pointed to
similar correlations amongst lesbian women. Internalized homophobia may also affect health indirectly—especially when operating below
consciousness. Work by Margolies et al. (Margolies et al., 1987) and Malyon (Malyon, 1982) suggest that internalized homophobia may affect
intra-psychic functioning by generating various defence mechanisms. These may project themselves through difficulties with intimacy,
commitment or other aspects of relationships. For example, a study by Rosser et al. (Rosser et al., 1997) reports significantly lower levels of
sexual satisfaction in high scoring homonegative gay participants compared to low scorers. Equally, homonegativity
may lead to
the development of self-defeating personality traits which reflect internal representations of the
stereotypical dysfunctional homosexual. These `secondary and tertiary adaptations' as Malyon labels them may have a
profound impact upon the mental health of the individual and any interventions would need to be within a gay-affirmative therapeutic
paradigm. Previous Section Next Section Internalized homophobia—balancing
the `personal' and the `political' Despite the
widespread acceptance of internalized homophobia as a valid concept within lesbian and gay health and social scientific arenas, there are a
number of concerns around an undiscriminating acceptance of the term as a research-orientated and theoretical paradigm. In addition to the
conceptual and methodological difficulties raised earlier in this paper, there are also significant implications for lesbian and gay communities if
we choose to explain and conceptualize health difficulties in this way. Kitzinger (Kitzinger, 1996, 1997) raises a number of objections to the
concept of internalized homophobia. These include its emphasis on individual pathology rather than on institutional oppression. The danger of
using terms like internalized homophobia or homonegativity is that being gay or lesbian is implicitly represented in pathological terms. `Instead
of going to heterosexual therapists to be cured of our homosexuality, now lesbians and gay men are supposed to seek out lesbian and gay
therapists to be cured of internalized homophobia' [(Kitzinger, 1997), p. 211]. The concept suggests weakness rather than the resilience
demonstrated by lesbians and gay men, and keeps the focus away from the structures of inequality and oppression.17 In addressing
internalized homophobia rather than institutionalized and cultural heterosexism, lesbian and gay academics are in many ways `buying into' the
individualistic and positivist-empiricist biases of mainstream psychology which continues to denigrate and pathologize the voices, identities and
experiences of lesbians and gay men. However, it must be noted that many lesbians and gay men do benefit from the gay-affirmative
therapeutic interventions of lesbian and gay therapists which typically explicitly address internalized homophobia, and there is a considerable
body of evidence linking homonegativity and pathology. It may well be that as queer academics we are persuaded by the dangers of current
conceptualizations of internalized homophobia in a socio-political sense, but also recognize a need to address the problems of lesbians and gay
men in a health milieu. This must involve addressing issues as clients see them and using language that they can identify with.
need to achieve a balance between the personal and political,
There is a
and it is incumbent on lesbian and gay social scientists
to be especially sensitive to and critical of the concepts we use and their consequences, particularly where there is potential for reinforcing
oppressive, heterosexist structures. Furthermore there is a clear need to balance interventions on an individual basis with more collective social
action. There is clearly a need in most countries for specific legislation which addresses the civil rights of lesbian and gay peoples, and which
addresses `hate crimes' specifically. In Britain, the repeal of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which prohibits the `intentional
promotion of homosexuality' in Local Education Authority run schools, is essential for teachers and school counsellors to feel free to fully
support lesbian and gay students without fear of sanction. Whilst
cultural and institutional heterosexism remain
largely unchallenged, it is difficult to provide nurturing and supportive environments for all lesbian
and gay people, and particularly those who are particularly anxious, distressed or confused about
their sexual identities. Fortunately, there does appear to be an increase in the social/support infrastructure available to (particularly
younger) lesbians and gay men in many areas. Cody and Welch's study (Cody and Welch, 1997) demonstrated the importance of social and
community groups in working through issues around internalized homophobia and constructing `families of choice'. One participant in the
study states; `The support group helped me to feel better about being gay...being happy and gay is not an oxymoron. You can have both' [(Cody
and Welch, 1997), p. 62]. Interestingly a sense of community was achieved by men in this study through groups, friendship networks and
particular partners rather than through participation in the commercial gay `scene' in neighbouring towns and cities. This may be particularly
valid for women for whom there is often a dearth of commercial venues which are not (gay) male dominated. Such groups appear to often play
a vital role in providing accurate information, discussing salient issues and working on skills (e.g. assertiveness, negotiating safer sex, etc.) and
strategies both formally and informally within a safe and explicitly gay-affirmative environment. Previous Section Next Section Concluding
remarks This paper has aimed to provide a wide-ranging discussion of the role of internalized homophobia with health-related problems
amongst lesbians and gay men. I have provided evidence that suggests that homonegativity merits consideration as a predisposing and
perpetuating factor in many aspects of ill-health. As a concept, it may help to identify particularly vulnerable and at risk individuals, and should
be considered in health education and disease prevention models. Internalized homophobia may relate to coping strategies and a willingness to
access certain coping resources. There is as yet no clear evidence that homophobia impacts directly on the progression of illnesses, although it
may interact with other factors (e.g. coping strategies) to produce important health-related consequences. I hope that the paper has reemphasized the need for gay-affirmative models of health care and intervention. Whilst there is a valid explanatory role for internalized
homophobia, there remains a number of integral inadequacies and inconsistencies in how the concept is defined and operationalized, and
there is a significant need to refine the concept and improve the way that it is assessed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore,
there is also a need to be aware of the potentially harmful role of using the concept imprudently in terms of feeding into heterosexist
pathological models and in underestimating both the heterogeneity and resilience of lesbian and gay communities. At worst, internalized
homophobia represents a catch-all pseudo-explanation which colludes with anti-gay and lesbian models of ill-health. As social scientists and
health professionals, we need to ensure that this does not happen but rather that the concept is used judiciously and helps to further develop
models which validate the experiences of lesbians and gay men and provide adequate interventions to health problems.
Silencing
Cuban Journalist and gay rights activist silenced in her country- spreading the word
key
Cogswell 13 (Kelly Cogswell, Lesbian activist, independent journalist, and award-winning columnist,
4/2/13, Gay City News, “Queer Citizens in Cuba's Shadow,” Huff Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-cogswell/queer-democracy-in-cubas-_b_2941487.html)kw
If I sound all corny about it, it's because a couple days before I'd been to an event at NYU featuring
Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez who was finally allowed to leave the country after ten years of requests.
She's continually defamed by the Cuban government, physically harassed, spied on in her home, even
tossed in jail occasionally. But she counts herself lucky because other journalists are locked up for
good, or have convenient car accidents merely for wishing to speak, to participate in the life of their
country. And for thinking everyone else should have the chance, too. In that island of silence and the
meaningful ellipse, blogging is not an innocuous pastime. The government has done its best to restrict
internet usage (fewer than 10 percent have access, less than Haiti), and even skew Cuba's image online
by bombarding the web with their own propaganda. In 2011, the Economist quoted one official as
saying, "They have their bloggers and we have our bloggers," he says. "We will fight to see who is
stronger." One of the combatants on the regime's side was Eliécer Ávila (video in Spanish) who has
begun to talk openly about his work leading The Technology and Politics Surveillance Project of
"Operation Truth." He worked with hundreds of other computer science students to create the illusion
of support for the regime by constructing fake sites, fake links, likes and dislikes, their own fake bloggers
to drown out the opposition with a screen of white noise. But they're doomed and they know it, like a
glass any soprano can shatter. Just look at how loudmouthed queers changed the U.S. from a place
where we were pariahs regularly rousted and arrested, into this amazing political force. Gradually, we
won the tools of democracy -- the rights to speak, to assemble, demonstrate, write, think, create,
agitate, organize. Now we participate as equals (nearly). We sit in Mason Hall and hold the candidates
to account. All of them wanting our votes, our support. Our money. I hear some of you sneering that
the system's not perfect, pointing out its failures. But so what? It's a fucking miracle it works at all,
considering how humans are, either apathetic or with an overwhelming impulse to power. Cops
everywhere get away with whatever they can. Politicians, even the best, believe the rules don't quite
apply to them. Ordinary people abdicate their citizenship, often sit there like frogs in the pot as water
gradually heats up.
Many still discriminated and censored- drag shows hidden and cops paid off
Hayes 11 (Mathew Hayes, professor of journalism and communication studies at Concordia University
in Montreal, 30 April 2011, “Glimpses of queer Cuba,” http://babaksalari.com/blog/?p=286)kw
Salari says he saw a divide in the Cuban queer community. He perceives that life is much easier for
gays if they’re part of the intelligentsia. A number of artists, writers and intellectuals work quite
openly there as queer people, though there are still obvious restrictions in terms of government
censorship . “I know a theater director there, who works frequently, and everyone goes to see his
shows. Everyone knows he’s gay, it’s not an issue for him. He gets respect. As well, I know a lesbian
artist who explores her sexuality in her work. But if you’re a sex worker, it’s a different story. I wanted
to bring both of these worlds together in the photographs.” Salari managed to get this series of photos
exhibited in Havana, at a gallery. He says it was well received but, not surprisingly, there was little or no
press coverage around it. While a number of gay Cubans have emigrated to Canada, Salari says things
are changing there. “Since 2001, I sense a shift in attitudes there. I think things have opened up a bit.”
He also argues that Cuban culture itself is unique in the Latino world: “Cuban culture is a mix of Latino,
African and a revolutionary culture. It really is quite different from, say, Mexican culture.” This, he
says, makes it an especially rich place for an artist to explore. Salari also says that Cuban drag culture is
also quite vibrant—if underground. “Drag shows are held privately, but are big—as many as 500
people will show up. The police know about them, of course, but they’re kept quiet .” Salari was
especially happy about one transsexual he convinced to participate. “She was quite discreet about it, but
I managed to get her to open up and we developed a friendship. I invited her to the show in Havana. She
blossomed as being a part of the show. She opened up, talking about how difficult it was for her to come
out, to go through the process of being herself. This was one of the best stories to come out of the
book.”
Iran Scenario
Parallels to homophobic Iranian culture- connections must start small
Hayes 11 (Mathew Hayes, professor of journalism and communication studies at Concordia University
in Montreal, 30 April 2011, “Glimpses of queer Cuba,” http://babaksalari.com/blog/?p=286)kw
Babak Salari says that the more time he spent in Cuba, the more powerful the connection felt. Salari, a
Montreal-based photographer, began to travel to Cuba over seven years ago, both for pleasure and to
capture images. But as his research grew, Salari, an Iranian-born refugee who fled the country in 1982,
could intuit the strong connection between Cuban and Iranian cultures. “Iranian culture is a
homophobic one,” says the 48-year-old. “The president there denies everything. I felt very personally
connected to the culture in Cuba. This subculture is largely one you don’t see in Cuba. I felt this very
strong parallel between the two communities.” Thus Salari became more and more drawn in by his
subjects, almost 100 of which are printed in his new book, Faces, Bodies, Personas: Tracing Cuban
Stories (Janet 45 Press, $30). With a powerful forthrightness and simplicity, Salari captures the lives of
gays, lesbians and the transgendered in Cuba. Cast in stunning black and white, the images are clearly
empowering for the subjects, presented without any hint of apology. Salari, an experienced
photographer who has also documented the lives of Afghans, indicates a respect for his subjects that
makes his photos feel less voyeuristic and more celebratory as a result. And he does what outstanding
photographers can do, when faced with the lives of the marginalized: he makes that which has been
rendered invisible visible. “When I first went there, I was familiar with the politics of the Cuban
government,” he recalls. “But I was not so familiar with the gay community there. My information was
really very limited—I had seen Before Night Falls [the 2000 film about a gay artist who flees Cuba] but
not much more than that.” But as Salari spent more time there, he would meet up with one or two gay
Cubans, and this would prove a crucial starting point to his introduction to the entire community.
From there, he would be introduced to more queer Cubans and would gain trust, allowing for his
photography to begin.
Iranian persecution of queerness leads to discrimination, torture, and death under
Iranian law
Dehghan 12 (Saeed Kamali Dehghan, MA in International Journalism, 17 May 2012, “Iran's
persecution of gay community revealed,” The Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/17/iran-persecution-gay-community-revealed)kw
The lifestyles of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iran are comprehensively and
systematically denied by the Islamic regime, which exposes them to horrific punishment, bullying and
risk of suicide, a study has found. The first detailed report on Iran's LGBT community has found that its
members live under social and state repression, with some being persecuted, forced into exile or even
sentenced to death. The study was conducted by Small Media, a non-profit group based in London.
Researchers led by Bronwen Robertson, director of operations, gathered first-hand testimonies from
hundreds of LGBT Iranians using face to face interviews or through a secret online forum. "The
bastions of the Islamic Republic of Iran fully realise that an established (albeit secretive) LGBT
community exists beneath the folds of fundamentalism in [the country]," says the report. "[But]
figuratively speaking, the Iranian government is doing its utmost to sweep the community under a
densely woven Persian rug." In a speech at Columbia University in New York in 2007, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like you do in your country … In
Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you that we have!" Yet
homosexuality is punishable by death, according to fatwas issued by almost all Iranian clerics. Until
recently, lavat (sodomy for men) was a capital offence for all individuals involved in consensual sexual
intercourse. But under amendments to the penal code, the person who played an "active role" will be
flogged 100 times if the sex was consensual and he was not married, while the one who played a
"passive role" can still be put to death regardless of his marriage status. Punishment for mosahegheh
(lesbianism) is 100 lashes for all individuals involved but it can lead to the death penalty if the act is
repeated four times. Among the testimonies gathered by Robertson and her team was that of a 27year-old gay man from Qazvin in the north-west of Iran. He said: "It's very hard to live as a homosexual
in this country. Is it me or is it the culture, society, history or all of them? Loneliness is killing me."
Another said: "If I said I saw myself as being part of this society, I'd be telling the biggest lie of my life. I
don't see myself as part of this society at all." In September last year, three men from the southwestern city of Ahvaz, the capital of Iran's Khuzestan province, were reported to have been executed
after being found guilty of charges related to homosexuality. This week, there were unconfirmed
reports of four men, identified as Saadat Arefi, Vahid Akbari, Javid Akbari and Houshmand Akbari, from
Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, being sentenced to death for sodomy. Transsexuality was
legalised in Iran in 1987. Yet the report warns that, despite state support for sex-change operations,
"the social stigma attached to transsexualism is unwavering and transphobic abuse remains
prevalent". It goes on: "Still very much ostracised, transsexual Iranians do not enjoy a privileged
status in society." LGBT Iranians have also fallen victim to the confusion within the Iranian society in
regards to differences between being a homosexual and transsexual. Parents have forced their
homosexual children to have sex-change operations, local psychologists and psychiatrists who still
deem homosexuality as a mental illness have prescribed cures. This also exists within the regime with
officials often confusing consensual intercourse with rape. In cases when an execution involving
sodomy charges is reported, it's difficult to find out whether the convicts were engaged in consensual
sex or whether it's been a rape issue. One of the contradictions surrounding LGBT life in Iran, is that
homosexuals are granted military exemption on the basis that they are mentally ill which will prevent
them from doing official work. The report acknowledges that decriminalisation of homosexuality would
not necessarily mean an end to LGBT discrimination. "LGBT issues are particularly taboo and are
seldom discussed in Iran's public sphere," it said. "Even if Iran decriminalised homosexuality, it could
take decades for it to become socially acceptable in the Islamic Republic of Iran." As the result, many
LGBT members in the country feel excluded from the society. "If I said I saw myself as being part of this
society, I'd be telling the biggest lie of my life," said a 26-year-old Iranian gay man. "I don't see myself as
part of this society at all. That's because of my homosexuality and the Iranian people's mentality about
homosexuality ... I usually refer to Iran as 'your country' instead of 'my country' or 'our country'." Human
rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: "[The Iranian LGBT community] show that, despite state
repression and the frequent compromises they are forced to make to protect themselves, many Iranian
LGBTs manage to get on with their lives and to forge a sense of community and solidarity."
Solvency
Solvency
We must challenge the way that heteronormativity is enacted—that includes
challenging labels and actions performed by “heteronormative people.” Currently
ideology restricts analysis that we can do to examine political truths that create
hierarchies that justify heteronormativity—these ideologies cause a loss of meaning
and alienates the “Other” that the hierarchies create
Barris ‘7 (Jeremy Barris is professor of philosophy at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.
He is interested in the relations between reality, thinking, style, humour, and justice. His publications
include Paradox and the possibility of knowledge: The example of psychoanalysis and The crane's walk;
Plato, pluralism, and the inconstancy of truth (forthcoming). 2007, Volume Six, Issue 1 “The Power of
Homophobic Labeling: A Post-Structuralist Psychoanalytic and Marxist Explanation”
http://www.radpsynet.org/journal/vol6-1/barris.html#Biographical_Note)
Homophobia works in part and very powerfully through the medium of labels. By 'labels' I mean social categories, including
the words, concepts, and attitudes that together make up the substance and meaning of those categories. And homophobia here includes feelings and judgments both of those reacting to the
gay person and of the gay person herself ('internalized homophobia'). The specter of the label 'homosexual' (or 'gay,' 'queer,' 'dyke,' 'faggot'), all on its own, can and often does terrify or appal.
I shall try to answer two related questions concerning homophobic labeling in this paper. The first question concerns the power of labels in general: how can any label, mere words, mere
attitudes even of strangers, affect a person so strongly, and even to the depths of her or his being? Labeling affects us radically, and probably all humans have experienced the profound effects
of simply having one kind of label rather than another attached to one -- 'geek,' 'effeminate,' 'butch,' 'beautiful' -- whether or not any more 'concrete' consequences have followed beyond the
labeling itself. The second question concerns gay-related labels in particular: what is it about the gay-related labels that gives them the peculiar type and intensity of impact that they have?
Where the prejudicial forms of being labeled black, or a woman, for example, involve being regarded
as inadequate or inferior, the prejudicial forms of being labeled queer seem to involve an entirely
different order of rejection: being unthinkable, not the way things really are, being 'unnatural.' This depth of rejection is, of course, not restricted to queers. Racially
mixed marriage, or extremely tough women, for instance, may get the same kind of reaction (e.g., Fein and Nuehring, 1981). But it seems to be central in the
rejection of homosexuality. Warner, for example, notes "the assumption that this group [queers] . . . does not or should not exist" (1993, p. xxv, insertion added). And
as Butler (1990) writes, "The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that
certain kinds of 'identities' cannot 'exist'
-- that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not
'follow' from either sex or gender." Because these identities "fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear . . . as . . . logical impossibilities" (p. 17). The model I shall
propose, to answer these questions, is drawn from cultural-political theory that was in vogue in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time some influential syntheses of Louis Althusser's
structuralist Marxism and Jacques Lacan's post-structuralist pyschoanalysis were developed. These syntheses offer a very fine-grained explanation of how social structures and meanings
(Althusser) shape our most intimate psychology (Lacan). I shall try to show how this kind of explanation can illuminate both of the questions about homophobic labels. With respect to the
question about labels in general, Lacan argues that
linguistic structures literally construct the fabric of our most intimate
subjectivity, while Althusser argues that social-political ideology works by constructing us as the specific type of subject that we then experience ourselves as being. That is, for both
theorists, our selves, and also our sense of ourselves, depend for their very existence on social meanings, including
labels, and not the other way round. This explains why labels can have very deep effects on us. With respect to the question about homophobic labels in particular, Althusser, along with
Roland Barthes and other structuralist and post-structuralist Marxists, argues that the kinds of meanings that (at least Western, capitalism-informed) social-political ideology constructs, not
only for human subjects but for things in general, have the particular feature of being ahistorical. That is, while the things that make up our world may undergo changes, in each case the thing
that the changes happen to is understood as something already existing, as just unchangingly there, as something that has always been essentially the way it is. Everything that undergoes
change has a 'nature' that just is what it is, that is simply given. The basic nature of things, then, has no history by which it came about and through which it could have turned out differently,
or by which it still could become different. It just is as it is, and could not have been otherwise. As a result, anything that might contrast with the way things naturally are, is literally
inconceivable: it would be trying to be different from what simply could not have been different. And this applies to human life as well as to everything else. Modes of living that contrast with
the 'natural' ways are literally inconceivable: they simply are not the way things are. Other ways of living life can only be seen as one or another kind of failure to exist properly, to be what one
is. For example, they are seen as an ineradicable disease of character, or as a state of sin. Lacan, on the psychological side, develops the concept of the 'imaginary.' This is a dimension of our
We often desperately need, for example, not
to be an 'accident' or a random, chance event in the universe, something that might easily not have
existed at all, or that could easily have turned out to have had qualities and values that we cannot, as
we are, identify with. As with the ideological concept of nature, the result of the 'imaginary' fixation is that one cannot conceive that one could have been fundamentally
subjectivity that results from the universal human need to feel that we have fixed and eternal natures.
different. The result of combining these theories is a model in which powerful internal drives work together with pervasive social forces to subject us to a particular idea of what it means to be
natural. This confluence of forces on a specific concept of nature helps to account for the intensity and character of the homophobic reaction to what falls outside the familiarly 'natural.' In the
first section below I shall outline the relevant elements of the structuralist and post-structuralist theories of ideology. I shall then, in the next section, discuss their part in explaining the power
of homophobic labeling. In the third section, I shall discuss the relevant elements of Lacan's theory of subjectivity, and how his theory complements the ideological side of the explanation. In
the fourth section, I shall briefly discuss an important context in which the concept of nature is in fact legitimate. Finally, I shall explore some further effects of homophobic labeling in the light
of some central features of this explanation. Ideology and the Nature of Things 'Ideology,' in this context, refers to widespread, politically relevant systems of ideas that present themselves
with a certainty that does not depend on any grounds. Differently put, they present the world or parts of the world as unquestionably having certain characteristics that they do not
unquestionably have. This definition does not require us to commit ourselves, either way, on the un-postmodern idea that there is a genuine truth of the way things are that can meaningfully
contrast with ideology. {Though I do think that there is, in fact, room for an idea of truth of this kind. See, for example, Barris (1997). } The point here is that ideology claims a truth that it is not
Even if no ways of approaching the world are in a position to claim knowledge of the
truth, ideology is still overstepping its bounds, and contrasts with acknowledgments of uncertainty or
in a position to claim.
revisability. The kind of presumed obviousness that
characterizes ideology
makes it very hard or perhaps impossible to raise
certain kinds of questions . The result is that those who suffer from circumstances to which those
questions are relevant are badly disadvantaged. This is how ideology has its specifically political
effects, whether or not it is also deliberately intended to have those effects. It benefits some social groups and
disadvantages others, prior to and without the possibility of negotiation. These systems of ideas are present in our everyday forms of thought, and so also in the everyday forms of expression
that structure and convey our thought (Larrain, 1979, p. 130). As Belsey (1980) writes, 'ideology is inscribed in signifying practices -- in discourses, myths, presentations and re-presentations of
the way 'things' are -- and to this extent it is inscribed in the language' (p. 43). And as Volosinov (1973) argues of language itself, "a sign does not simply exist as part of reality -- it reflects and
Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation"
(p. 10). In other words, ideology operates as a dimension of language, by signifying reality in certain ways. In particular, ideology (at least Western, capitalisminformed ideology) typically signifies reality as being natural . In other words, although things in the world have a history, so that their
refracts another reality. Therefore it may distort that reality or be true to it . . .
being as they are is simply a happenstance that could have turned out otherwise, ideology presents them as though they are the only way they could ever have been, and as though they could
not conceivably have been different. It makes what is really a particular historical development of things appear to be what things ultimately and absolutely -- in their very 'nature' -- are. As
Plummer (1975) argues (though from a symbolic interactionist rather than a purely semiotic perspective), "for any individual of a society, there is a tremendous pressure upon him to
apprehend his reality as if it were inevitable, absolute and unchanging . . . a man-made order becomes mystified as a Natural Order" (p. 118). So, for example, marriage is by nature only one
very particular kind of union, and it has always been that way. Capitalism describes how human economics has always worked, and people are naturally, and have always been, basically greedy
and concerned primarily with monetary profit. Women and men have various characteristics by nature, and have always had them. And mammals are and always have been essentially
heterosexual. Ideology also disguises its own character as a form of signification that could, itself, have been different, as being a dimension of what is just one possible language, just one way
of 'refracting' or categorizing the world among actual and possible other ways. Ideology presents itself as simply a reflection of the way things simply are, so that there just are no alternative
views of reality to be expressed. As Bennett (1979) writes, "although bestowing a signification, a particular conceptual organization on reality, language constantly generates the illusion that it
reflects reality instead of signifying it," so that language seems to be "the mere mirroring" of the way things are (pp. 5-6). In Althusser's words, "those who live in ideology believe themselves
Ideology, then,
signifies the world as existing in the only conceivable or possible way it could: as without origin,
without history, eternal, unquestionable. Barthes (1972), for example, writes of bourgeois ideology as transforming "History into Nature . . . the status of
by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology" (1971, p. 175).
the bourgeoisie is particular, historical: man as represented by it is universal, eternal . . . bourgeois ideology yields an unchangeable nature" (pp. 141-142). As a result,
"norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order"
ideological
(p. 140). And Coward and Ellis (1977) talk about this as the production
of an ideological vraisemblable which is effective precisely for the reason that it appears as 'natural,' 'the way things are' . . . The practice of ideology has succeeded when it has produced this
'natural attitude,' when for example the relations of power are not only accepted but perceived precisely as the way things are, ought to be and will be (pp. 67-68). Althusser, similarly, notes
that it is: a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before
which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out . . . 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!' (1971, p. 172). Once objects and the relations between them are seen as existing
in the only conceivable way they could, and as not conceivably not existing, these objects and relations cannot require or even be susceptible of explanation. It is literally nonsense to try to
explain something that by definition is the only conceivable way it could ever have been. Looking for an explanation for the way something is presupposes that contrasting ways are
conceivable. Without a contrast with other conceptions of how something might exist, there is no way even to have the idea of a 'particular way' in which it does exist, and so there is nothing
to be explained. And, further, explaining how something came to be the way it is presupposes conceiving a time when it was not like that, conceiving it as having been different. Certainly,
things do undergo changes, and one can try to explain what produces those changes and what results from them. But the 'nature' of the thing characterizes what undergoes those changes,
and it is understood as already given before the changes. It is what is already there for the changes to happen to. And as a result it is not itself involved in the changes or explained by them.
There is therefore no meaning to asking for an explanation of that underlying nature itself: it is not part of the world of change, and so could not conceivably have been otherwise. In Barthes'
words, then, "ideology . . . records facts or perceives values, but refuses explanations; the order of the world can be seen as sufficient or ineffable, but it is never seen as significant" (1972, p.
142). Among the things that ideology signifies as natural in these ways are people. As Barthes writes, ideology "produces the inverted image of an unchanging humanity, characterized by an
indefinite repetition of its identity" (p. 142). And as Althusser (1971) argues, ideology induces the individual to think of herself, like any other 'natural' thing, as not produced, brought into
being, by larger structures. Instead, a human being understands, and so experiences, herself as a source of entirely self-motivated actions, as an unchanging entity with choices that are
explained by nothing beyond themselves. In Althusser's words, "
ideology has the function . . . of 'constituting' concrete individuals
as subjects" (p. 171). Ideology constitutes the person as a 'subject' in this way by constantly addressing her, through the host of social institutions that surround her, in ways that only
allow her to respond as if s/he were this purely autonomous and unchanging kind of entity, not needing and insusceptible of further explanation. As Coward and Ellis (1977) explain, the
imaginary identity of ideology closes off the movement of contradictions, calling upon the subject as consistent . . . a subject who thinks himself/herself to be the point of origin of ideas and of
actions . . . an identity (a point of self-reference) rather than a process (p. 77). Althusser (1971) calls this act of constructing the subject by addressing her, 'interpellation': ideology . . .
'transforms' the individuals into subjects . . . by . . . interpellation or hailing . . . which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace. . . hailing: 'Hey, you there!' . . . [T]he hailed
individual . . . becomes a subject . . . [b]ecause he has recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that 'it was really him who was hailed' (p. 174). Even before the individual is
born, Althusser notes, it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already . .
. appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected' (p. 176). We are socialized, then, to experience and understand ourselves as having a
certain fixed identity that has and requires no explanation beyond itself: a nature. More generally than in the specific kinds of interaction Althusser describes, language itself induces a fixed
understanding and experience of things. At any given time, language only offers particular ways of conceiving and expressing reality. And since we can only mean what our language gives us
the resources to mean, we only have access to these particular ways of conceiving reality. This includes our conception and so our experience of the reality of ourselves. As Derrida (1973)
writes, "the subject (self-identical or even conscious of self-identity, self-conscious) is inscribed in the language . . . he is a 'function' of the language" (p. 145). Because of the limitations of
language itself, then, we are restricted to particular ideas of the way we are, without resources of meaning that would allow us to conceive ourselves in alternative ways. This dimension of
ideology is already and automatically an aspect of language itself. Now, the problem is not that our 'true' selves are distorted by ideology. The problem is that what we mean by a true self is
already the distortion. What we think of as a 'true self' is exactly that 'natural' subject signified by ideology. It is only language, complete with its ideological effects, that allows us to mean
what we can mean by 'ourselves' in the first place. And this is so, not only because language is our system of meanings, but also because we can only participate in using language by genuinely
taking on certain specific characteristics. Interpellation is one example of how this works: one becomes, for example, an equal, or a subordinate, or a threat. Or one becomes an 'I,' stably
consistent as more or less the same personality from sentence to sentence, or a 'you,' reliable -- unlike, say, a mosquito, or water vapor -- to respond to requests or endearments in certain
specific conventional ways. As Lacan (1977a) puts it, the form in which language is expressed itself defines subjectivity . . . if I call the person to whom I am speaking by whatever name I choose
to give him, I intimate to him the subjective function that he will take on again in order to reply to me, even if it is to repudiate this function (pp. 85-87). This theory allows us to suggest the
ideological side of an answer to each of the two questions about homophobic labeling I started with. I shall explore these answers in the next section. Ideology and Homophobic Labeling This
theory of ideology allows us to understand, first, why social labeling in general can affect us so very deeply. Our very being is already a structure formed by social meanings, so that we are
made of the same stuff that labels are made of. Consciousness, after all, is a structure of meanings, understandings, and acts of reference. Labels, then, affect us because they are continuous
with what we are. As Lacan notes, "language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is. Words are trapped in all the corporeal images that captivate the subject" (1977a, p. 87). This
theory also allows a first answer to the question about the intensity and particular effects of specifically homophobic labeling. Because ideology signifies the world as natural, if anything were
to conflict with the socially accepted ideas about reality, it would conflict with the only way things can conceivably be. Consequently it would not just conflict with those particular accepted
ideas, but with conceivability itself. And that kind of conflict does happen. I have already quoted Judith Butler's comment that "certain kinds of 'identities' . . . fail to conform to [the] norms of
cultural 'intelligibility,' and therefore 'appear' . . . as . . . logical impossibilities" (1990, p. 17). An 'unnatural' category violates the very 'rules,' the very structure and reliability, of meaning itself.
As Hebdige (1979) argues, more generally, any elision, truncation or convergence of prevailing linguistic and ideological categories can have profoundly disorienting effects. These deviations
briefly expose the arbitrary nature of the codes which underlie and shape all forms of discourse . . . The limits of acceptable linguistic expressions are prescribed by a number of apparently
universal taboos. These taboos guarantee the continuing 'transparency' (the taken-for-grantedness) of meaning (p. 91). This offers an explanation of why 'unnatural' categories elicit such
visceral rejections from people who encounter others to whom these categories apply.
This kind of experience threatens their very sense of
meaning and reality. But, more than this, because social meanings constitute our very substance as individuals , a
violation of the general structures of meaning also violates the structure of what we most intimately
are. Consequently this kind of encounter also threatens the reality of the person herself as a coherent subject. If, more, such a category applies specifically to ourselves, it makes sense that
the violation of our being would be all the more intense, and all the more complex for being specifically directed. Along with threatening our sense of reality and in particular of our own
reality
, it would also make us feel alien to the conceivable order of things.
It would make us feel that we, the particular persons
that we are, somehow violate the way the rest of the world does and should make sense, that we in particular are so fundamentally wrong that we ought not to exist. That is, it would make us
These things are exactly what
homophobic labeling does to its victims, and perhaps also, more indirectly, to its perpetrators. Now, since the
feel that we are really a fake kind of existence, unworthily pretending to the status of the genuine and legitimate ones.
world is full of conflicting events and developments, there cannot help but be things that do not fit into the 'natural' order of things as ideology presents it. And given that deviations from this
natural order literally cannot be conceived, ideological understanding can only deal with them by forms of paradoxical intellectual gymnastics. Since they must be noticed, it must be done in
ways that insist that there is nothing there to notice; or they must discussed in ways that insist there is nothing to discuss. Foucault (1978), for example, describes this kind of talkative
insistence on silence (although he argues that it is no longer the leading strategy of dealing with deviance) as "a sentence to disappear . . . an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know" (p. 4). But it is necessary to dismiss these unnatural
occurrences in these ways, since pretensions to being real by what is inconceivable, threaten sense or meaningfulness itself. Consequently these occurrences cannot help but also have enough
reality to require being dismissed from notice. But, since being natural is the only form that any reality can take, these unnatural things are also naturally the way they are. While the specific
signifier 'unnatural' signifies them as not part of nature, every other signifier that is relevant to them continues to signify them as existing in 'the only conceivable way,' that is, as natural. And
of course even the signifier 'unnatural,' itself, must be taken to have the kind of meaning that ideology presents as ultimately the only conceivable kind of meaning: an expression of what
cannot be conceived otherwise, of what is naturally the way it is. The unnatural things, then, are naturally violations of sense: they could not have been otherwise. They naturally exist as
incapable of existing. And they are by nature incapable of having a conceivable nature. In other words, they are naturally unnatural. As Foucault describes contemporary understandings of
'deviant' sexualities, for example, they are "a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d'être and a natural order of disorder" (1978, p. 44). This powerful contradiction
of natural unnaturalness is the fuller answer I want to propose, although so far only presented in the context of ideology, as to why homophobic labeling has the particular intensity and type of
impact it does.
Not only is the unnatural person alien to everything meaningful and worthwhile, but this is her natural
condition. That is, it is part of the ways things are and ought to be, that this person should not exist, that his existence commits a terrible wrong. And this situation is unalterable and
inescapable. The concept of change does not even apply to what is the only way it can conceivably be. I shall now turn to discussing Lacan's theory of subjectivity, which explains how
vulnerability to this same contradiction is rooted in core dimensions of our psychology. Lacan and the Imaginary Dimension of Subjectivity For Lacan, as for Althusser, language constructs or
constitutes us as subjects. All meanings occur within language, and this includes the meanings of 'self' and of the many differences between ourselves and the world that are also necessary to
defining our separate and specific existence. There is empirical confirmation that we and our world are linguistically constituted in this way. Infants have to learn to distinguish their bodies
from the world around them and to distinguish their own hurts and joys from those of other people, and they have to learn that their own body parts all belong together in an integrated unity.
And this learning occurs partly and necessarily through the process of learning language, of learning to refer to themselves and other things stably in many and various ways, including
establishing some things as stable entities (that is, learning to relate to them that way, not finding stable things immediately given to perception) by, as part of that establishing process,
naming them. Until we have entered into the organizing structure of language, then, we have no particular meaningful reality, and we ourselves are not anything in particular. As a result, in
Lacan's words, the "signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny . . . their innate gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding . . . [A]nd . . . everything that might be considered
the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier" (1972, p. 60). Lacan describes our initial lack of particular reality as "a certain dehiscence at the heart of the
organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months" (1977a, p. 4). Now, before the infant enters into language (roughly
between its sixth and eighteenth month), Lacan finds that there is a first stage of its acquiring a sense of the unity of its own body. This seems to occur through its perception of the unity and
coordination of others' bodies, or through seeing the whole of its own body in a mirror. And exactly because it does not yet distinguish between itself and others, or between itself and images
that are separate from itself, it experiences that visible unity as the unity of its own, felt body. In Lacan's words, it seems to be the case: that experience of oneself in the earliest stage of
childhood develops, insofar as it refers to one's counterpart, from a situation experienced as undifferentiated. Thus . . . we see . . . those gestures . . . by which a subject reconstructs the
imperfect effort of the other's gesture . . . that are all the more remarkable in that they precede the complete co-ordination of the motor apparatuses that they bring into play (1977a, p. 18).
Lacan refers to this stage of development as the mirror stage. It is the beginning of the dimension of human subjectivity that Lacan calls the imaginary, because it is based on visual
perceptions, or, in other words, images, either of actual bodies or reflected in a mirror. The imaginary is a dimension of our psychology that structures our sense of our own identity, of the
reality of ourselves, as being specific, stable, and complete, in the way that wholly perceived images are. The "specular image . . . is linked as a unifier to all the . . . elements of what is called
the fragmented body" (1977a, p. 196). The problem with the imaginary, however, is that it is built on an image that does not belong to the body it unifies. The infant establishes its sense of
itself, and differentiates itself from others, on the basis of identifying with an image that is not itself. And in fact, equally paradoxically, this distinction between itself and the image can itself
only become meaningful to the subject because of its initial identification with it, since that identification is the subject's basis for establishing itself as a self distinct from other things that are
not itself, in the first place. The imaginary, then, is also imaginary in the sense of being based on a fiction, a fantasy. The subject's sense of itself is based on a fiction of unity that it does not, at
the time, really possess, and that in any case is not its own unity. But because the subject's sense of self is based on, made possible by, this fiction, it can never fully replace it with properly
established knowledge of its own wholeness or integrity. On the other hand, because it is the subject's sense of its reality that is based on this fiction, it nonetheless must, in order to feel real,
try to replace it with a sense grounded in genuine reality. As Lacan writes, [T]his form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always
remain irreducible for the individual . . . or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being . . . of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the . . . syntheses by which he must
resolve as I his discordance with his own reality (1977a, p. 2). As a result, it is built into the roots of the human subject to have a need for unity and completeness that it can never fully satisfy,
an impossible need to be fully and properly what it is. This also emerges as the equivalent and equally unsatisfiable need to be completed by being in relation to objects that are fully and
properly what they are. This is a need which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short with entities or 'things' that are very
different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field, stretched in accordance with the lines of animal desire (p. 17). That there is this kind of paradox of
identity does not depend only on the soundness of this particular psychoanalytic theory of infant development. It seems likely that human development simply could not happen without this
kind of paradox. In order to learn language, for example, we need to be able to understand ourselves as consistent and specific subjects, to which, for instance, 'I' and 'you' apply. But the
meanings of terms like 'I,' or 'consistent,' or 'here,' only occur within the context of the established norms and practices of a language. Consequently we cannot understand ourselves as
subjects without first having access to the meanings that language offers. In other words, we have to understand ourselves in the ways appropriate to engaging with language before we can
understand ourselves in the ways appropriate to engaging with language. As a result, our sense of ourselves (and our grasp of the meanings of things in general offered by language) is
necessarily partly based on a moment of logical incoherence. The idea that we have an unfulfillable need for fixity helps to explain why we keep setting up new orthodoxies, and why we keep
defending them as though they were self-evidently true and self-evidently morally and politically right. This explanation applies even if these are orthodoxies of the unorthodox: for example,
the idea that concepts and identities are never appropriately fixed, but always necessarily unstable or requiring to be transgressed. This is just a sort of positive version of natural
unnaturalness. The deeply contradictory character of the imaginary is confirmed and intensified, Lacan argues, once the child enters into language. For language itself works self-contradictorily
both to define the specific realities of particular things and to undermine those same definitions. Saussure, the founder of structuralist linguistics and consequently one of the sources of
Lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis, argued that the meanings of words depend entirely on their differences from other words, and not on things and events in the world outside language. We
would not be able to grasp information about those things and events, it could have no meaning for us, unless we already had access to the kinds of meanings that words have. That the
meanings of words depend, instead, on their relations to each other, is confirmed by the fact that these meanings shift drastically depending on how they are combined with other words in
particular sentences, and on the particular ways they are and can be contrasted with other words. Meaning, then, is not a given, positive entity or quality that simply reflects the world.
Instead, meanings are established entirely within the system of language, independently of the world. They are in fact the unstable result of a system of differences between meanings,
guaranteed by nothing outside that system, and by nothing in themselves that precedes those differences or contrasts. "A difference generally implies positive terms between which the
difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms" (Saussure, 1959, p. 117). In Lacan's words, "we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the
meaning 'insists' but that none of its elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment capable" (1977a, p. 153). As a result, the very existence and character of any meaning
depends, unstably, on an indefinite range of meanings that are not what it itself is. What it is on the 'inside' depends on what is 'outside' of it, on what does not belong to it. And this includes
the meaning of any reference to the human subject. Language gives a meaning to the specific positive reality that each of us is, but only by defining it entirely in terms of an unstably shifting
host of meanings that it is not. And because we are a structure constituted by language, language also builds into us a state of failure to be what we are. As Lacan argues, If we choose being
[given independently of language], the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose meaning . . . it is of the nature of this meaning . . . to be . . . eclipsed by the
disappearance of being [which, since it is independent of language, is what might have validated the reality of this subject that language claims to mean], induced by the very function of the
signifier (1977b, pp. 211-212, insertions added). As a result, then, language builds into the very fabric of our existence an unsatisfiable drive to arrive at what we are: to be complete and stable.
That is, language itself works together with our pre-linguistic 'discord' to build into us the need for the imaginary, for a fixed and self-sufficient nature. In Lacan's words, "The drama of the
subject . . . is that he faces the test of his lack of being. It is because it fends off this moment of lack that an image moves into position to support the whole worth of desire: projection, a
function of the Imaginary" (quoted in Lemaire, 1977, p. 72). And the "imaginary process" that "begins with the specular image . . . goes on to the constitution of the ego by way of
subjectification by the signifier" (Lacan, 1977a, p. 307). Like ideology, then, our own psychological structure builds into us a need to experience ourselves as natural. Now, because our
subjectivity is constituted by language, it is also shaped by the specific social categories that partly make up language. Consequently, on the psychological side of things too, our experience of
ourselves as natural is made what it is partly by particular socially accepted categories. As a result, when we experience ourselves as not fitting the specific social categories of what is natural,
our imaginary need for naturalness, to be fully and properly what we are, is violated. We therefore experience ourselves as incoherent, unintelligible beings, as not completely or properly
existing, as only fake realities. We have this experience in response to the same categories through which ideology works, but, over and above the ways ideology produces that experience, we
have it because of our psychological structure. But, further, our experience of ourselves as natural is not only shaped by the social categories, but also by the 'natural' signification that ideology
gives them. And with that comes the whole logic of the ideological signification of nature. As a result, when we experience ourselves as being unnatural, we automatically also experience
ourselves, again, as being naturally unnatural. We experience it as part of the right and proper nature of things that we do not have genuine, legitimate existence. The structure of our own
subjectivity, then, both makes us specifically vulnerable to the effects of homophobic labeling that ideology produces, and contributes powerfully to those effects in its own right. In short,
through the working of ideology, on the one hand, the 'unnatural' label violates our sense of reality, of ourselves, and of sense itself. And by treating this violation as our nature, this labeling
holds our very existence responsible, condemns our very being, for this destruction of the meaningfulness and worth of our reality and ourselves. On the other hand, the structure and working
of our own psychology ties us even more fully into these same effects of 'unnatural' labeling. And it does so with all the strength of our deepest striving to exist. The Legitimate Context of the
Naturally-Unnatural Contradiction There is, however, an important context in which this contradiction of natural unnaturalness is legitimate. I want briefly to discuss this context, because it
gives a more fully accurate perspective on the nature of this contradiction and on what is at stake in it. First, the need for fixity, self-sufficiency, and completeness, for a dimension of reality
that is natural, is not only psychological and subjective, but also logical. Language and meaning themselves presuppose it in order to function, in order to be language and meaning. As Weber
(1991) writes, Left to its own devices, the symbolic [or language, composed as it is of differences between its own terms, with nothing to ensure any stable consistency in those differences] . . .
would tend to dissolve and to displace the very determinations upon which it 'itself' depends. In short, without the imaginary, the symbolic would self-destruct. It is therefore no less
dependent on the imaginary than the imaginary is on it (p. 108, insertion added). Similarly, Gallop (1985) notes that There have been some thinkers who . . . argue that Lacanian analysts have
been so preoccupied with denouncing the ego and thus the imaginary (for the ego is the agency of the imaginary), that they have overlooked the positive and necessary function of the
imaginary . . . [I]t might . . . be said that the imaginary is necessary to give 'consistency' to the symbolic (Montrelay), to 'embody' it (Laplanche) (p. 218). Now, if language and meaning
presuppose a dimension of fixity, self-sufficiency, and completeness, then anything we might mean (because it is something we mean) by truth and reality themselves also presupposes a
dimension of this kind, a dimension of naturalness. Second and consequently, anything we might mean by truth and reality themselves, then, is contradictory in this respect. There are,
necessarily, such things as the simply given natures of things, and, as Saussure's discussion of language shows, whatever we can mean by these natures is, necessarily, not simply given, but
inherently insecure and questionable. As a result, 'natural unnaturalness' is not just a product of ideological and psychological distortions of reality. It is also a dimension of meaning and reality
themselves. Its expressions in ideology and in our psychology are therefore partly ways of genuinely dealing with something true of reality, as well as partly being ways of evading it. The
distorting evasions of these expressions certainly need to be understood and countered; but the relation of these expressions, unevaded, to the truth of things needs to be recognized and
respected as well. Perhaps part of an answer is to combine a constant respect for our need to establish what is genuinely natural, with a constant willingness to fight our need to believe that
we already understand what our sense of what is natural means for the status of conflicting ideas of nature, and whether and in what ways it might be possible for those ideas to interact
meaningfully with our own. My concern here, however, is with the distorted application and destructive effects of 'natural unnaturalness' in homophobic labeling, and I shall now discuss some
more of those. More Effects of Homophobic Labeling As I have discussed, one way of expressing the meaning of a thing's being natural is that it requires no explanation, and that in fact the
very idea of explaining it makes no sense. By definition, it simply could not conceivably have been otherwise. It follows, however, that anything that is unnatural, does require to be explained.
Something that appears to violate sense, to make no sense, inherently calls for an explanation. In fact, more, it requires to be explained away. Explanations are made in terms of what does
make sense, so that, if the explanation is successful, the violation of sense will vanish away, and, with it, the thing that is a violation of sense. But what is unnatural is also naturally unnatural.
Consequently, it both calls for an explanation, one that is so thorough that it will replace the unnatural thing altogether, and it is meaningless to ask for an explanation of it at all, for an
increased understanding of it in any way, since it could not conceivably have been otherwise. One effect, then, of the homophobic labeling of homosexuality as 'unnatural,' is that gayness is
very powerfully experienced simultaneously as a violation of sense that desperately requires to be explained away, and a timeless essence that is absolutely insusceptible of explanation. This
helps to make sense of some of the kinds of paradoxical intellectual gymnastics that homophobia produces in dealing with homosexuality. One strategy for dealing with, and symptom of the
effects of, this naturally-unnatural labeling, is simply to reject explanation, to recognize homosexuality as simply outside the bounds of sense, while also recognizing that it is always urgently
necessary to insist on and re-establish its senselessness. One is then always freshly appalled at the existence of homosexuality, freshly shocked at its even making a claim to exist. One cannot
accept it, because it is inconceivable, but one cannot simply dismiss it once and for all, because it also could not conceivably not be the way it is. It does not merit attention, and it must
urgently be reprehended. Another of these strategies and symptoms of the effects of naturally-unnatural labeling is to save the possibility of explanation by showing that the unnatural thing's
difference from the natural order is ultimately only apparent. That is, it does not really exist and so does not really need an explanation, only an explanation for why it seems to exist. The thing
is really only a deviation from the way things properly are, and so bears a coherent, understandable relation to the way things are and make sense. For example, homosexuality is an
"adaptation consequent to pervasive fears surrounding the expression of heterosexual impulses. In our view, every homosexual is, in reality, a 'latent' heterosexual" (Bieber et al, 1962, p. 220).
Gay people are really just afraid of members of the opposite sex, and so trying to find a substitute for what they really want (Socarides, 1979, 1981). Homosexuality is then only a pretend
desire, substituting for the real, natural thing. Similarly, there is the theory that gay men, for example, are really heterosexual women trapped in men's bodies, which nicely eliminates
homosexuality altogether (Marshall, 1981, pp.135-136). Of course, this kind of explanation then confirms that these fake realities, these pretend desires and genders, really do exist, just by
virtue of explaining them. Consequently they still have to be condemned, despite and because of this demonstration that they really are naturally understandable products of what is natural. A
third strategy and symptom is simply to offer contradictory explanations (which may include either or both of those found in the first two strategies), while nonetheless also maintaining an
attitude of having a soundly respectable claim to sense, and an impeccable moral standing. So, for example, homosexuality is a sickness, but nonetheless morally reprehensible; it is genetic,
but nonetheless licentious; it is definable only in terms of sexual acts, but nonetheless indicates inadequacy of the person's character traits in general; gay people are degenerate, but
nonetheless no different from anyone else (Chesebro, 1980). This, incidentally, is a sampling of social scientists' explanations, no mere uninformed lay efforts. Conclusion: Coping with the
Effects of Homophobic Labeling On the side of coping with these effects of homophobic labeling, perhaps one of the roots of, for example, camp sensibility, or of its particular appeal for gay
communities, is the honest recognition of this naturally unnatural status. Camp celebrates an explicitly fake version of reality, what is meant to be experienced as only a copy of the real thing.
But it also takes the fake version seriously, and is often moved by it, at the same time and in the same act as making a joke out of it. As Newton (1979) explains camp, it is a strategy for dealing
with "a 'spoiled identity,' in Goffman's [1963] terms . . . an identity that is well defined but loaded with contempt" (p. 105). And it characteristically involves "the perception of 'being as playing
a role' " (p. 107), a perception conveyed by "incongruous juxtapositions" (p. 106). The result is a kind of humor that "does not cover up, it transforms" (p. 109). Core (1984), similarly, explains
that camp is, among other things, "a disguise that fails" and "a lie which tells the truth." It is, he says, "cross-dressing in a Freudian slip" (p. 7). In a more explicitly political understanding of
camp, Meyer (1994) argues that, because the socially "marginalized agent has no access to representation [the successful production of meanings], the apparatus of which is controlled by the
dominant order,"camp", as "queer parody" of the socially dominant meanings, is the only process by which the queer is able to enter representation and to produce social visibility. This piggybacking upon the dominant order's monopoly on the authority of signification explains why Camp appears, on the one hand, to offer a transgressive vehicle yet, on the other, simultaneously
evokes the specter of dominant ideology within its practice (p. 11, insertion added). In fact, if the suggestion is right that the natural-unnatural contradiction is part of truth and reality
themselves, then camp is not only a psychological and political strategy for coping constructively with some of the deep effects of homophobia. It is also one expression of insight into a deep
and rich dimension of the nature of reality and truth. This is a dimension that mainstream culture and some core features of our own psychology typically work to keep hidden. And it is
consequently a dimension of truth and reality that victims of the 'unnatural' label are put into a uniquely privileged position to be able to understand, to do justice to, and to honor.
Counterfactuals
Unquestioned assumptions made by history have written out the queer. This kind of
ahistoricism necessitates tyrannical conformity. Queer reading solves.
Rohy '6 (Valerie: Assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. "Ahistorical," GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1, 2006 // LVL)
The queer past was overdetermined from the first, not least by the reparative impulse of "making up
lost time," from whose pathos the most rigorous historicism is not exempt.14 Inspired by visions of
those silenced in former ages, queer scholars sought to discover loves, in the words of one landmark
book, "hidden from history."15 As Michel Foucault has argued, however, the past's continuity with the
present cannot be assumed. Attentive to historical alterity, the dangers of metanarrative, and the
disjunction between an earlier register of homosexual acts and a modern rubric of gay identity, queer
criticism has largely translated Foucault in a cautionary tone.16 It warns against the hasty assumption
of commonalities between present and past same-sex desires and refuses as "ahistorical" or
"anachronistic" readings that would project modern concepts back in time. In this logic, historicism,
now broadly cognate with social constructionism, becomes the hallmark of progressive politics. Hailed
as the universal defense against universalism, historicism [End Page 65] promises respect for
difference, particularity, and pluralism where the ahistorical would impose tyrannical conformity. To
grasp the influence of this argument, one need only track the recurrence of the words ahistorical and
anachronistic in the queer criticism of the past fifteen years. The rise of historicist methodologies in
queer literary studies in the 1990s brought a set of apotropaic gestures—the perfunctory nod to
historical cautions, the pointed aside on a rival's anachronism, the dutiful apology for an unavoidable
retroversion—that by now have been honed and condensed to a stylized, almost purely gestural form.
Where the ahistorical is concerned, distinguished scholars from widely different critical positions seem
to share a common language. When Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that the "modern view of lesbians and
gay men as a distinctive minority population is of course importantly anachronistic in relation to earlier
writing," we are asked to remember something that of course everyone already knows (and to
remember that we already know it), because, however well-known, this important point must endlessly
be acknowledged.17 Writing in 1996, Bonnie Zimmerman blames queer theory for the distortion of
lesbian experience and "the appalling misrepresentation and ahistorical construction of the past twenty
years."18 Reviewing anthologies of gay male literature, George Haggerty remarks on "the danger of
misreading the past" by positing an "ahistorical homophobia," but he notes that he too has been
accused of "reading the past in terms of the present."19 Even in a book that outlines an unconventional
historiography of "perverse presentism," Judith Halberstam complains that Lillian Faderman
"relentlessly imposes contemporary understandings of lesbian desire on a text in which lesbian identity
cannot be imagined as such."20 From this point of view, the dangers of anachronistic projection might
be personified in Poe's narrator, who in his yearning for the past abandons fact for "the suggestion of a
vivid imagination" and allows his "labors" to take "a coloring from [his] dreams" (231, 228). But what
else might "Ligeia" tell us about history and retrospection? What makes anachronism so "appalling" and
"relentless" a threat? And how might queer theory interpret the desire and disgust underlying notions
of the ahistorical? Such questions do not deny the value of queer literary history, nor do they presume
that all accounts of the past can be equally credible. Rather, they speak to the critical discourse in which
something called historicism is defended as the sole ethical possibility and something called the
ahistorical is denounced by a shaming rhetoric whose vehemence seems at times to outstrip its object.
Queer reading requires attention to historical specificity, but it does not demand a defense of an
authentic past against the violation of backwardness.
Counter-factual history helps us answer “what if” questions
King and Zeng 7 (Gary King teaches at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Langche Zeng teaches at the
Universitiy of California-San Diego, “When Can History Be our Guid? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference”
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf)
Social science is about making inferences-using facts we know to learn about fact we do not know.
Some inferential targets (the facts we do not know) are factual, which means that they exist even if we do not
know them. In early 2003, Saddam Hussein was obviously either alive or dead, but the world did not
know which it was until he was found. In contrast, other inferential targets are counterfactual, and thus
do not exist, at least not yet. Counterfactual inference is crucial for studying ‘‘what¶ if ’’ questions, such as whether the Americans
and British would have invaded Iraq if the 9/11/2001 attack on the World Trade Center had not occurred. Counterfactuals are also
crucial for making forecasts, such as whether there will be peace in the¶ Mideast in the next two years, as the quantity of interest is
not knowable at the time of the forecast but will eventually become known. Counterfactuals are essential as well in making causal
inferences, as causal effects are differences between factual and counterfactual inferences: for
example, how much more international trade¶ would Syria have engaged in during 2003 if the Iraqi
War had been averted? Counterfactual inference has been a central topic of methodological
discussion in political science (Thorson and Sylvan 1982; Fearon 1991; Tetlock and Belkin 1996;¶ Tetlock and Lebow 2001),
psychology (Tetlock 1999; Tetlock, Lebow, and Parker¶ 2000), history (Murphy 1969; Dozois and Schmidt 1998; Tally 2000), philosophy¶ (Lewis
1973; Kvart 1986), computer science (Pearl 2000), statistics (Rubin 1974;¶ Holland 1986), and other disciplines. ‘‘Counterfactuals are an
essential ingredient¶ of scholarship. They help determine the research questions we deem important¶ and the answers we find to them’’
(Lebow 2000:558). As scholars have long recognized, however, some counterfactuals are more amenable to empirical analysis¶ than others. In
particular, some counterfactuals are more strained, farther from the¶ data, or otherwise unrealistic.
Data doesn’t always solve-sometimes we need to reimagine the past to see what
could have been
King and Zeng 7 (Gary King teaches at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Langche Zeng teaches at the
Universitiy of California-San Diego, “When Can History Be our Guid? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference”
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf)
empirical examples. The first evaluates inferences in the scholarly literatures on the effects
of democracy. These effects (on any of the dependent¶ variables used in the literature) have long been among the most
studied questions in comparative politics and international relations. Our results show that many analyses
about democracy include at least some counterfactuals with little empirical support so that scholars in
these literatures are asking some counterfactual questions that are far from their data, and are
therefore inadvertently drawing conclusions about the effects of democracy in some cases based on
indefensible mode¶ assumptions rather than empirical evidence. Whereas our example about democracy applies
We offer two
approximately to a large array of¶ prior work, we also introduce an example that applies exactly to one groundbreaking study on designing
appropriate peacebuilding strategies (Doyle and¶ Sambanis 2000). We replicate this work, apply our methods to these data, and find¶ that the
central causal inference in the study involves counterfactuals that are too¶ far from the data to draw reliable inferences, regardless of the
methods employed.¶ We illustrate by showing how inferences about the effect of UN intervention drawn¶ from these data are highly sensitive
to model specification.¶ The next section shows more specifically how to identify questions about the¶ future and ‘‘what if ’’ scenarios that
cannot be answered well in given data sets. This¶ section introduces several
new approaches for assessing how based in
factual evidence is a given counterfactual. The penultimate section provides a new decomposition of the bias in estimating
causal effects using observational data that is more¶ suited to the problems most prevalent in political science. This decomposition enables us
to identify causal questions without good causal answers in given data sets¶ and shows how to narrow these questions in some cases to those
that can be answered more decisively. We use each of our methods to evaluate counterfactuals¶ regarding the effects of democracy and UN
peacekeeping. The last section concludes the article.
Counterfactuals can and should be applied to international politics
King and Zeng 7 (Gary King teaches at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Langche Zeng teaches at the
Universitiy of California-San Diego, “When Can History Be our Guid? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference”
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf)
examine the counterfactuals of interest. Assessing the causal effects of multidimensional
UN peacekeeping operations implicitly involves asking the following question: In civil wars with
multilateral UN involvement, how much peace building success would we have witnessed if the UN
had not gotten involved?¶ Similarly, in civil wars without UN involvement, how much success would there¶ have been if the UN had
In this section, we
gotten involved? In other words, the goal is counterfactual¶ predictions with the dichotomous UNOP4 variable set to 1FUNOP4, which is one¶
counterfactual for each observation. To begin with, we check how many counterfactuals are in the convex hull of the observed data. We found
every single counterfactual in the data set is a risky extrapolation rather than what would¶ have
been a comparatively safer interpolation. We also computed the Gower distance of each counterfactual from the data and
none. That is,
found that few of the counterfactuals were near much of the data. For example, for all counterfactuals, an average¶ of only 1.3% of the
observations were within one GV (which is 0.11 in these data).¶ Thus, not only are the counterfactuals all extrapolations, but in addition they
do¶ not lie just outside the convex hull. Instead, most are fairly extreme extrapolations¶ well beyond the data. These results strongly indicate
that the data used in the study¶ contain little information to answer the key causal question asked, and hence, the¶ conclusions reached there
are based more on theory and model specifications than¶ empirical evidence.
Any of their solvency take-outs are just ways to exclude our counterfactuality-they
view this method as outside of the norm and something that should be rejected. But
allowing for counterfactuality can help change perspectives and prevent future
mistakes instead of repeating them
Huston 5 (James Huston is a Regents Professor at the University of Illinois and a writer at Project Muse, “Reconstruction as it should have
been: An Exercise in Counterfactual History”,http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwh/summary/v051/51.4huston01.html)
Because the authors are taking a bite of usually forbidden fruit in the historical profession—offering
make-believe histories—the features of the exercise we are engaged in require explication before we
are summarily cast out of the garden of interpretive delights. There are explicit reasons for in- dulging
in this type of exercise, usually termed counterfactual history. Most historians offer explanations for
why various processes or events occur. When they do so, their explanations (or as is usually termed in
the profession, their interpretations) set up a causal model: certain things (or variables, however
named) create the conditions that produce a result. That mode of analysis invites a counterfactual
rendering of the history under investigation because the logical implication is that by removing some
of the independent variables or changing their values, a different outcome would have been achieved.
As long as historians offer interpretations, they at the same time imply that alternative paths in the
history were possible and maybe even viable. Was England’s failure to place an on-site bureaucracy to
govern the colonists the reason for the American Revolution? Then under certain conditions, ¶ perhaps
prescient British leaders could have hung onto the Colonies if they had created more police authority in
Then per- haps the viable alternative was a fusion of the opposition parties, led by the border slave
Was the reason for the Great Depression the wrong policy
decisions by the Federal Reserve and the immense contraction of the money supply
–
perhaps a more informed Federal Reserve would have made the right moves and have avoided the
Great Depression—and maybe the entire New Deal as well. Any causal explanation of an event or a
process in history evokes the possibility of an alternative
Multiple benefits to pedagogically embracing counterfactual history-allows us to
inquire and question beyond the levels we already are comfortable at and gives us
insights on the topic that wouldn’t have happened outside this debate round
Huston 5 (James Huston is a Regents Professor at the University of Illinois and a writer at Project Muse, “Reconstruction as it should have
been: An Exercise in Counterfactual History”,http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwh/summary/v051/51.4huston01.html)
Finally, let me add the potential heuristic value of the counterfactual exercise to students. Teaching
students the importance of context in human affairs is actually a more formidable task than many of
us realize. Having students determine the historical forces at work in some time period (the
parameters of the problem, so to speak), a set of potential solutions, and then sort out what was
realistically possible, is a powerful exercise. Moreover, it also provides students with an insight into
basic principles of historical inquiry that they can then apply to the present in which they exist: understanding the context, constructing hypothetical solutions, and then testing the proposed solutions
against their understanding of the forces and ideolo- gies at work.
Counterfactuals give us the UNIQUE opportunity to question the motives behind what
happened in a particular time or at a particular event that no other method of analysis
can access
Lebow 2K (Richard Lebow is an American political scientist best known for his work in international relations and U.S. foreign
policy, “What’s So Different about a Counterfactual?”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25054129.pdf?acceptTC=true)
Even when evidence is meager or absent, the difference between counterfactual and "factual" history
may still be marginal. Documents ¶ are rarely smoking guns that allow researchers to establish motives
or ¶ causes beyond a reasonable doubt. Actors only occasionally leave evidence about their motives,
and historians rarely accept such testimony at face value. More often historians infer motives from
what they know about actors' personalities and goals, their past behavior, and the constraints under
which they operated. In his highly acclaimed study of the Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan argues
that Pericles wanted to ally with Corcyra in the expectation that it would deter Sparta from coming ¶
to the aid of Corinth. If deterrence failed, Athens, protected by its city ¶ walls and the long walls to its
harbor at Piraeus, would refuse to engage ¶ the main body of Spartan forces even if they invaded Attica
and laid ¶ waste its olive groves and vineyards. After the Spartans experienced a ¶ few years of
frustration, Pericles expected them to recognize the futility ¶ of waging war against Athens. Further, he
thought that the peace fac ¶ tion, led by King Archidamus, would regain power and that the two ¶
hegemons would reach a more lasting accommodation.10
Your “facts” and “truth claims” are epistemologically suspect. You shouldn’t exclude
the affirmative just because our views on what can and can’t be done are different
than yours
Lebow 2K (Richard Lebow is an American political scientist best known for his work in international relations and U.S. foreign
policy, “What’s So Different about a Counterfactual?”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25054129.pdf?acceptTC=true)
Any sharp distinction between factuals and counterfactuals rests on questionable ontological claims.
Many of the scholars who dismiss ¶ counterfactual arguments do so because they do not believe they
are ¶ based on facts. Philosophers have long recognized that "facts" are social constructions. They do
not deny that reality exists quite independent of any attempt to understand it by human beings or
that some understandings may transcend culture. Physical scientists may be correct in ¶ their claims
that fundamental concepts like mass, volume, and temperature are essential to the study of nature
and that extraterrestrial scientists would have to possess the same concepts to understand the ¶
universe. This is not true of social concepts, which vary across and within human cultures. There are
many ways of describing social inter actions, and the choice and utility of concepts depend largely on
the ¶ purpose of the "knower."
Re-imagining the past only implicates changes in our perspective, however changes in
perspective can have positive effects on our relation with what we are studying
Bunzl 4 (Martin Bunzl is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick NJ, where he directed the Rutgers Initiative in
Climate and Social Policy from 2007 to 2011, “Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide”,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/530560.pdf?acceptTC=true)
When it comes to examining the consequent of a historical counterfactual, like most historians
Ferguson implicitly embraces the view that what is involved is always and only an act of imagination.
The difference between plausible and implausible counterfactuals might be thought to be a function of
the degree to which we are able to discipline our imagination, and there is a case to be made that one
of the effects of being a good (and specialized) historian is that one’s imagination is just so disciplined.
But even if we do that, can such imaginings be anything more than an aid to the historian in the
context of discovery, doing no more than functioning in the construction of claims that must
themselves still be settled by evidence? If not, we are back to the question of evidence again when it
comes to counterfactuals. But perhaps plausible counterfactuals bear certain evidential markings that
we can learn to read.
We access a reflexivity that causes people to try and look back at their reactions to an
event and how they would have personally changed
Tetlock and Belkin 96 (Philip is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management at the
University of Pennsylvania, Aaron Belkin is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science University of California, Berkeley,
“Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics”,
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UyMXon0JmBsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=counterfactual+history+and+reasoning&ots=A
6ekIM8xr_&sig=FagXX0NhGOdxHlhZ8--gf7U_T6Y#v=onepage&q=counterfactual%20history%20and%20reasoning&f=false)
Mental simulations can compel people to acknowledge embarrassing or even shameful
inconsistencies in their application of moral rules. The paradigmatic example is the identitysubstitution thought experiment that manipulates either the perpetrator or victim of a deed and asks
the audience to contemplate whether they had the same emotional reaction to what actually
happened as they would have had to various hypothetical events. For instance: “If Bosnians were
bottlenosed dolphians [Rwandans white, Chechnyans Lithuanians . . . ], we never would have tolerated
the slaughter of innocents so long.” Insofar as the audience detects a discrepancy in their reactions to
the two scenarios, and insofar as the audience firmly believes that the mentally manipulated cause
should be irrelevant, the audience will deem the discovery of a differential emotional reaction to be a
disturbing fact about themselves. Moreover, the thought experiment is easily translated into an actual
experiment. For example, survey researchers often perform actual identity-substitution experiments
to gauge the influence of “socially undesirable” causes of policy preferences that, it is assumed,
people would not be willing to acknowledge if they were asked directly .Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock
1991).
Any link turns as to why CFH is bad for reasoning are empirically denied-we’ve been
using it for ages
Tetlock and Belkin 96 (Philip is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management at the
University of Pennsylvania, Aaron Belkin is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science University of California, Berkeley,
“Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics”,
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UyMXon0JmBsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=counterfactual+history+and+reasoning&ots=A
6ekIM8xr_&sig=FagXX0NhGOdxHlhZ8--gf7U_T6Y#v=onepage&q=counterfactual%20history%20and%20reasoning&f=false)
There is nothing new about counterfactual inference. Historians have been doing it for at least two
thousand years. Counterfactuals fueld the grief of Tacitus when he pondered what would have
happened if Germanicus had lived to become Emperor: “Had he been the sole arbiter of events, had
he held the powers and title of king, he would have outstripped Alexander in military fame as far as
he surpassed him in gentleness, in self-command and in other noble qualities” (quoted in Gould 1969).
Social scientists-from Max Weber (1949) to Robert Fogel (1964)-have also long been aware of the
pivotal role that counterfactuals play in scholarship on such diverse topics as the causes of economic
growth and the diffusion of religious and philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, some contemporary
historians still sternly warn us to avoid “what-might-have-been” questions. They tell us that history is
tough enough as it is-as it actually is-without worrying about how things might have worked out
differently in this or that scenario. Why make a difficult problem impossible? In this view (Fisher 1970; A.
J. P. Taylor 1954), we do scholarship a grave disservice by publishing a volume on counterfactual
reasoning. We are luring our colleagues “down the methodological rathole” in pursuit of
unanswerable metaphysical questions that revolve around the age-old riddles of determinism, fate,
and free will (Fisher 1970, 18).
Genealogy
A genealogy of historical struggles is key to the criticism- opens up critical ground to
challenge contemporary norms
Dean, 94 (Mitchell, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney and contributor to Economy and
Society and Theory and Society, 1994, “Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical
Sociology”, <http://www.revalvaatio.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/deancritical_and_effective_histories_foucaults_methods_and_historical_sociology.pdf>)ZB
From the early 1970s Foucault places his studies under the new heading of genealogy. However, in his inaugural address to the Collège de
France (1981a) this term describes a domain not fundamentally different from his earlier studies. However, he does speak of a ‘critical’ section
of the analysis that alternates, supports, and complements the genealogical description of the formation of positivities, the domains of objects
of discourse (ibid. 70–3). The critical section addresses the external and internal constraints, and institutional systems that envelop discourse
and subject it to forms of exclusion, rarefraction, and appropriation. Foucault speaks here of a ‘morphology of our will to know’ (ibid. 71).
Indeed, he argues that all earlier forms of exclusion—such as prohibition and taboo, or the division and rejection he studied in relation to
madness—have tended to drift toward a ‘will to truth’, the historically modifiable, institutionalised ways of creating oppositions between true
and false statements that exert a power over the field of discourses and practices (ibid. 54–6). It is here critical description has a style of learned
detachment (la désinvolture studieuse), while the genealogical mood is one of a fortunate positivism (un positivisme heureux). Where
archaeology had earlier addressed the rules of formation of discourses, the new critical and genealogical description addresses both the rarity
of statements and the power of affirmation. Genealogy
will uncover a positive and productive form of power
underlying every movement of institutional or discursive delimitation of statements. If Foucault remains a
‘fortunate positivist’ it is because he treats the formation of the objects of discourse as a distinct and knowable
component of reality, while, at the same time, regarding these objects as ones shaped, fashioned and
applied within social, political, and institutional spaces. Genealogy emerges as a ‘history of the
present’ because it is able to undertake an analysis of those objects given as necessary components of
our reality. It isolates a form of analysis which suspends contemporary norms of validity and
meaning at the same time as it reveals their multiple conditions of formation. In a 1976 lecture, Foucault
defined genealogy (1980i:81–3) 0 present but masked within the smooth functionalism of global theory and its history; and the popular
knowledges and local memories regarded as unqualified or actively disqualified within the hierarchies of scientificity. Such a union is thought in
presentist terms:
it ‘allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this
knowledge today’ . But genealogy can only do this on the basis of archaeology. This historical knowledge of struggles, and the
entertaining of the local, discontinuous, illegitimate forms of knowledge disqualified in the course of such struggles, can only be analysed
because archaeology provides the point of attack on discourse we defined above. ‘If we were to characterise it in two terms,’ Foucault clarifies
(ibid. 85), ‘“archaeology” would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and “genealogy” would
be the
tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected
knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play’.
Genealogy allows for an anonymous narrative of history – any alternatives are coopted by power-knowledge
Shiner, 82 (Larry, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, History, Visual Arts, University of Illinois Springfield,
October 1982, “Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge”, History and Theory, Vol.
21, No. 3, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505097>)ZB
By refusing to trace continuities in history, genealogy is also led to reject the "subject" as the creator
of history and the bearer of its continuity. On the contrary, genealogy shows how the subject is
"created" by power-knowledge complexes of history. Foucault's polemic is specifically aimed at the phenom- enological
conception of the subject as the constitutive foundation of knowledge. In Foucault's view, even the historicized subject of existentialism
remains an ahistorical residue at the heart of history. Genealogy
is "a form of history which can account for the
constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to
a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty
sameness
throughout the course of events."1'5 More specifically, Foucault's genealogy dispenses with the idea of the "author." In his
essay "What is an Author?" Foucault examines the ambiguous role the "author-function" plays in our culture, showing how an "author" and his
or her "works" are extremely problematic concepts. Once we recognize their culturally specific and conventional character, the privilege given
to the "author" and the "work" as units of historical study cannot be justified.'6 Genealogy not only rejects the subject as the originating force
or point of continuity in history, it also undercuts the conventional "objects" or "events" studied by the history of ideas - the idea, the theory,
the constituted discipline or science. These events or units are regarded by Foucault as just as problematic as the "author" or the "work." In The
Order of Things, for example, Foucault argues that the organizing principles which inform the natural history of the eighteenth century give it
more in common with the analysis of wealth or the general grammar of that time than with the biology of the nineteenth century, which is
governed by a set of principles it shares with the political economy and philosophy of its day. Accordingly, the historian could more justifiably
take these organizing principles as the "event" to be studied than anachronistically making the sciences as currently conceived a model for the
event. Thus a genealogy will not take its events as they are conventionally given to it, but will constitute its own events. Specifically,
genealogy will look for the anonymous rules governing discursive practices along with the network of
power relations of which these rules are a part. For example, in The Order of Things, the particular set of human sciences
which Foucault studies are not described in terms of their founders or the internal evolution of concepts and theories but in terms of the
implicit rules which governed them - rules for the formation of objects and concepts, for the selection of theoretical strategies, for positioning
the subject. Because Foucault rejects the conventional "events" of intellectual history to focus on a set of anonymous rules which formed their
preconceptual conditions, he has been misunderstood as rejecting events as such in order to study structures. But Foucault sees no such
dichotomy between structure and event. In common with the Annales approach, he is simply studying events of a different scope and temporal
breadth. The main purpose of the term "archaeology" in Foucault's early works was to call attention to this different level or stratum of events "discursive formations" - which lay between the general rules of linguistic structure on the one hand and the particular epistemological
formulations of science and philosophy on the other.
Political hope fails queers because it was not made for queers - underlying tension
between genealogical paradigms and the logic of the queer. Sexuality and nationalism
are historically co-dependent even as their reproducibility is antagonistic as queers are
excluded from the future. Our genealogy solves.
Nadeau 9 (Chantal Nadeau, professor and director of Gender and Women's Studies, Kritik, " Chantal Nadeau responding to "Happily Ever
After? Examining Narrative Form in the Queer Cuban Love Story" 12/7Colloquium with Dara Goldman", December 17, 2013,
http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2009/12/chantal-nadeau-responding-to-happily.html)
What is the relationship between queer and the future? Between queer and its future? How do we
define queer in relation to a future that would be outside of the matrix of heteronormativity and a
certain vision/rendition of reproducibility? Or is it that queer always happens in an impalpable,
unmarked present, yet one that clearly makes it a “no future” body by definition? In her December 7
lecture, “Happily Ever After? Examining Narrative Form in the Queer Cuban Love Story,” Dara Goldman
examines “The underlying tension between the genealogical structure of traditional narrative
paradigms and the non-normative logic of the queer (Latino) love story.” Using two narrative forms of
“queer cuban love,” Strawberry and Chocolate and The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda, Goldman
walks the thin line between the intra- and extra-diegetic to retrace the queerness that can emanate
from conventional narrative paradigms. Yet, Goldman eloquently argues that queerness can only
emerge from fractures, and--following Rosemary Hennessy--Goldman reminds us that “new freedoms
serve to reinforce capitalist hegemony.” Using Goldman’s inspiring incursion into queer Latino
narrative forms of queer futurity through a discussion of Strawberry and Chocolate (forgive the film
scholar here for her indulgence), I wish in return to question how the apparently disruptive link between
future--queer--hope carries the (post)colonial residues of various sets of narratives of progress and/or
liberation coupled with that of nationalist sentiment. Interestingly, the great divide between the
characters of Diego and David, which seems at first to be commanded by sexual dissonances, is
intrinsically linked to class and to what I call in this instance black (market) mobility i.e. the
underground national publicity that sticks to particular enactments of ethnicity and sexuality. Diego-the urbanite fag--bears liberal freedom as a national flag and is the guardian of the objects of the
Cuban Revolution’s censorship. He feeds on censored commodities from the Continent--Gide, whisky-while protecting the memory of the Cuban artist non grata. Meanwhile, David as the true (and poor)
child of the Cuban Revolution eats up and vomits the expected revolutionary narratives that the
university feeds to its students, until he rubs knees and shoulders with Diego. Diego--the Red Queer,
the Black Queen--stands outside the past and the “no future” of the Cuban Revolution, while
embodying the contemporary urgency of Havana in 1979 as the end of a certain era for the revolution
(the Mariel Boatlift happened in 1980, while, according to Gutierez Alea, “the period before 1979 was
also the time of greatest repression or discrimination against homosexuals”). Diego exposes the ways
that (queer) sexuality and nationalism are historically co-dependent even as their reproducibility is
antagonistic. In this sense, as rightly defended by the careful analysis of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive (Duke UP, 2004) which José E. Muñoz provides in Cruising Utopia: The Then
and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press 2009), Edelman has a point when he suggests that “Political
hope fails queers because, like signification, it was not originally made for us [queers].” This, adds
Muñoz, is why, for Edelman “the social is inoperable for the always already shattered queer subject. It
resonates only on the level of future reproductivity” (Muñoz 91). What then is the queer futurity that
haunts the textual singularities unraveled in Strawberry and Chocolate? As a narrative without children,
is it a film with no futurity or hope? While, according to Goldman, queer sexuality in The Forbidden
Stories of Marta Veneranda escapes identity and travels through various bodies--either that of the
400-pound neighbor or the married bisexual woman--the queerness of Strawberry and Chocolate’s
narrative is conveniently materialized through the bodily narrative of the Red Queer: Diego. And, I
would argue, it is materialized equally through the ice cream flavor of the day which is neither chocolate
nor strawberry but David. A Mexican-Spanish-Cuban coproduction released and distributed in North
America in 1994, thanks to Robert Redford and Miramax, coined “Delectable” by Playboy magazine, and
nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film in 1995, Strawberry and Chocolate sticks to
certain bodies better than others and projects a rather conventional narrative of unfleshy desire
between Diego, the überfag and heir of European culture (which in the film equates contestation and
liberal disenfranchisement) and David the virgin and soldier of the Cuban intellectual revolution. One
could wonder in this sense if it is David the Red, Michelangelo’s David, or David the virgin that most
titillates Diego, who never misses an opportunity to chant and proclaim his identity as “fag-religious-and Cuban.” Cuba as a nation officially rid of fags, gods, and yankees, emerges here as the unlawful
marriage between the unruly and the uncanny. As Goldman rightly suggests in her astute analysis of
the film: beyond and despite the death drive, Cuba emerges as the narrated untainted utopian future.
To me the film echoes Homi Bhabha’s initial call for a cultural critique of the nation as a narrative
(1990). Bhabha rhetorically asks: “What kind of a cultural space is the nation with its transgressive
boundaries and its 'interruptive' interiority?” In light of Goldman’s analysis and the question posed in
her title, “Happily Ever After?,” I would like to ask: What is the futurity of queer in a situation in which
queer belongs less to the transgressive boundaries of the nation than to its interruptive interiority?
Could we say that the queer moment is articulated both through a certain death of queer subjectivity
and through a transformative redeployment in what is coined by Muñoz as queer utopia? What
happens when utopia and futurity stand as the “ever after” present? Can negation and futurity (or
strategic postponement or political suspension) constitute powerful critical terrains to reinterrogate
the transformative power of queer beyond the regimes of identity and its necessary
instrumentalization? On the other end, the deployment and configuration of multiple and competitive
desires that travel through Strawberry and Chocolate and The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda
prompt a lingering yet simple question: Queer? Queer? With all its fractures, ruptures, configurations
of shame and pride, one has to ask if the transformative and disruptive quality of queer doesn’t
belong to its undercurrent potential to exist outside the representation of the reasonable self. This is
maybe–I cautiously use “maybe”–what inhabits and makes intelligible the (a)shamed selves of Marta
Veneranda: an unsettling sense that normative and non-normative sexualities are constituted through a
sequence of porous boundaries, or what Goldman optimistically tags as “the essential connection
between the teleological narrative trajectories and didactic models of reproduction.” Thinking of
reproduction/nonreproduction and narratives of queer (Cuban) love at the same time might offer in
this sense a way to reflect upon and critically unpack the ways queer, queer subjectivities and their
bodily colonial deployments circulate on the theoretical and political highway. It dawns on me that
after years of feminism, postmodernism, queer theory, queer tout court, so much still needs to be
written about how we inhabit our various queer subjectivities and how shamelessly we have
colonized others, imperialized some, denied others, and outlawed those in between. Though we as
theorists have done a fair job at describing the steps through which a certain construction of queer and
queer affinities might be intelligible in the public sphere, it seems that we are still incapable of
translating the competing meanings of queer outside the predicament of a neutral identity that
unavoidably reconstructs the heteronormative and white order. Then the murderous question hits: Is
queer as a representational death only the vessel of one's specific existence, and therefore the
authorized dealer to monopolize the production of anxiety, fear, shame, pride, and exclusion which
necessarily arise at the moment that one’s body becomes someone else’s body? What does it mean to
think that even before we have a moment of humility--which to me equals a death of the self--we are
already doomed to erase any trace of that moment from our skin and let the other, the face of that
other queer bear the scars of shame? Is shame then all about making room for a liberal deployment of
happiness that would erase any possibility for a future-already-in the present? To be, beyond all,
continued…
Narratives
Narratives allow for public pre-recognition- only the narrative of the sacred Cuban
citizenship allows for the recognition of the queer body and allows the erotic to be
expressed
Urbistondo 12 (Josune Urbistondo, Doctor of Philosophy from University of Miami, CARIBBEAN BODYSCAPES: THE POLITICS OF SACRED CITIZENSHIP AND THE
TRANSPERSONAL BODY,http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1808&context=oa_dissertations&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fstart%3D10%26q%3Dcuba%2Bheteronormativity%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%2C45%26as_ylo%3D2012#search=%22cub
a%20heteronormativity%22 ,pgs 229-231, anuss)
Using sacred citizenship as the critical frame for reading these literary works allows publics to imagine political
pre-recognition , echoing Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling discussed throughout the project. Despite these subjects’ current
socio-political limitations, the novels imagine a futurity different from what the contemporary reality affords. They also suggest that politics
and change for these identities and societies at large are not only thought of and enacted, but also
intimately felt. Sacred citizenship is primarily argued through the availability of physical spaces
constructed within the novels through Anzaldúa’s notion of “nepantla.” While the universality of alternative citizenry
seeks to overcome and shatter divides, nepantalism is an acknowledgement of creating space on the
physical, psychical, and sacred border. By casting the sacred and the protagonists accessing sacral elements as in process,
borders are then continuously crossed and imagined as flexible spaces that accommodate a
multiplicity of cultural and sacral components. Unlike Bosniak’s notion of “boundary-conscious” citizenship, where exclusion
is the underbelly of community belonging, the physical and metaphysical crossings produced in these narratives
grant the subjects in process an occasion to reside within the interstices of new discourse and
understanding. Concurrently, bodies as indeterminate and ever-evolving scenes as well as knowledge produced through the erotic
become a form of sacral engagement. In The Pagoda and Cereus Blooms at Night, subaltern bodies re-signify sexual and gendered norms. The
way these bodies perform intimacy further challenges existing notions of heteronormativity as stable
and constant. Cereus Bloom’s Otoh (the anatomically female transgendered protagonist) performs transvestic identities that, I argue,
position a sexed and gendered body that is always in the process of becoming. His multiple transvestic performances come up against
established gender and sexual notions demanding new, more dynamic and flexible language to describe and layer identity without foreclosing
difference. In this instance, Marjorie Garber’s contention with contemporary criticism as looking “through rather than at the cross-dresser” to
insist binarity has been most productive. Otoh’s crossings and layered identity becomes emblematic of resisting this neat resolution and sitting
with identity as a “category crisis.” His identity
is unraveled further when reading his identity alongside the
body/person he loves. Otoh falls in love with Tyler, a cross-dressing nurse who proclaims to reside within the limiting semantic space,
“not a man and not ever able to be a woman” (Mootoo 77). Together, they possess reproductive capabilities but their
social and intimate identities provide a queer perspective to the multiplicity of and in desire. Otoh and
Tyler’s physical coupling is not captured in the novel and left as a queer possibility, while Mr. Lowe in The Pagoda constructs a recuperative
identity through nurturing sexual couplings. Echoing Lorde’s 231 argument, the
(nurturing) erotic is expressed in the novel as
unharnessed energy that envelops and allows unbridled passions with non-threatening recognition.
While Mr. Lowe’s physical space to be, the pagoda he builds, is deferred beyond the scope of the page, his self-making sexual experiences with
both men and women are cast as countering previous abusive and violent sexual encounters. However, his perpetual
state of selfreflection, especially at the end of the novel, supports my argument on the erotic as being part of
sacred citizenship but far less stable than a physical space to which one can return.
Our positioning as students is key—the status quo entails that there is a subtle
discomfort when talking about queer theory in an educational setting which reifies
subtle prejudice, which means an alternative is necessary
Hylton ‘4 (by Mary E. Hylton—2004 University of Nevada, Reno ¶ Mary E. Hylton is assistant professor, School of Social Work, University
of Nevada, Reno “Heteronormativity and the ¶ Experiences of Lesbian and ¶ Bisexual Women as Social Work ¶ Students.”
http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/STUDENTSUPPORT/sswad/docs/HETERO~1.pdf, gingie)
Heteronormativity ¶ With the exception of a few unusual incidents, participants reported ¶ that disclosures of their sexual identities were met
with tolerance, ¶ acceptance, and even support. However, despite
acceptance of their ¶ personal disclosures,
participants encountered subtle forms of ¶ prejudice throughout their social work education programs. The ¶ subtleness of
this prejudice and corresponding discrimination was ¶ articulated by Valerie: "I don't know how to stress the subtlety of it ¶
and the obviousness of it at the same time. I don't really know how ¶ anyone can capture that in a paper, but I don't think that
it is any ¶ different than race or class." Because of its subtly pervasive form, this prejudice most closely ¶
resembles the concept of heteronormativity. This privileging of ¶ heterosexuality inhibited the ability of some people to
consider the ¶ potential implications inherent in the status of lesbian, gay, or ¶ bisexual. For example, Valerie went on to state: "Because
most of the ¶ people were straight, it seemed like they just didn't think about it." ¶ Discomfort.
Heteronormativity was often evidenced by discomfort ¶ with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) issues. ¶
Participants observed that faculty members and peers often appeared ¶ to be uncomfortable in discussing LGBT issues or interacting with ¶
lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. This
discomfort was reported to be ¶ particularly problematic in the
classroom, where curricular content ¶ occasionally brought LGBT issues to the forefront. Rachel reported, ¶ "I think that people feel
fairly uncomfortable even talking about gay ¶ and lesbian issues in class." One participant noted that a professor's
¶ discomfort
with LGBT issues would not only negatively affect ¶ specific discussions, but also influence the overall comfort with issues ¶ of
sexual identity experienced by students. Dee observed, "If the ¶ professors are uncomfortable in talking about it, obviously the ¶ students are
going to feel uncomfortable talking about it." Further, ¶ participants
observed that people who appeared
uncomfortable with ¶ LGBT issues often succeeded in terminating class discussions related ¶ to said
issues. Rachel recalls, ¶ I had one professor who would continue ¶ to try to get people involved ... and it ¶ was painful, like pulling teeth. It
may ¶ be that people have an opinion and are ¶ uncomfortable in expressing it, but [the ¶ discussion] tends to hit
the floor. ¶ Invisibility. Another and perhaps more insidious manner in which heteronormativity ¶ manifested
for participants was the invisibility of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people ¶ within their social work programs. As well
as being experienced on a personal level, ¶ this invisibility was also observed to be widespread within social work education. ¶ Invisibility
was reflected by a dearth of information provided within the curriculum ¶ regarding LGBT issues, the absence of publicly identified lesbian,
gay, or bisexual ¶ faculty and peers, a failure to incorporate LGBT issues in class examples , and a failure ¶ to incorporate
sexual orientation in conceptualizations of diversity. In other words, not ¶ only did some participants attend programs where there were no
publicly identified ¶ lesbian, gay, or bisexual peers or no publicly identified lesbian, gay, or bisexual ¶ faculty, LGBT
issues were
frequently not discussed at all. Faculty members were ¶ reportedly as likely to omit information regarding LGBT issues as were
students. For ¶ example, Audre stated, "Most of the professors by and large do not talk about gay and ¶ lesbian issues." Regional Contexts ¶ The
Southern United States. The participants in this study attended a total of six ¶ different MSW programs located within five Southern states
named earlier. Of these six universities, five were public institutions. These programs ranged in size and ¶ location, with several programs being
located in large urban areas, and an equal ¶ number being located in small to medium-sized cities. Overall, participants described ¶ the general
region in which their social work programs were located, e.g. the South, as ¶ being highly stratified and somewhat culturally conservative.
Stratification was ¶ observed to be based on gender, class, and race. These observations were made by ¶ women who had grown up in the
South as well as women who had grown up in ¶ different regional contexts, but who had relocated to this region. For example, Dee ¶ stated "it
is how it is supposed to be in the South as far as men and women and the ¶ traditional roles." As is evidenced in the statement below, these
patterns of ¶ stratification and cultural conservatism were reflected in the MSW programs. "The ¶ social work program is a reflection of [the city
in which it is located]. It is very ¶ conservative, very White, Southern, and 'old-school.'" ¶ Perhaps because of the stratification and conservatism
of this region, participants ¶ observed that many of the people with whom they came into contact had little or no ¶ awareness of marginalized
groups, including lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. This ¶ observation was most clearly articulated by one of the participants who also
identified ¶ as being Jewish. Judy reported, "Since I have been in Georgia, I have met people who ¶ have never met a gay person. And I have
met people who have never met a Jewish ¶ person, which is a shock for me." The lack of exposure to openly LGBT people as well ¶ as to LGBTrelated issues was given by several of the participants as a principal reason ¶ for disclosing their sexual orientation. In addition, many of the
women discussed this ¶ lack of exposure as an impetus for their feelings of responsibility to educate their peers ¶ about lesbian, gay, and
bisexual issues. ¶ Lynn: I have a responsibility to myself, to my community, and to my classmates to ¶ expose them, whether they like it or not,
to [LGBT] issues. ¶ Audre: And I am here to say [to the class], "That is not true. You do know me. You do ¶ know someone who is gay. And not
only do you know me, but you like me. And you ¶ like me because I am a lot like you, and it is okay." ¶ Religion emerged as a particularly
significant factor influencing the experiences of ¶ participants. Contextually, religion was presented by several of the women as a ¶ determinate
of the regional culture. Participants distinguished the religiosity evident in ¶ the South from religiosity in other regions of the United States. This
religiosity was ¶ described as pervasive, and predominantly Protestant, in particular Baptist. For ¶ example, Judy found that "... people from the
South are very religious. The religion is ¶ different from the religion up north. There are a lot of Baptists." Religion and regional ¶ context were
frequently linked and associated with negative attitudes in regards to ¶ LGBT people. This sentiment is evidenced in Dee's statement: "I know
that a lot of ¶ people who did have objections, they were from the South and were very religious." ¶ Rural and urban settings. Although all of
the women attended programs within the ¶ Southern United States, variances in regional contexts among these programs contributed to the
variance in experiences among participants. In particular, differences ¶ resulting from urban versus rural locations were found. These
differences revolved ¶ around general levels of tolerance of LGBT people and the presence and accessibility ¶ of an LGBT community. Women
who attended programs in medium-sized or small ¶ cities experienced difficulties in accessing lesbian and gay-related resources within the ¶
community. ¶ Lynn: There is no distinct community that we have found here yet. ¶ Rachel: I actually attempted a couple of times to contact the
[gay and lesbian] ¶ community center and I didn't get very far. I got a recording most of the time. There ¶ just wasn't a whole lot going on there.
¶ The lesbian and gay communities in the small or mid-sized cities were often limited, ¶ with very little to offer people who have a diversity of
interests. Furthermore, the ¶ dearth of agencies providing services to the lesbian and gay community precluded ¶ many participants from
realizing their goal of working with lesbian-, gay-, or ¶ bisexually identified people. Kate reported, "I would have loved to have been able to ¶
find a field placement that focused on [LGBT issues], but this is [a small city] and that ¶ is not possible. "The lack of opportunity to work with
lesbian-, gay-, or bisexually ¶ identified people resulted in decisions by a number of participants to move after ¶ graduation to larger cities that
have well-developed social service systems that address ¶ LGBT issues. Unfortunately, the constant migration of these students to urban areas ¶
perpetuates the dearth of social service providers in rural areas who are sensitive to and ¶ interested in LGBT issues. ¶ In contrast, the women
who resided in urban areas, such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and ¶ New Orleans, were not only able to identify and access lesbian and gay-related ¶
resources within the community, many of them were actively involved in said ¶ communities. It should therefore not be surprising that the two
women who were able ¶ to find field placements in agencies that focused primarily on LGBT issues resided in ¶ large cities.
Aff Answers
AT: Extinction Impacts
Their impacts are epistemologically suspect- their focus on preserving the world is
founded within the mindset that the future is only for those who can and do
reproduce in the traditional way
Bruin-Molé 13 (Megen J. de Bruin-Molé, Masters in English Language and Culture, ‘Hybrid Children, Queer Futures The Subversive
Power of the Symbolic Child in Popular Culture’, 4/8/13, http://dare.uva.nl/document/489518, pgs 5-8, anuss)
As in Bruhm and Hurley, this thesis will use the term queer in its “more traditional sense, to indicate a deviation from ‘normal’” (x), whether
that deviance takes sexual, racial, or other forms. While
Curiouser approaches the symbolic child directly from the
perspective of sexuality and queer theory, I hope to emphasise yet another aspect of the child as a
queering symbol— namely that, as David Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg argue, the “fear of monstrous children is
inseparable from fear of mortality and the breakdown of cultural strategies for repressing this fear”
(114). To explore the idea that monstrous children can also represent a kind of queerness or otherness,
motivated by fear, I will take examples of what Karen J. Renner calls “evil children” (Renner “Evil Children I” 79) as my starting point,
moving away from the idealised, inherently ‘good’ child. I will use instances of animal-human hybrid children, a subtype
of the evil child, to explore how the fear and violence that these ‘evil’ children inspire in many texts is far
more reflective of the culture that surrounds and moulds them than of the children themselves. Hybrid
children are useful examples in a discussion of childhood’s symbolism because they are at once human and inhuman, and can represent both
traditional and marginalised identities. My analysis will include an examination of Jeff Lemire’s post-apocalyptic comic book series Sweet Tooth
(2009-2013), which follows the exploits of a half-deer mutant boy, and of Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009), a ,lm about two scientists who
combine human and animal DNA in an experiment to create a monstrous hybrid child.
A theme that appears again and again in
these texts regarding queer children is that of apocalypse, which is a narrative motif but also a theoretical concept that
is closely linked to questions of humanity, otherness, utopia, and futurism. Edelman also makes the
argument that children are vehicles for something he calls “reproductive futurism” (3). Reproductive
futurism is the idea that every decision made in the present must be weighed based on its
consequences for a future held in trust for an imaginary and symbolic child. According to Edelman, this child
not only represents the future that we in the present are commanded to create, it also conforms to
the ideals and ideologies of the status quo, creating a future where there is no room for difference. The
term ‘reproductive futurism’ is a play on words, indicating that the symbolic child initiates a kind of futurism that
continually reproduces itself, and suggesting that the only group allowed to participate in this selfreplicating future are those who can and do reproduce in the traditional way. Edelman’s solution to this
reproductive futurism is the rejection of utopia and futurism altogether, refusing “the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always
affirmation of an Molé 7order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4). According to Edelman, although
standing against hope seems absurd and impossible, we can no longer rationalise using hope for the
future (through the symbol of the child) to dictate action in the present. Instead, we must take the
seemingly impossible position of standing against the child, and thereby against the future. To explore this apocalyptic
reasoning, I will conclude this thesis with a brief exploration of apocalyptic theory and an analysis of (post-)apocalyptic children, in which I will
more explicitly relate the above discussions of evil children, reproductive futurism, and the nature of childhood. !e textual examples in this
discussion will be the childbirth narrative in P.D. James’s 1992 novel !e Children of Men (and the 2006 ,lm adaptation), in which one man is
tasked with protecting what is possibly the last fertile woman on earth and her unborn child. Finally, I will return to my discussion of hybrid
children in an examination of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-2000), a revisionist narrative about a human woman and her half-alien
offspring.
Not only does their reproductive futurism implicate their impacts as being suspect, it
also serves to form a future in which the queer is only allowed as a sacrifice to
preserve the sanctity of the innocent straight child
Zaborskis 13 (Mary, B. English and Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, Department of English at University of Pennsylvania, Orphaning
Queerness, http://scholar.oxy.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=ctsj&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dreproductive%2Bfuturism%2Bepistemology%26btnG%3D%26hl%3D
en%26as_sdt%3D0%252C45%26as_ylo%3D2013#search=%22reproductive%20futurism%20epistemology%22, pgs 18-20, anuss)
Lee Edelman explains why the
child is seen as this desired figure for a normative future. Queers, according to
Edelman, have been continually figured as outsiders because of “reproductive futurism,”89 or the system
that privileges heteronormativity through projects that hold up the child as an empty vessel for which
society works, at least rhetorically. In other words, present actions are for the good of the children in some
undefined future. So these queer children give the adults a way to participate in reproductive
futurism, thus figuring themselves, even though they are queer, into a system from which they have
previously been excluded. The child is an extension of the adult through her queerness: the cross-generational mirroring allows the
child to be a realistic site where the adults can refashion themselves. If they can un-queer the child, the queer adult can
somehow become un-queer. Edelman reminds us that “queerness, for contemporary culture at large …
is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end.”90 So removing the queerness means a
restoration of a child poised for a straight future, thus finding a way to make her queerness figure into
this reproductive futurism. This sacrifice of the queer child is a way to preserve the innocent child.
Once the child is devoid of sexuality, she can become “a vacancy at the center of [a] story … under
[adult] control.”91 This “vacant” child ensures that queerness is gone, replaced with normative gender identity,
thus preserving heteronormativity and continuing to exclude sexualities that do not participate in the
reproduction of that future. If “the sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer,”92 then queerness
can exist—as long as it is “sacrificed” in the service of a heteronormative agenda and has a timeline.
This concept of erasing queer childhood has been increasingly explored in queer theory. Halberstam explains that the “image of the
tomboy is tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood … [and must get] remodeled
into compliant forms of femininity.”93 Like the queer orphan, the tomboy must reflect a stage that ends. By
contrast, Elizabeth Freeman writes that “queers [have been regarded as] as temporally backward, though paradoxically dislocated from any
specific historical moment … [with] no past: no childhood, no origin or precedent in nature, no family traditions or legends, and, crucially, no
history as a distinct people.”94 In the un-queering model of these orphan narratives, the
queer child becomes a way to situate
the queer adult in history, not necessarily with an origin, but with the possibility of a genealogy that
secures their future. The child gives the adult family, and thus the possibility of family traditions ,
legends, and history. According to Freeman, while the queer adult does not have a history, he or she can imagine a
history for the un-queered child. The child becomes able to help sustain “a fantasy of a preferred
past.”95 Whereas the adult’s own past involves his or her ghostly gay child self, this newly straightened
child may not be subject to the same future hauntings. The child inherits an imagined past, and having that past further
assists in the destruction of their queerness because it prevents queer futurity. Thus, the motive to destroy the queer child
becomes shared—queer child and queer mentor collude to orphan queerness. While we can understand why
the adult is so deeply invested in the destruction of the queer, it might not be clear why the child does not resist and even participates in this
self-destructive project. Queerness
is made undesirable to the child, and the careful cultivation of that
feeling of undesirability ensures that the child will not maintain her queer ways once she is made
aware of them. Each child becomes brutally invested in the orphaning of her own queerness.
AT: Alternatives
The us-them dichotomies that heteronormativity creates are the first step towards
“Othering” people that don’t fit into a specific, socially constructed category, which
justifies endless violence in search of a utopia—an alternative must not only reject
heteronormativity, but normativity in the abstract—a drive for normality causes a loss
of pleasure
Barker ’11 (by Meg Barker, 22 Aug 2011, 14:12—Dr. Meg Barker, Senior Lecturer in Psychology ‘What's wrong with heteronormativity?”
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=78518, gingie)
What is heteronormativity? The first thing that happened was that a group of colleagues and I received a response to a complaining letter
which we had written to a television company. We had complained about a recent documentary about sex which they aired. One of our main
problems with the programme was that virtually all of the sex that they included in it was heterosexual sex (heterosexual couples kissing and
cuddling, or – when it got more explicit - somebody with a penis penetrating someone with a vagina). A small part of the final episode was
given over to considering why some people are attracted to the 'same sex', but the vast majority of representations of sex were heterosexual.
The response from the television company was that they didn't really see a problem with their representations given that 'the majority of the
British population is heterosexual'. After receiving this email, I took a bit of a break and read a few news articles which my friends had linked to
online. I found a particularly interesting one about a legal case where a woman wanted the right to wear a collar to work because she was into
BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism). After finishing the article I looked through the comments
which people had written on the website. I was struck by how many of them argued that the woman should keep her sexuality to herself, 'leave
her sexual proclivities at home like most people', stop 'going on' about what she does in private, in her bedrooom, etc. A similar issue has
recently come up in psychotherapy and counselling, whereby some people have argued that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) counsellors
should not let their clients know about their sexualities, and that being open about them could be harmful. All of these are examples of
heteronormativity: the idea that attraction and relationships between one man and one woman are
the normal form of sexuality, that sex itself should involve a penis penetrating a vagina, and that any
other forms of sexuality, or gender, are not normal, or at least not as normal as this. The first example which I
gave of heteronormativity is pretty obvious. The argument from the television company is that it is okay to present heterosexuality in virtually
all of the examples of sex on the show because 'the majority' of people are heterosexual. The second example is perhaps a little less clear, but
none-the-less I think it is an example of heteronormativity. People
generally have no problem with a person wearing a
wedding ring to work, having a picture of their heterosexual partner on their desk, or talking about
what they did with their heterosexual partner at the weekend. The suggestion that it might not be
okay to wear clothes, or have conversations, which imply that a person is lesbian, gay or bisexual, or a
BDSM practitioner, is heteronormative because the same kinds of things which are challenged - or
regarded as strange - here go unquestioned for non-kinky heterosexual people. These second kind of challenge
also reveals that people are generally assumed to be heterosexual (and interested in heterosexual, non-kinky, sexual practices) unless proven
otherwise. This is another example of heteronormativity. People
who are not heterosexual (or who are kinky, or nonmonogamous, or otherwise outside the heteronorm) have to make a decision whether to let people know this or not,
whereas people inside the heteronorm know that people will make the correct assumptions about
their sexuality, relationships, gender, etc. Why is it a problem? So what the television company, and (by implication)
many of the people commenting on the collar story are saying is that heterosexuality is normal, and therefore it is
fine to depict it as such, and to see people as strange who do not fit within it, and to put different
restrictions on their behaviours than we do on heterosexual people. I'm guessing that many of the people
concerned would agree that homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are bad things: it is not okay to be prejudiced towards,
or to harm people people on the basis of, their sexuality or gender. However, they don't see a
problem with regarding people outside of heteronormativity as somehow 'less normal' and treating
them differently on the basis of that. Why do I think this is such a problem? There are many reasons, but here I am going to
focus on three rather practical ones. First, rather obviously perhaps, heteronormativity is bad for people who are outside of heteronormativity.
Secondly, it is based on some quite problematic ideas about what is normal, and whether that should be what we base our treatment of other
people on. And finally, perhaps less obviously, I would argue that heteronormativity is also bad for people who are within it.
Heteronormativity is bad for people outside of it Psychologist Catherine Butler wrote a short story, which was eventually
produced as a film, called 'homoworld'. This imagined a world in which heteronormativity was reversed: where being gay and lesbian was seen
as the norm, whilst heterosexuality was regarded as peculiar and requiring explanation. It is a useful exercise for people who are heterosexual
themselves to reflect upon what it might feel like to be outside of the sexuality norm. For example, the characters in homoworld have to decide
whether to come out (and deal with the stress of possible rejection or prejudice) or to hide their relationship (and deal with the stress of
keeping such an important thing secret). They also have to cope with questions from others about the ways in which they decide to commit to
their relationship or to have children. On a very everyday level, they are surrounded by lesbian and gay representations: on billboard
advertisements, in pop songs, and on the street where it is generally only lesbian and gay people who are kissing or holding hands. It can be
useful also to check out the heterosexual questionnaire, and the straight privilege checklist, to get a sense of how heteronormativity feels for
those who are outside of it. These tools raise awareness of the fact that it is not just outright homophobia which is bad for LGB people. It is also
tough if everybody around you feels that it is okay to ask what you think caused your sexuality, or to question whether you are really that
sexuality, or whether it might be better just to keep quiet about it. Similarly,
there is a degree of privilege, comfort and
security, in having a sexuality which nobody else feels discomforted by, which isn't used as a reason to
question your masculinity or femininity, which isn't the basis of derogatory language (e.g. 'that's so gay'),
which is not seen as the totality of who you are, and whereby you are not expected to speak for everybody else who has that sexuality. The
monosexual and cisgender privilege checklists are similarly useful in relation to bisexuality and trans.
Psychologists know that dividing people into 'us' and 'them' is often the first step towards treating
'them' differently , and even cruelly. So we can see that heteronormativity and homophobia cannot be as easily
disentangled as people might hope. When we heternormatively separate 'normal' heterosexual
people out from other groups
(e.g. LGBT, BDSM, non-monogamous, asexual),
we reinforce divisions which then
make it easier for those groups to be ridiculed, stigmatised, and attacked . We know that biphobia, transphobia
and homophobia still exist at worrying levels: there
are still countries where people can be put to death for these
things, and in the UK the extent of LGBT bullying and discrimination is still extremely problematic. If we are serious about ending hate crime
and prejudice we need to look beyond just criminalising transphobia, homophobia and biphobia, towards addressing the heteronormative
society which suggests that it is acceptable to see LGBT people, and other groups, as 'different'. Heterosexuality might not be normal, and why
are we so concerned with normality anyway? This is all very well, you might say, but the television company is right that surveys have found
that most people are heterosexual. Perhaps it is just bad luck for those who are outside of heteronormativity. We can't stop presenting
heterosexuality as the norm just because it is hard for a few minorities that we do so. Facts are facts. There are many answers to these
challenges. First we might think about the findings of those surveys which are mentioned. The percentage of heterosexual, and nonheterosexual, people found in such surveys depends an awful lot on the questions which are asked and the way that they are asked. In the UK,
the national census does not ask questions about sexual identity for precisely these reasons. The national treasury estimated that between 5%
and 7% of the UK population were LGB, whereas the International Household Survey found that 1.5% of people said they were LGB. However, a
further 3.8% said that they were 'other', didn't respond, refused to respond, or reported that they didn't know. Given high levels of stigma and
prejudice we might well suggest that these surveys are actually measures of 'out' LGB people who are happy to use this terminology (which not
all cultural groups use, for example). The NATSAL survey, which asks about 'sexual experiences' rather than sexual identities, found that 8-10%
of people in the UK had had sexual experiences with a partner of the 'same sex' in 2000. This had gone up from 3-5% of people in 1990, so
clearly experiences, or at least reporting of them, is not static over time. Also, people may well answer differently to a postal survey (whether
they answer at all, and whether they answer honestly) than to an in depth interview, for example. This could partially explain why Kinsey's
famous study in the US found that over a third of men reported some 'homosexual' contact. So we can question whether heterosexuality really
is the norm. By some ways of assessing normality (number of people who identify as heterosexual on a survey), we could argue that it is.
However, if we turn to behaviour, particularly if we include all of the groups who fall – in some way – outside of mainstream heteronormativity,
then we would conclude that it is not. In fact, non-kinky,
monogamous, 'opposite sex', relationships and attractions
would certainly be the minority if we considered all those people who have had some kind of 'same
sex' sexual experience, those two thirds of people who enjoy some kind of BDSM practices or fantasies, the high number of people
whose gender identity doesn't fit into traditional masculinity or femininity, and all of the people who are in some way non-monogamous. But
even if we went by the most conservative of statistics, we might ask how big a minority it has to be before we include a group of people as part
of the norm, or at least stop treating them as different from everybody else. Analogies could be made here with other minority groups such as
ethnic and religious minorities, and those with certain disabilities, although there are clearly different issues with different types of 'difference',
and they often intersect with one another. Discussions of sexuality often focus on trying to prove, or disprove, naturalness or normality, but we
might ask a bigger question of whether either of these is really a good foundation to base our treatment of people on. We can think of example
of very unusual things (being highly intelligent, or a person like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela) which we would agree are good, and very 'normal'
things (like being unkind or standing by when others are in trouble) which are not. We might also start to ask questions about why we focus so
much on some divisions that it is possible to make between people (about sexuality and gender, for example) and not on others (for example,
about eye-colour, food preference, or handedness). Heteronormativity
is bad for people within it My final point is that
heteronormativity is not just problematic for people who are located outside it. It is actually pretty bad for those inside it for many reasons as
well. These have been particularly brought home to me in my work as a sexual and relationship therapist. Almost every seemingly
heteronormative client who I've seen in this capacity has expressed an overwhelming desire to be 'normal' and often a desperate fear that they
might not be, which has frequently made their life a misery.
Normality is often privileged over everything else
including having pleasurable sex , positive relationships, and open communication. First, given the degree of
stigmatisation of those who are outside heteronormativity there is a lot of pressure on those who are
inside heteronormativity to stay within it. They know that stepping outside means, at least, being questioned and
seen as less than normal, and, at worst, being attacked, oppressed, and discriminated against. This means that
heteronormativity can feel like a dangerous and precarious place to be, especially in these days where
everyone is also expected to be quite sexually adventurous in order to prove that they are interesting
people with exciting relationships. The lines between heteronormativity and the 'outside' can seem
pretty blurry . Where, for instance, do bicurious women fit, or metrosexual guys, or people who buy the fluffy handcuffs and jewelled
riding crops sold by mainstream sex shops, or those who have a new monogamous arrangement where it is okay to occasionally get off with
somebody other than their partner at a nightclub? So those who have some kind of desires and inclinations beyond rigid heteronormativity,
and who act on these, often live in some degree of fear of others finding this out and of how they might be treated if they do. Others
try
to remain completely within heteronormativity, but this often brings with it problems as well . Many
people, for example, simply do not tune into their sexuality at all for fear of what they might find if they do so. Instead, they focus on trying to
have a certain kind of sex with a certain kind of partner the number of times per week which they have been told is 'normal'. Quite often, this
results in problems such as people being penetrated finding it painful or difficult and/or people penetrating finding that they lose their erection
or ejaculate too quickly (see www.cosrt.org.uk). Statistics on these kinds of 'sexual dysfunctions' go up to between a third and a half of people,
suggesting that they are extremely common. However, we might question whether it is right to see these as 'sexual dysfunctions', or as 'societal
dysfunctions' whereby people are being told to have a certain kind of sex which isn't really what they'd most enjoy. Sex therapists often find it
useful, when working with these kinds of problems, to get people reading about the vast diversity of sexual practices and fantasies that human
beings have, either by reading collections of fantasies and/or making checklists of what they might like to try. It
can also be helpful to
question the idea that everybody needs to be sexual in order to be regarded as healthy or normal. All
of this involves questioning heteronormativity. Moving from sex to romantic relationships more broadly, we can see that
heteronormative models of everyone needing a opposite-sex partner to spend their life with can be very tough on those who are single, or who
go through relationships break-ups, as well as sometimes encouraging people to stay in relationships which are not good for them, and
sometimes meaning that people leave relationships too quickly due to expectations of the 'perfect' match. What does an alternative look like?
It is often easier to point out what is wrong with something - like heteronormativity - than it is to offer anything else to put in its place. To end
this blog (which has become rather long already!) I will try to offer some quick ideas which might be of help to people like the television
companies and commentators who I mentioned earlier, if they are convinced by my arguments. First of all it is vital to point out that it isn't just
heteronormativity that is a problem. Any
kind of normativity would be equally problematic. There is a tendency for those
who step out of one kind of normativity to quickly produce their own form of normativity in its place. This is pretty understandable because
being on the outside is a scary and precarious place to be, and we
seem to be drawn to seeing the world in 'us and
them' kinds of ways. However it is also unhelpful, and reinforces the very divisions that we are saying are so
problematic. For example, it isn't great for LGBT people if, on coming out, they are faced with a whole load of new and rigid rules about
how to be properly lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. Similarly, for the person who is struggling with sex in the ways which I wrote about above, it
isn't great if the only other option that they can find is another kind of normativity where everybody is expected to be hugely sexually creative
and try everything once. So the answer is not just to come up with another kind of normativity that we expect everybody to adhere to.
However, what we can do is to replace the normativity model with what Gayle Rubin calls a model of 'benign variation'. This is the idea that
there is a diversity of sexual desires, practices and relationships, and – so long as they are engaged in consensually and ethically – they are all
equally fine. Here we are not concerned with how normal something is: a person can equally take part in something which is completely unique
to them, or which most other people have experienced. What would this look like in practice? Here are a few ideas, but I would be very
interested in hearing other's thoughts. Programme-makers, advertisers, magazine editors and so forth would be less concerned with
representing what is 'normal' and would instead go out of their way to ensure that the full diversity of sexual practices, relationships, bodily
forms, and so forth, were represented in their materials. In addition they would take care not to present any sexual practice, identity or
relationship as ridiculous or problematic on the basis of its unusualness. Instead of asking whether something like wearing a collar to work was
a more or less normal activity, we would afford each person with the same rights to express their sexuality or relationships through their
appearance. Researchers in this area would be less concerned with questions of what are, or are not, normal sexualities, and with trying to find
explanations for certain sexualities. Instead they would attend to documenting the diversity of sexualities that exist, to exploring the lived
experiences of different people and communities, and perhaps to examining which ways of understanding sexuality are most positive in terms
of decreasing stigma and discrimination. Educators and parents would be keen to ensure that young people grow up with an understanding of
the range of possible relationships and identities available to them, rather than the idea that some of these are better than others. The focus
would be on ethics, consent, and communication, and on tuning into our own bodies, desires and feelings.
AT: Status Quo Solves
The regime is inconsistent- queer rights aren’t guranteed
Halatyn ’12 (Justin Halatyn, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 8/24/12, “From Persecution To Acceptance? The
History Of LGBT Rights In Cuba”http://www.coha.org/from-persecution-to-acceptance-history-of-lgbt-in-cuba/) JRW
Despite the recent announcements by the Castro regime to move towards an LGBT friendly
community, the government remains inconsistent with all of its promises. For example, gay men have
long been considered unfit to join the Communist Party. Within the last 20 years, a few prominent gay bars and
organizations have been raided and shut down by the government. Gay rights activists, both in Cuba and abroad, have
accused the Cuban authorities of applying the crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness” unfairly to
homosexuals, and ignoring complaints of those who have been beaten or fired from their jobs
because of their sexual orientation. Other gay rights activists have criticized Mariela Castro for her
inconsistency and hypocrisy when it comes to gay rights, arguing that gay rights activists continue to
be imprisoned, beaten, or simply disappear while she provides little more than lip service to the issue.
In addition, while Cuban society is gradually warming up toward homosexuality and LGBT rights, many
homophobic elements remain. For example, in 2006, the Cuban state television released “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the first
soap opera on Cuban television concerning issues of homosexuality. Although the soap opera was received favorably by many for bringing the
issue into the public discourse, it also attracted enormous controversy, with many Cubans saying they were offended by the show’s release and
refused to watch it. The most negative reviews conceded the belief that the show was important, but as a way to warn people of
homosexuality’s consequences rather than a way to promote tolerance and acceptance toward it.
Cuba is far from heaven for queers- gay pride parade canceled after organizers
arrested
Katz 8 (Sue Katz, 1 July 2008, “Cuba Cancels Gay Pride Parade,” Alter Net,
http://www.alternet.org/story/90474/cuba_cancels_gay_pride_parade)kw
Cuba's very first gay pride march was planned for June 25th, the Guardian, a British daily, reported, but
the organizers were wary. It's true that just a month ago Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela (pictured
below) spoke against homophobia at a public rally in her role as head of Cuba's National Centre for Sex
Education. Even though this seemed to signal a desirable attitude change at the national level, it's
certainly not queer heaven. Havana-based Aliomar Janjaque, a gay activist, pointed out that continuing
discrimination towards LGBT people ranges from workplace bias to some folks still being jailed for
same-sex passion. The march was to be a collaborative project between Cuban gays in Cuba and in
Florida. One key Florida supporter, Arturo Alvarez, was prescient in his concerns: "We'll see with this
parade if openness has really been achieved." Unfortunately, the Guardian reported in a follow-up
story the next day, the event was canceled "moments before it was to begin." Aliomar Janjaque, the
president of the Foundation LGTB Reinaldo Arenas in Memoriam, and his fellow activist, the president
of the Cuban League Against AIDS, were intending to deliver a set of demands to the Justice
Department when they were arrested. They were asking for a governmental apology "for its past
repression and, in some cases, incarceration of openly gay citizens, and the inhumane treatment of
prisoners with AIDS." The Cuban Catholic Church, the AP reported, had just a couple of days earlier
complained about the government "promoting" homosexuality, in response to Mariela Castro's speech
against homophobia and the announcement of "government-paid sex changes for 28 people who have
undergone extensive study after requesting the surgery." Instead of the canceled gay pride gathering,
Arturo Alvarez held a solidarity rally at his Latin dance and drag club in Miami. Ironically enough, the
aborted march had been set to begin at Havana's aptly named Don Quixote Park.
AT: Framework
Multiple benefits to pedagogically embracing counterfactual history which allows us
to inquire and question beyond the levels we already are comfortable at and gives us
insights on the topic that wouldn’t have happened outside this debate round-different
levels of analysis on the topic are better as long as we’re in the direction of the topic
Huston 5 (James Huston is a Regents Professor at the University of Illinois and a writer at Project Muse, “Reconstruction as it should have
been: An Exercise in Counterfactual History”,http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwh/summary/v051/51.4huston01.html)
Finally, let me add the potential heuristic value of the counterfactual exercise to students. Teaching
students the importance of context in human affairs is actually a more formidable task than many of
us realize. Having students determine the historical forces at work in some time period (the
parameters of the problem, so to speak), a set of potential solutions, and then sort out what was
realistically possible, is a powerful exercise. Moreover, it also provides students with an insight into
basic principles of historical inquiry that they can then apply to the present in which they exist: understanding the context, constructing hypothetical solutions, and then testing the proposed solutions
against their understanding of the forces and ideolo- gies at work.
Analyses coming from a counterfactual viewpoint increases our ability to process
different types of information-solves any education standards
Tetlock and Lebow 1 (Philip is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management at the University
of Pennsylvania, Richard Lebow is an American political scientist best known for his work in international relations and U.S. foreign
policy, “Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning”,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3117716.pdf?acceptTC=true)
Correlational analyses revealed that experts invoked all three belief-system defenses against
dissonant close-calls but preferred certain defenses. Two of them-challenge the logic of the connecting
principles and generate second-order counterfactuals that put history back on track-were widely
employed and were tightly linked to the respondent’s abstract orientation toward world politics
(average r = 0.54 with the covering-law scales). The third defense-challenge the mutability of historical
antecedents-was markedly less linked to abstract political orientation (average r = 0.29). There is no
compelling reason one’s theoretical position on the robustness of nuclear deterrence should predict
whether one believes Stalin could have survived the cerebral hemorrhage of March 1953 or whether
Cuba could have been cloudier on an October day in 1962. The plausibility of most antecedents hinges
on specific facts tied to particular times, places, and events; if anything, it is disconcerting that abstract
orientation predicts so much variance—8% to 10%- in judgments of the mutability of antecedents.
This location, just like the homeland of Cuba, is crucial to endorsing discourse.
Academic institutions like debate have a responsibility to creating meaningful changestopping homophobic violence requires a change in heteronormative academia.
Zosky 9 (Diane, Associate Professor of Social Work, Education’s Missed Opportunity to Influence Tolerance: The Absence of LGBT Content
in Curriculum, 2009, http://mediarelations.illinoisstate.edu/identity/0910/oct8/Survey-Zoskypub.pdf, pgs 14-15, anuss)
Institutions of higher education can do a great deal to influence the learning environment to be more
tolerant and accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students. This can be instrumental in
preparing all students for a role in society that is diverse in many ways, including sexual orientation
and gender identity. Universities can begin by taking a close look at the macro environment as established through policy and asking
what message is sent to constituents of all levels. Partner benefits for employees, the explicit inclusion of sexual orientation
and gender identity in institutional nondiscrimination policies, including same-sex partners for
“married” student housing, support of LGBT student and faculty/staff organizations, and support for
LGBT content in the curriculum are just a few policies that can promote a diversity inclusive
environment. Policies at the macro environment not only impact recruitment and retention of LGBT students, but queer faculty and staff
as well. When minority students see people like themselves in faculty and administrative positions, they receive the implied message that the
environment is inclusive, safe, and mentors or role models are available. Universities can establish the unequivocal expectation that
homophobia, discrimination, harassment, and oppression will not be tolerated. Institutions of higher education may have to be pro-active in
this regard. Few reports of anti-gay violence or harassment should not necessarily lead institutions to naïvely believe that their campus is safe.
Students may be reluctant to identify or report the victimization if they fear it won’t be taken seriously or even worse, would subject them to
even more oppression by outing in a hostile environment. Without clear evidence from the institution that the university will be a safe and
supportive environment, students might easily decide that the stakes are simply too high to risk whether or not their victimization will be
responded to appropriately.
Establishing a culture of zero-tolerance for LGBT harassment or violence will
often require extensive training for many groups of people that serve students. The assumption that
most people come from a perspective of hetero-normativity indicates that knowledge, sensitivity
training and exposure to gay/bi/trans issues and people would be enlightening for most straight staff.
Certainly the campus police force must be sensitive to LGBT issues to respond to reports of harassment and victimization as hate crimes. Staff
in residence halls, from RAs to the dining hall employees, would benefit from training. Staff at the campus health services and the student
counseling services should know how to render services that are sensitive and respectful to sexual orientation or gender identity. Offices of
Student Affairs may often be a central place to receive and respond to issues with LGBT students that may jeopardize their continued
matriculation through the University. It is essential that the Student Affairs staff is educated and accepting. Obviously training and
encouragement for academic faculty to be comfortable and inclusive with LGBT content in the curriculum sends a message to all students that
sexual orientation and gender identity minority status are valid experiences . Inclusion
of content in the curriculum
establishes a counter-experience to the silencing and subjugation that occurs when LGBT experience is
ignored. This legitimization of status can set the culture for positive identity development and self-esteem
thereby freeing up gay/bi/trans students’ energy for the business of preparing for a career. In addition to a pro-active stance by intentionally
including LGBT content into the curriculum, faculty can challenge homophobic remarks and jokes as ignorant, malicious and unacceptable in an
enlightened environment. Faculty can call attention to unintentional heterosexist opinions as well and open up a learning experience for
students who may not have intended to be derogatory. Faculty can facilitate discussion on the existence of privilege that may be invisible, yet
pernicious to those who are marginalized. This
type of open and enlightened discussion of ideas about diversity
may provide bridges for people who are different from each other to find they have more in common
than they have in difference. This study indicates that students in college have very little exposure to LGBT content at the collegiate
as well as pre-college level. Yet, exposure to LGBT people and issues through knowledge and personal
relationship can dispel myth, stereotype, and judgment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
students. Lessons learned in the classroom and on campuses about diversity, inclusion, and tolerance will be carried into society by the next
generation of leaders. Higher education, as the catalyst for enlightenment, has an opportunity and indeed a
responsibility to shape a society free from prejudice and discrimination.
Our criticism of neoliberal policy and intellectual practices is key to embracing an
egalitarian ethic
Grady et al, 2012 (Jonathan Grady PhD, Rigoberto Marquez PhD, and Peter McLaren PhD, Department of
Education, University of California, Los Angeles, August 27, 2012, “A Critique of Neoliberalism with Fierceness:
Queer Youth of Color Creating Dialogues of Resistance”, Journal of Homosexuality,
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00918369.2012.699839>)ZB
In order to obtain a better sense of the various types of resistance in which queer youth of color are participating in, further research needs to
address the ways queer youth of color resist schooling practices that are anti-queer and homophobic. For instance, instead of just looking at
resistance through performance, it is important to look at the different types of resistance and activist work queer youth of color are doing
within HIV/AIDS organizations. There is a long history of queer youth activism within these spaces. HIV/AIDS organizations have provided queer
youth of color with opportunities to name their identities and mobilize for unjust practices in schools and communities. In addition, there is also
a growing network of queer youth of color in metropolitan cities that have started coalition work with other youth organizations. Documenting
how and why queer youth of color participate in those spaces could provide us with an interesting and innovative lens to see how emerging
coalition models among youth are developing on the ground. As queer youth of color become more comfortable disclosing their queer
identities within schools it is imperative that schools are equipped to provide these youth with the resources and protections they deserve.
Consequently, it
is also acknowledged that work needs to done that looks at the role of teachers who try
to create spaces of resistance for queer youth of color in schools. There is little research that
documents the experiences of teachers working with and for queer youth of color, and hardly any that looks
at the experiences of teachers of color working with queer youth in urban schools. Through resistance, activism and
performance, queer youth of color have now started to shape a critique of oppressive structures,
neoliberal policies, and pedagogical practices that are critical of their intersecting identities. Thus, society
must now move toward a conceptual framework that concerns the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the construction of
educational discourse and practice. Through
sites of resistance rooted in progressive struggle, queer youth of
color must be enabled by critical transformative intellectuals committed to encouraging youth to
critically evaluate and challenge ideologies while displaying an allegiance to egalitarianism (Hill, 2009). As
the suppression of critical thought, the shattering of lives, bodies, and dreams by neoliberal capital and the commodification of education
becomes commonplace, McLaren and Baltodano (2000) suggest: Reclaiming schools and teacher education as one of cultural struggle and
education in general as a vehicle for social transformation in conservative/capitalist times, a clear commitment to organize parents, students,
and communities is needed. It stipulates that society needs to develop critical educators, community activist, organic intellectuals, and teachers
whose advocacy of social justice will illuminate their pedagogical practices. (p. 41) As
we begin to think dialectically and
continue to struggle for social justice, educational equity, creativity, and spaces of freedom, our hope
is that by voicing and bringing to the surface the experiences of queer individuals of color and notions of
the performativity of dance we
policies
can start to create a more inclusive conversation on the effects of neoliberal
on our nation’s youth and how to create a platform of collective resistance considering the nexus of performance, education, and
race.
Reject their truth claims- an effective genealogy must reject objectivity
Vucetic, 11 (Srdjan, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at University
of Ottawa, 2011, “The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations”, Google
Books)ZB
Genealogy is a tool of interpretative inquiry, which defines itself against histories guided by a desire
for the empirical and scientific status of historical knowledge.” It rejects objectivity and
correspondence to the facts in favor of (inter)subjectivity and the multiplicity of interpretations. Central to
genealogy is the notion of the so-called power-knowledge nexus, which posits that truth and validity
are discursively produced and enmeshed with relations of power. Last, genealogy seeks to be
"effective" in disrupting of what is regarded as natural, logical, or inevitable, rather than constructed,
contingent, and haphazard. It is in this sense that genealogy is particularly promising as an antidote to Churchillian histories of the
Anglosphere as the carrier of liberal modernity. This particular genealogy is committed to the historical recovery of identity politics in four
epochs of Anglosphere history: America and Britain it 1894-1903; Australia and New Zealand in 1950-1951; Australia and Canada in 1955-1956
and 1964-1965; and Britain and Canada in aooa-zoo3. At its most basic level. mine is a story about how competing articulations of Self- Other
relations collided in the imagination of what it means to be a member of the Anglosphere core for over a century. But there is more: Embedded
in this genealogy are four sets of pairwise comparative cases studies that l use to evaluate the theoretical argument. These are the AngloAmerican ‘great rapprochement‘; the Korean War and the Pacific Pact negotiations; the alliance politics of the Suez crisis and the Vietnam
escalation: and the anti-Iraq “coalition of the willing.”
AT: Cap K
Perm Solves. The focus should be on the intersection between economic capitalism
and its exclusion of the queer
Tanyildiz 13 (Gokboru Tanyildiz, Masters in Arts and Critical Sociology from Brock University in Ontario, MAKING QUEER ANTICAPITALIST RESISTANCE INTELLIGIBLE: READING QUEER CHILDHOOD IN THE RUINS OF NEOLIBERALISM, 2013,
http://www.dr.library.brocku.ca/bitstream/handle/10464/4637/Brock_Tanyildiz_Gokboru%20Sarp_2013%20.pdf?sequence=1, pgs 104-105,
anuss)
Despite the invaluable contributions made by many scholars to the fields of sociology and queer studies, most
of their work
overlooks the intersection of economic and material fields in the analysis of cultural productions.
Indeed, queer cultural studies has predominantly been preoccupied with the sexual and its political connotations. This onedimensional cultural analysis has resulted in a gap: the absence of the economic in queer cultural
studies. I addressed this gap through an analysis of three cultural 104 productions. In this project, I analyzed the multi-layered
complexities among the sexual, economic, historical, and geographical spheres of social life as they are
represented in Kes, Billy Elliot, and Boys Village. By teasing out these complexities and articulations, I brought the sexual and the economic into
closer conversation. Relatedly, by
drawing on anti-capitalist theoretical tools to analyze visual cultural
productions, I integrated the economic more deeply into queer cultural studies. Therefore, my thesis
contributes to the fields of queer studies, sociology and economic theory by illuminating the often neglected connections between the sexual
and economic. I achieved this in a nuanced analysis of the lives of working-class children in a context where normative sociosexual relations
police the boundaries of ‘liveable’ lives. I shed light on the relationship between sexual and economic regimes in three ways. First,
I
extended and complicated queer reading strategies by incorporating an anti-capitalist critique that
emphasizes that “the regulation of sexuality [is] systematically tied to the mode of production proper
to the functioning of political economy.”206 This incorporation has methodological consequences as it
offers a new strategy of reading and interpreting cultural texts. For instance, my anti-capitalist queer readings of Kes, Billy Elliot and Boys
Village investigated
the representations of heteronormativity and capitalism in relation to each other,
not independent of one another. In so doing, I was able to capture the violence perpetuated by these
normative regimes in their ever-changing and complex nature. Second, I explored representations of
heteronormative capitalist subjectivity from the vantage point of non-normative subjectivities by
juxtaposing Robinson Crusoe with Kevin in the contemporary film, Boys Village. This juxtaposition has epistemological
implications as it provides a novel way of knowing social reality. An African proverb reminds us the
importance of critical epistemologies: “until lions start writing down their own stories, the hunters
will always be the heroes.” Through my analysis, I challenged the mainstream understanding that economy is a neutral sphere that is
divorced from the racialized, gendered and sexualized processes of social life. By telling the stories of Friday’s grandchildren, I demonstrated
how white, capitalist, colonialist, heterosexual Robinson subjectivity cannot express the richness of human experience. Rather, it distorts the
relationships of domination and exploitation that render people’s lives unlivable. Third,
I offered a deepened spatio-temporal
understanding of queerness by deploying nostalgia in a new way. Through this deployment, I
indicated that queer modalities of being are not bound to the here-and-now, unlike normative social
ontologies. Even though it exists in the here-and-now, queerness also refers to the thereand-then
through nostalgic negotiations of time and space. This utopic characteristic of queerness highlights its
fundamental openness to various possibilities. In this open futuristic time and space, queer film engage with history in a
nostalgic fashion. It embodies the algos of those who suffered from unlivable and impossible lives, and strives to make a nostos for them by
frustrating the straightjacketing of normative matrices of power.
Queers are excluded from past genealogy for not being "productive"
During 92 (Simon During, a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where he also served as Director of the Film and Media
Programme and a PhD in Victorian Literature from Cambridge, "Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing", 1992,
http://www.questia.com/library/107602585/foucault-and-literature-towards-a-genealogy-of-writing)
Within the sexual apparatus, individuals do not interest the state primarily as owners of property, or
as citizens, or even, finally, as productive workers, but as emotionally stable subjects capable of
strong interpersonal relations-that is, capable of domestic stability and love. At this point, as we shall
see, sexuality begins to split ofF from classic nineteenth-century bio-power in the process of extending
it. Foucault argues that the family becomes the object of state administrative concern in a discourse
which anchors affection across two axes: the husband-wife axis and the parent-child axis. This
question of "anchoring affection" is vital: ultimately, for instance, it is the connection between sex and
interpersonal relationships that lies behind the strong sanctions against masturbation in the nineteenth
century. Sex takes up its function as an anchor for love as legal relations between spouses change: as
wives gain rights. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act, for instance, enabled magistrates to grant
separation and maintenance orders on behalf of women (as mothers) who were subject to domestic
violence or "Wife Torture," as Francis Power Cobbe called it in an influential pamphlet of the time.
With the legal and religious support for the life-long marriage contract weakening during the 1880s and
1890s, conduct books, admittedly by radicals like Karl Pearson, began to advise women not just on how
to manage a house but on how to keep a marriage "happy" by improving sexual techniques. As to
children: it is where children's health is concerned that experts come to have their least problematic
access to the family, especially in the programme of national vaccination-the first British compulsory
Vaccination Act being passed in 1853. But the state's right of access into the domestic sphere was
fiercely resisted (Wohl 1983, 10-43). By the first decades of this century, "sex education," designed to
produce a "healthy" or "natural" attitude to sex in children, had become a site of contestation. Here the
state's right to take a pastoral role was not generally accepted. By the late nineteenth century, however,
proto-welfarist agencies monitor working-class domestic life to prevent children from becoming
prostitutes, and to protect them from incest (though, in Britain, incest only becomes illegal in the first
decade of this century). Domestic space becomes not just a sanctuary from the supposedly necessary
immoralities of business, or the horrors of alienated labour, or even a site available for women to
manage and to keep clean and "respectable," but a defence against outsiders, most vividly conjured
up by the image of the "sex criminal" preying on children. 1 And in anti-"perversion" rhetoric, the
concept of nature is called upon. Non-heterosexual sexual acts between adults are troped as
"unnatural."
Case Neg
Status Quo Solves
Same sex support in Cuba- Even the church supports
LGBTCuba 08 (LGBTCuba, June 2008, “Gay Celebration in Cuba Launches HIV Prevention Campaign
Exposes myth that LGBT gatherings in Cuba are prohibited,” http://www.gaycuba.ca/together/)kw
Tangible gains. Positive changes for gays that have government blessing haved inspired a sense of
awareness and acceptance across the population. In May this year Cuba announced it would fully
support and cover costs for gender-reassignment surgery . Such a bold and compassionate move
makes future LGBT gains much easier. What a different set of priorities from those of affluent gay misleaders in the US who focus on chasing corporate dollars and logos while ignoring the dire plight of LGBT
youth (640,000 of whom are homeless, without health care and lacking schooling), the poverty
experienced by transgendered people on account of bigotry, the double discrimination and persecution
faced daily by queers of color, and the economic hardships miring the lives of workaday lesbians and gay
men. Gay celebration at Mí Cayito Beach in Cuba, Number 4 Click photos to enlarge. Gay celebration at
Mí Cayito Beach in Cuba, Number 5 Gay celebration at Mí Cayito Beach in Cuba, Number 6 At the same
time Cuba is refining legislation to affirm same-sex unions for 2009. Education against bullying and
harassment, and for understanding and respect is part of school curriculum. Exciting literature, art,
drama and history is being written and produced by Cubans not shy to declare their sexuality. The
country teems with an awakening to the subject that is palpable. Cuba held official events on December
1, 2007 in recognition of World AIDS Day. It endorsed and hosted state events on May 17, 2008 for the
International Day Against Homphobia (IDAHO), which were attended by national leaders. This was not
the case for the US. Eminent Cuban scholar and sexologist Mariela Castro Espín is president of CENESEX
Eminent Cuban scholar and sexologist Mariela Castro Espín is president of CENESEX. The Federation of
Cuba Women, a volunteer organization in which 86.7% of island females over 14 years old hold
membership, laid groundwork for these achievements years ago. Today many pro-LGBTs changes
emanate from CENESEX (National Center for Sexual Education) whose leader is eminent scholar and
sexologist Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro. CENESEX and other
organizations such as Línea Ayuda (an education and support organization for people with HIV/AIDS)
enjoy vast support, membership and participation from LGBT Cubans. Indeed, Cuba must be doing
something right as the Catholic Church recently registered concern. Cardinal Jaime Ortega of Havana
said that while he applauds "efforts to humanize social life" in Cuba by condemning homophobia, he
questioned embracing "First World ideologies" that promote an "anything goes" mentality!
The SQUO solves the AFF- Castro has declared his support and laws are changing
Halatyn ’12 (Justin Halatyn, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 8/24/12, “From Persecution To Acceptance? The
History Of LGBT Rights In Cuba”http://www.coha.org/from-persecution-to-acceptance-history-of-lgbt-in-cuba/) JRW
Homosexuality in Cuba Today: Today,
official legal penalties for gay men continue to be eliminated. For instance,
in 1988 the penal code imposed fines on those who “hassle others with homosexual demands.”
However, in 1997, this language was modified to “hassling with sexual demands,” gradually removing
the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual behavior. In addition, previous public scandal laws that penalized
those who “publicly flaunted their homosexual condition” were later changed to those who engaged in “sexual insult,” indicating a more modest tone against
homosexuality. Particularly
progressive reforms have been made in the last few years under current
President Raúl Castro, largely from the strong backing of his daughter Mariela Castro, who is also the
director of CENESEX. The most revolutionary change occurred in June 2008, when the Cuban
government permitted doctors to perform sex change operations. In the last year, the Cuban
parliament proposed a law permitting same-sex unions. If this law does pass, it would signal a huge
breakthrough in LGBT rights in Cuba. Havana’s rhetoric regarding homosexuality has grown more tolerant as well. Raúl Castro has
publicly declared his support for LGBT rights. Fidel also has changed his tone dramatically since the
1960s. Although he once vulgarly referred to homosexuals as “agents of imperialism,” and praised the Cuban countryside for supposedly being free of
homosexuality, his recent declarations express a much more tolerant sentiment. In the last few years, Fidel has come to support
LGBT rights, claiming he was distracted by other problems in the earlier period of the Revolution.
Additionally, he now claims that the persecution of homosexuals in earlier years was “a great
injustice.” Considering that even Fidel has changed his outlook, it is unlikely the Cuban government
will shift back anytime soon to a less progressive position.
Castro is adapting to fit society- removing exits visa’s proves
Halatyn ’12 (Justin Halatyn, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 8/24/12, “From Persecution To Acceptance? The
History Of LGBT Rights In Cuba”http://www.coha.org/from-persecution-to-acceptance-history-of-lgbt-in-cuba/) JRW
Lastly, on October 16, the Cuban government announced it would end its exit visa requirements for its
citizens to travel abroad. While the connection to gay rights is marginal at best, such an act does
suggest yet another attempt by the Castro regime to modernize and adapt to the changing demands
of its society. Whether this more lenient policy translates into greater rights for gays in the near future
is unclear, but it certainly suggests a willingness to consider more progressive customs, which is
another promising sign. It is clear that the enactment of LGBT rights in Cuba is an ongoing struggle. Uncertainty still remains, and the
government and society as a whole still display a certain level of uneasiness regarding homosexuality. Nonetheless, in comparison with
pre-revolutionary times, the situation today has greatly improved. Penalties towards gay men have
gradually been reduced, the government has expressed its support for gay rights, and even gay civil
unions have been seriously proposed and considered.
Cuba has begun to support queer rights
Halatyn ’12 (Justin Halatyn, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 8/24/12, “From Persecution To Acceptance? The
History Of LGBT Rights In Cuba”http://www.coha.org/from-persecution-to-acceptance-history-of-lgbt-in-cuba/) JRW
Policies Begin to Change: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Havana’s policies toward its LGBT community began to change as communist leaders around the world
began to lean toward a more tolerant policy regarding homosexuality. Some
observers have pointed to the rise of the feminist
movement in Cuba as a key component in the liberalization of social tolerance toward Cuba’s LGBT
community. For example, in 1977 the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) was
founded by the Cuban Women’s Federation, which “encouraged a more enlightened outlook on
homosexuality and started to undermine traditional sexual prejudices and taboos.” Around this
period, the Cuban government began to pass laws that broke down the sexual division of labor in the
traditional family unit. In 1979 the Cuban government finally removed homosexual acts among consenting adults from the Penal Code as a criminal
offense. Certainly the situation regarding this practice was much improved in just the course of a decade. However, as with most countries’ early policies regarding
homosexuality, changes in practice have occurred gradually. Despite
the legislative reforms, the government continued to
prohibit “ostentatious displays of homosexuality” along with “homosexual acts in public places.” Cuba
also received criticism from the international community during this period for quarantining people
with HIV. Some have argued that another explanation for Havana’s homosexual policies is that Cuba’s
continued dependence on the Soviet Union for trade and assistance led to a Stalinist-style intolerance
of homosexuality throughout the earlier part of the decade. In other words, as in many cases, the LGBT population in Cuba had
to wait for continued rights to be granted before discrimination was erased. In 1986 however, a watershed shift against homophobia occurred in Cuba. The
annulment of many of the remaining laws in the Penal Code that had prohibited homosexual conduct
allowed authorities to release those who had been previously imprisoned for homosexual activity.
During this period, the Cuban authorities began to show greater tolerance toward homosexuality in
order to enforce safe sex and to gain political support for the regime from the LGBT community and
from critical international observers. Finally, in 1993, the incarceration law for HIV patients was rescinded. The Cuban
government began to produce films and documentaries condemning discrimination against
homosexuality, and the medical community in Cuba began to describe homosexuality as a natural
minority condition rather than a perverse choice. This medical outlook was particularly crucial in the reevaluation of policies toward
the LGBT population.
AT: Advantages
Iran Scenario
Media hype- Ideas of GLBT punishment is a form of US dominance to overtake Iran
Feinberg ‘6 (Leslie Feinberg, Grass roots GLBT activist, 24 June 2006, “There’s no anti-gay pogrom in
Iran,” Workers World, http://www.workers.org/2006/world/iran-0629/)kw
Google the word “Iran” with the keywords “gay” or “transsexual” and thousands of English-language
articles and blog entries pop up, the vast majority generated after two young men were executed in
Mashad, Iran, on July 19, 2005. Within hours, gay neo-conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, former
editor of the New Republic magazine, wrote a blog account entitled “Islamists Versus Gays.” The
London-based gay rights group Outrage! posted a media release stating, “Two gay teenagers were
publicly executed in Iran on 19 July 2005 for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality.” Gay political pundit Doug
Ireland, a longtime journalist for the Nation magazine, also declared in his blog headline: “Iran
Executes 2 Gay Teenagers.” In cyberspace, this interpretation raced at the speed of light down the
Internet information highway. While Outrage! claimed that the Iranian Students News Agency had
published an item on the morning of July 19, 2005, saying that the two young men were executed for
consensual gay sex, even Human Rights Watch says the headline and the first sentence of the article
make it clear they were hanged for rape, or “sodomy by coercion”— “lavat beh onf.” And some antiIranian imperialist media monopolies—including the New York Times, Associated Press, Fox News
Channel and Times of London—also mentioned that the two were executed for taking part with at
least three others in abducting and gang-raping a 13-year-old boy at knife point. Radio Free Europe—
also no friend to Tehran—ran a lengthy report on Sept. 1, 2005, entitled “Iran: Is There an AntiHomosexual Campaign?” The article concluded, “It is clear that officially and in practice, there is
discrimination against homosexuals in Iran. However, systematic repression of homosexuals does not
seem to be an issue.” Project GayRussia.Ru published an online interview, dated Aug. 25, 2005, with the
publishers of MAHA—an Iranian gay Farsi-language e-magazine. The MAHA representative explained,
“The GLBT situation in Iran has changed over the past 26 years. The regime does not systematically
persecute gays anymore, there are still some gay websites, there are some parks and cinemas where
everyone knows that these places are meeting places for gays; furthermore it is legal in Iran that a
transsexual applies for sex change and it is fully accepted by the government. There are some medias
which sometimes (not often) write about such issues. Having said that, the Islamic law, according to
which gays’ punishment is death, is still in force but it is thought not much followed by the regime
nowadays.” (www.gayrussia.ru) This more nuanced view of the situation facing the LGBT community
in Iran doesn’t fit in with U.S. finance capital’s propaganda war, which is demanding “regime change”
in order to re-conquer the oil wealth, land and labor of 70 million Iranian people. In such a bellicose
climate, progressives must be vigilant against any reports—real, manufactured or exaggerated—that
seem to support the imperialist re-enslavement of Iran.
Solvency
Counterfactuals Bad
Counterfactuals merely invert heterosexism
Rohy '6 (Valerie: Assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. "Ahistorical," GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1, 2006 // LVL)
Although no one now denies that historiography's backward glance colors the past with traces of the
present, that reminder changes the case against scholarly anachronism. When compelled by an ethical
imperative to read the past on its own terms, the practice of historical criticism is impossible on its
own terms. Historical alterity is, after all, a recent invention; the conviction that past ages are
noncontinuous with modernity is a hallmark of modernity.30 To apply such theories retroactively to
texts whose own view of time more nearly matches what is now called continuism can only in the most
paradoxical sense constitute a "respectful" acknowledgment of the texts' historicity. In "Song of Myself"
Walt Whitman [End Page 68] declares that "these are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and
lands" and imagines the poet's subjectivity extending across time and space: "Here or henceforward it is
all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely."31 Whitman's dream of universal connection among "all
men in all ages" may indeed be a product of his age, but the theory that would protect Whitman's age
from contamination by the present imposes, in that prophylactic effort, a contemporary notion of the
past's fragile specificity. The Whitman example suggests not that we should be more truly historical but
that there is no truly historical historicism. As its canniest practitioners acknowledge, historicism is
always to some degree ahistorical—or rather, anachronistic. A screen memory of the public sphere,
historiography cannot cease to transfer ideas of the present to the past. And if historiography without
anachronism is impossible, then resistance to anachronism is resistance not to the other of historicism
but to an abject aspect of its own methodology, a projected image of its own atavism. The
impossibility of a "true" historicism, however, does not undermine charges of anachronism but
ensures their effective performance. This rhetoric has no outside; it interpellates everyone as a guilty
subject of temporal self-governance and measures all against a standard that none can meet. Perhaps
that is why Haggerty styles himself at once the cop and the criminal of historicism, why Sedgwick must
"of course" insist on something that, even in 1990, everyone already knew. The charge of anachronism
recurs endlessly because no one is ever innocent of it. In this respect the historical argument mirrors
the fundamental logic of sexual discipline, in which no one's hetero credentials are ultimately above
suspicion and in which, under the threat of an ineradicable perversity, to be heterosexual is always to
be policed by one's vulnerability to being seen otherwise.32 Faced with its own uncertainty, straight
culture seeks a categorical distinction from the deviance whose backwardness might oppose
reproductive futurity. Although in the queer historicist version of this logic it is not the future that
must be rescued but the past, the same pathos of untenable boundaries informs each—whether the
counterfactual, hegemonic fantasy of straight families' vulnerability to the predations of
homosexuality or queer theorists' defense of a hard-won history.
Queer historicism links to heterosexual time
Rohy '6 (Valerie: Assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. "Ahistorical," GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1, 2006 // LVL)
It may seem that a properly historical queer theory is the one anodyne for doctrines of primitivism
and regression that devalue gay and lesbian desires, or that undoing hurtful theories of queer
anachronism means rejecting anachronism as such. Indeed, with greater awareness of its own notknowing, the critique of anachronism might serve as a reminder that, to revise Sedgwick's axiom, we
can't know in advance what the past will turn out to have been.33 But when the insistence [End Page
69] on historicism is, first and foremost, an effort to put the past first and foremost, it mimes the
heteronormative demand for proper sexual sequencing. Construing retroaction as abomination, it
upholds the illusion of a true, unidirectional history, whose effect of veracity and realism is in fact
sustained by the very retroaction it condemns. Resistance to phobic definitions of homosexuality as
anachronistic does not require the same temporal logic that has sustained such diagnoses; instead,
resistance might mean a turn away from the discipline of straight time, away from the notions of
historical propriety that, like notions of sexual propriety, function as regulatory fictions.
Post-treatment bias DA-you don’t hold other variables constant when trying to
analyze past historical situations which means post analysis there is no coherent story
and they cant solve
King and Zeng 7 (Gary King teaches at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Langche Zeng teaches at the
Universitiy of California-San Diego, “When Can History Be our Guid? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference”
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf)
Post-treatment bias is the second component of bias in our decomposition, Dp, and¶ it deviates from
zero when some of the control variables Z are at least in part¶ consequences of the key causal variable D.
If Z includes these post-treatment variables, then when the key causal variable D changes, the posttreatment variables¶ may change too, and the plan to interpret the model as revealing the effect of the¶
treatment ‘‘holding other variables constant’’ becomes impossible. As a simple example that
illustrates the bias of controlling for post-treatment variables, suppose we are predicting the duration
of an African dictatorship using the unemployment rate as the key explanatory variable. If we control
for the existence of a well-armed cabal inside the palace gates five minutes before a coup attempt is
launched, our estimate of the effect of unemployment would be nearly zero. The reason is that we are
inappropriately controlling for the consequences of our key causal variable, and for most of the
effects of it, thus biasing the overall effect. Yet, we certainly should control for a pre-treatment variable
like the presence of natural resources in the country, as it cannot be a consequence of unemployment
but may be a common cause of both the explanatory and dependent¶ variables. Thus, causal models
require separating out the pre- and post-treatment¶ variables and controlling only for the pre-treatment,
background characteristics.¶ Post-treatment variable bias may well be the largest overlooked component
of¶ bias in estimating causal effects in political science (see King 1991; King, Keohane,¶ and Verba
1994:173ff). It is well known in the statistical literature, but is assumed¶ away in most models and
decompositions. This decision may be reasonable in other¶ fields, where the distinction between pre-
and post-treatment variables is easier to¶ recognize and avoid, but in political science and especially in
comparative politics and international relations, the problem is often severe. For example, is GDP a
consequence or cause of democracy? How about education levels? Fertility rates? Infant mortality?
Trade levels? Are international institutions causes or consequences of international cooperation?
Many, or possibly even most, variables in these¶ literatures are both causes and consequences of
whatever is regarded as the treatment (or key causal) variable. As Lebow (2000:575) explains, ‘‘Scholars
not infrequently assume that one aspect of the past can be changed and everything else kept¶ constant,
. . . [but these] ‘Surgical’ counterfactuals are no more realistic than surgical air strikes.’’ This is
especially easy to see in quantitative research when each of the¶ variables in an estimation takes its turn
in different paragraphs of an article playing¶ the role of the ‘‘treatment.’’ However, only in rare statistical
models, and only under¶ stringent assumptions, is it possible to estimate more than one causal effect
from a¶ single model.
Extrapolation DA-your extrapolation isn’t real world and the support for your analyses
is suspect. Prior evidence to show this must be possible
King and Zeng 7 (Gary King teaches at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Langche Zeng teaches at the
Universitiy of California-San Diego, “When Can History Be our Guid? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference”
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf)
The last component of bias, and the one most related to the central theme of the¶ paper, is
extrapolation bias. This component is the second of the two that arise from not adjusting or
improperly adjusting for identified control variables. Extrapolation bias may arise when the support
(or possible values) of the distribution of Z for the treatment group differs from that of the control
group. That¶ is, there may be certain values of Z that some members of one group take on but no¶
members of the other group possess. For example, we might observe no full democracies with GDP as
low as in some of the autocracies, but we still somehow need to¶ control for GDP. Intuitively, these
autocracies have no comparables in the data, so¶ they are not immediately useful for estimating causal
effects. To make causal inferences in situations with nonoverlapping support, we must therefore either
eliminate the region outside of common supportFas is a standard practice in statistics¶ and medicineFor
attempt to extrapolate to the needed data (e.g., autocracies with¶ high GDP), such as by using a
parametric modelFas is standard practice in political¶ science and most of the other social sciences. As
we demonstrate in the previous¶ section, extrapolation in forecasting involves considerable model
dependence. The same issue applies in causal inference, as we discuss here. Thus, unless we happen
to be in the extraordinary situation where a known theory or prior evidence makes it possible to
narrow down the possible models to one, or where we happen to guess the right model, we will be
left with extrapolation bias, De¶ 6¼0.
Turning points aren’t realistic-it doesn’t come down to one moment where a different
action would have revolutionized the world
Collins 7 (Randall Collins, Ph.D. is an American sociologist who is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal, “Turning Points,
Bottlenecks, and the fallacies of counterfactual history”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20110212.pdf?acceptTC=true)
The notion that history comes to a stop, that everything can be frozen at a particular moment, makes
for dramatic storytelling, but it is a rhetorical device, not a serious sociological analysis. Analytically,
the mistakes here are two: to assume that casual conditions are pinpointed, rather ¶ than spread out
across a wide range of situations that make up a structural pattern, and to assume that causality is
rigidly linear rather than stochastic. The counterfactual historian, wearing particularistic blinders,
imagines that if the battle of (Teutoburger Wald, Antietam, Britain, etc.) had gone a different way,
then everything is irrevocably cut off from a certain path, and must stick to the previously existing
path. (If the North ¶ had not won the Civil War, slavery would still exist today in the South, ¶ since the
historian can imagine nothing else that would have eliminated ¶ slavery.) What is missing is a theoretical
view of the general conditions ¶ that bring about a shift in the power of states, conditions that are
spread ¶ out widely in time and space. Ironically, the most sophisticated of classic historical
sociologists, Max Weber, also made a military turning-point argument. If the Greeks ¶ had lost the
battle of Marathon, he held, the Persians would have conquered Greece, and the whole process of
Western rationalization would have been cancelled. The argument hinges on Weber's point that a self
armed military force is the basis of citizenship, and that this is one of the ¶ necessary components of the
causal chain that produces legal guarantees ¶ for private property and, in combination with a number of
other factors, ¶ eventually gives rise to rationalized capitalism (Collins, 1986:19^4; ¶ Weber, [1923] 1961).
Nevertheless, I believe that here Weber is under the ¶ influence of his neo-Kantian philosophical
commitments and does not think through the logic of his own general analysis. The issue of whether
Persia could impose its social structures on the Greek city-states is a geo ¶ political question. Imperial
states of that period were weak in administrative organization and ruled through local notables.
Persia had already ¶ conquered the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, for example, where the most ¶ prosperous
city-states existed, and these continued to exist and run their ¶ own affairs, only paying tribute to the
distant Persian king. Additionally, geopolitical overextension at long distances from home base makes
defeat increasingly likely; if the Persians had won one particular battle on the Greek mainland, it
would not have made it impossible for Greek coalitions to fight again.
Turning points are inevitable-they could have been missed and looking at them in
hindsight solves nothing
Collins 7 (Randall Collins, Ph.D. is an American sociologist who is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal, “Turning Points,
Bottlenecks, and the fallacies of counterfactual history”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20110212.pdf?acceptTC=true)
Consider one more example of putative turning points. In the scholarship of recent decades, there has
been a movement to reconsider the rise of the West in world history. One line of argument holds that
(1) China was ¶ the wealthiest and most powerful society through the fifteenth century; (2) ¶ China had a
large fleet that carried out commerce and diplomatic/military missions in southeast Asia; and (3)
under Admiral Cheng Ho, this fleet reached the east coast of Africa in 1417-1421. A turning-point
argument follows: if Cheng Ho had continued to make subsequent expeditions, he could have
rounded the tip of Africa from the east, sailed up the west coast, and hence the Chinese could have
discovered Europe 70 years before the Portuguese fleet under Vasco da Gama had discovered the
reverse route to India and Columbus discovered America. The turning-point scenario that flows from
this point holds that China would have colonized Europe, turning the entire subsequent history of the
globe on its head. ¶ Instead, the Ming emperor made the fateful mistake of recalling Cheng ¶ Ho,
disbanding the fleet, and retiring into a seclusive posture that left ¶ China vulnerable to Western
domination in the centuries to come. ¶ The argument is glib, relying for its force on its shocking quality,
its reversal of the gestalt rather than on consideration of causal conditions determining imperial
expansion. Let us start at the last point: if a Chinese ¶ fleet had reached Europe, what reason would lead
us to expect they would ¶ conquer and colonize it? Nothing more than a facile analogy to the actual ¶
history of Western colonization. But Spain, England, and the other European colonial powers established
their colonies in lands chiefly inhabited ¶ by thin populations of horticutural and hunting/gathering
economies, with ¶ only a few early state formations (Incas and Aztecs). The position of the ¶ putative
Chinese invaders of Europe would have had no such imbalance ¶ in military and organizational resources.
In addition, Chinese forces would ¶ have been at an extreme logistical overstretch, given the economic
base ¶ for military operations in the fifteenth century. In short, no sizable Chinese conquest in Europe is
at all plausible. ¶ This brings us back to the nub of the turning point, the decision of the Ming emperor
to recall his admiral and disband the fleet. This was not merely an arbitrary decision, a fateful bad
choice that a "good emperor" would have avoided; it was itself part of the process of geopolitical
overstretch that was already being felt in the Ming state. The fleet was too expensive, relative to
other military and administrative expenses, ¶ and to existing capacities of tax extraction, and it was
politically contentious, especially from the viewpoint of Confucian administrators fighting ¶ the strength
of court eunuchs, of which Cheng Ho was one (Mote and ¶ Twitchett, 1988:232-236). Put in a more
sociological perspective, the failure of the Chinese to consolidate a world maritime empire was the
result ¶ of normal geopolitical limitations and the liabilities of highly centralized ¶ political structure, in
which the concentration of state power made it ¶ possible to curtail initiative in overseas expansion. The
usual way of ¶ making this comparison is to note that the parcelized sovereignty of ¶ fragmentary
European states allowed more variation in exploring new ¶ military, political, and economic paths.
Genealogy Bad
Focusing on Certain Queer Genealogy Buries Other Stories
Halberstram 11 Judith Halberstram is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist
Research at University of Southern California, published 2011 by Duke University Press, The Queer Art of
Failure, Chapter 5, “The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You”, pg 148
Singed
It is conventional to describe early narratives of gay and lesbian life as “hidden from history”; this notion, taken from the title of a well- known anthology edited by
George Chauncey and others, constitutes gay and lesbian history as a repressed archive and the historian as an intrepid archaeologist digging through homophobic
erasure to find the truth. But as
much as we have to excavate some histories that have been rendered invisible,
we also bury others, and sometimes we do both at the same time. You could say that gay and lesbian scholars
have also hidden history, unsavory histories, and have a tendency to select from historical archives
only the narratives that please. So new formulations of queer history have emerged from scholars like Heather Love, who argue for a
contradictory archive filled with loss and longing, abjection and ugliness, as well as love, intimacy, and survival. An example of a history from which gay and lesbian
scholarship has hidden is the history of relations between homosexuality and fascism. This is the topic of this chapter as I push toward a model of queer history that
is less committed to finding heroic models from the past and more resigned to the contradictory and complicit narratives that, in the past as in the present, connect
sexuality to politics. When I say that scholarship has hidden from this at times overlapping history, I do not mean that no one has discussed homosexuality and
fascism; in fact there is a large body of work on the topic. But because
the role of homosexuality in fascism is very ambiguous
and complicated and has been subject to all kinds of homophobic projection, we often prefer to talk
about the persecution of gays by the Nazis, leaving aside the question of their collaboration in the
regime. So, from the outset, I think it is important to say that there is no single way of describing the relationship between
Nazism and male homosexuality, but also that we should not shy away from investigating the
participation of gay men in the regime even if we fear homophobic fallout from doing so. Finally, the
purpose of any such investigation should not be to settle the question of homosexuality in the Nazi
Party, but to raise questions about relations between sex and politics, the erotics of history and the ethics of complicity.
Focusing On Queer Theory Genealogy Bad
Gill-Peterson 12 Julian Gill-Peterson is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University, a
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow, and a Canadian
living in Brooklyn., 4/18/12, Thinking Gender Papers, “Virtual(ly) Queer: Anti-Genealogy and ObsessiveCompulsion in Bechdels’ Fun Home”, pg 2 http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2qb5c1qk
Singed
I have a concern, however, with what genealogy does to time. I’m interested in queer children: not the proto-gays we adults used to be when
we were younger, nor the figure of the Child with a capital C, but rather the actually existing queer children in the world, ones that are mostly
absent from queer theory. The
problem with genealogy is that its territorialization of the past in an
arborescent form leaves no time for childhood at all. Queer theory’s investment in genealogy tends to
make it always look backward from the present or forward toward the future, and so it tends to turn
queer children into protogay kids, making them the back-formation of an already achieved adulthood.
The once potentially queer child is subject to a freeze-frame, reducing it to a fantasy or a narrative
that queer adults tell one another. I would intensify this point to say that the child actually troubles queer
theory’s investment not only in genealogy, but the very developmental, humanist teleology of queer
theory’s normalizing subject. The proto-gay child’s dominant deployment in queer theory—think here, for
example, of Jack Halberstam’s arguments about children in The Queer Art of Failure2—is actually the far more conservative
securing of the becoming human of the queer subject (which is an adult). When, as in models of “feeling
backward” or “queer futurity,” queer theory’s role is always and only to subvert the normative
through its queering, the very same structures that animate one form of investment in a regulatory
future (the capital C Child as futurity) are simply replaced with a new, “good” object (the proto-gay capital C Child as queer futurity). In
these parallel structures, the human exceptionalism of queer theory’s subject is left intact. Creating
anything new is difficult because we are stuck in genealogical time.
US Involvement Bad
US lies about oppression- Cuba on the way to improved human rights, US is
hypocritical
Evans ‘9 (Rachel Evans, Community Action Against Homophobia and Socialist Alliance activist, 21
August 2009, “The truth about queer rights in Cuba,” Green Left Weekly,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/42274)kw
The Cuban Revolution nationalized US agribusiness, telecommunications, petrol and every other private
robber baron that pillaged the island. Angry at arable land being given to peasants, holiday homes
given to the poor and natural resources being used for the betterment of the majority, the US
invaded, bombed, engaged in chemical warfare, economically blockaded and lied about Cuba. None of
these tactics worked. The Cuban Revolution remains 50 years on — an example to all countries seeking
to feed, clothe and educate their people. One of the lies spread by the US government is that gays and
lesbians are oppressed in Cuba. A 1999 US Department of Homeland Security report said: "Freedom
for Cuban gays and lesbians continues to be limited [and] reinforced by decades of government
persecution." This allegation is made by a government institution of a nation with an appallingly high
incidences of hate-crimes — and a wave of bans on same-sex marriages. It was only in June 2003 that
the US Supreme Court struck down Texas's discriminatory same-sex sodomy law. This ruling struck out
other US sodomy laws. Prior to this, 14 states in the US listed sodomy as a crime. Michigan meted out
the toughest sentence — sodomy was punishable by 15 years in jail for the first conviction and life
imprisonment for the second. This was until 2003. In comparison, Cuba had removed all anti-sodomy
laws by 1973. By the early 1990s, no Cuban laws mentioned homosexuality. Cuba, with a much higher
education and cultural level than the US, suffers no hate-crimes against homosexual or transgendered
people. Every second night on Cuba's state television channel, ads made by Cenesex (the governmentrun Centre for Sexual Education) are broadcasted in favour of sexual diversity. The ads show same-sex
couples going about their daily life and end with the message: "Diversity is natural." A half-hour youth
program screened while I was in Cuba interviewed young and old Cubans about attitudes to
transgendered people. Attitudes were supportive. Cubans support the government policy of free
gender change operations for transgendered people. In Australia, no trans person risks the operation
offered by the public system. They travel to Thailand for a $20,000 male to female operation or pay the
local private health system $25,000. Australian female to male breast reduction operations will set you
back a maximum of $10,000. In Cuba, this is all free. Cuba's National Assembly is discussing the
question of same-sex marriage. Cenesex is conducting a massive sexual education campaign in the
lead-up to more formal government moves. Fifty years ago the revolution opened up profound
discussion about human rights. One of the remaining chapters in this country's impressive history is
gay and trans rights. Cuba is writing this chapter much faster their hypocritical imperialist neighbor.
Capitalism K
Cap = Root Cause
Capitalism is the root cause of heteronormative violence
Brookshier 13 (Sarah Brookshier, Master of Arts in English from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University, OUT
OF TIME: QUEER EXCESS, TRAUMA, AND THE ART OF NATION-MAKING, 4/8/13,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10822/558264/Brookshier_georgetown_0076M_12102.pdf?sequence=1,
anuss)
For Foucault, the penal reforms of the 17th and 18th centuries arose from the need to develop more efficient means of punishing the everevolving property illegalities to which industry and production gave rise. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault notes that the
growth
of industry and capitalism would have been impossible without the systems of power which enabled
them to take such a foothold, and in turn, capitalism helped cement these systems of power and organization in the social body.
Capitalism, in its most essential terms, demands the extraction of the most profit from the fewest
resources possible. This process hinges on the production of excess labor, or what Marx refers to as “surplus
labor,” and its production is always a crisis of time. Surplus labor is the amount of labor beyond that
which is needed to procure the resources to sustain that labor, and in order to extract this labor, labor time must be
manipulated to its most efficient pace. This surplus labor is what the capitalist extracts in order to ensure the
exchange value of the goods is greater than the resources required in its production. A successful capitalist
reduces excess in time and materials on one end of production in order to increase excess in the form of profit on the other. For the capitalist,
excess becomes a threat when it represents lost capital gain. As I have shown, queer
lives embody this excess: as sexual
bodies, they fail to make “productive” use of their (re)productive potential. In this chapter, I intend to trace the
path of excess, and consider the ways the epochs of power Foucault describes in Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
represent the increasing threat, and the need to mitigate and eliminate the threat, 13 of an unproductive,
potentially destructive “useless” energy. First, I will posit that queer bodies, as beings which cannot
symbolically register, are in and of themselves a constitutive excess and traumatic threat to the
normative psyche. Then, I will show how these lives embody the excess that classical sovereign forms of
power shed and become the constitutive outside to the normative heterocapitalist psyche, and, through
the repetition and circulation of images of physical trauma, are used to cultivate that normative subjectivity. Finally, I will explore
how the circulation and reiteration of these images of queer trauma serve to discursively materialize
the queer body as always already traumatized, still in the name of encouraging desired subjectivities
while letting the undesirables languish. Queer Bodies, Traumatic Bodies In order to discuss the ways queer
bodies, as bodies out of use and out of time, become a traumatic threat to the continuity of
heterocapitalist subjectivity, it is crucial to note the way the abject is always already tied to the
subject, and we can understand this best by first examining psychoanalytic constructions of subjectivity. For Freud in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, consciousness emerges as a result of a mental protective barrier, which, as a result of
constantly receiving stimuli, becomes hardened and immune to the impact of external stimuli and
differentiates consciousness from external stimuli and matter (607). Though this protective barrier serves to protect the consciousness from
stimuli that would overwhelm it, the consciousness only exists as a result of differentiation from the world without, and as a subject position
can only exist by virtue of what it is not. Lacan takes up the matter of differentiation 14 and separation and argues that the child becomes a
“socially elaborated” being, or subject, by virtue of a severing from the mother initiated by the Oedipal crisis (“The Mirror Stage” 79). For both
Freud and Lacan, subjectivity demands a recognizable departure and differentiation, irrevocably tying the subject to the space from which it
came.
Capitalism is the root cause of heteronormative violence
Brookshier 13 (Sarah Brookshier, Master of Arts in English from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University,
OUT OF TIME: QUEER EXCESS, TRAUMA, AND THE ART OF NATION-MAKING, 4/8/13,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10822/558264/Brookshier_georgetown_0076M_12102.pdf?sequence=
1, anuss For Foucault, the penal reforms of the 17th and 18th centuries arose from the need to develop more efficient means of punishing the ever-evolving
Singed
property illegalities to which industry and production gave rise. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault notes that the
growth of industry and
capitalism would have been impossible without the systems of power which enabled them to take such
a foothold, and in turn, capitalism helped cement these systems of power and organization in the social body. Capitalism, in its most
essential terms, demands the extraction of the most profit from the fewest resources possible. This
process hinges on the production of excess labor, or what Marx refers to as “surplus labor,” and its production is always
a crisis of time. Surplus labor is the amount of labor beyond that which is needed to procure the
resources to sustain that labor, and in order to extract this labor, labor time must be manipulated to its most efficient pace. This surplus
labor is what the capitalist extracts in order to ensure the exchange value of the goods is greater than
the resources required in its production. A successful capitalist reduces excess in time and materials on one end of production in order to
increase excess in the form of profit on the other. For the capitalist, excess becomes a threat when it represents lost capital gain. As I have shown, queer
lives embody this excess: as sexual bodies, they fail to make “productive” use of their (re)productive
potential. In this chapter, I intend to trace the path of excess, and consider the ways the epochs of power Foucault describes in
Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 represent the increasing threat, and the need to mitigate and
eliminate the threat, 13 of an unproductive, potentially destructive “useless” energy. First, I will posit that queer bodies,
as beings which cannot symbolically register, are in and of themselves a constitutive excess and
traumatic threat to the normative psyche. Then, I will show how these lives embody the excess that classical
sovereign forms of power shed and become the constitutive outside to the normative heterocapitalist
psyche, and, through the repetition and circulation of images of physical trauma, are used to cultivate that normative subjectivity. Finally, I will
explore how the circulation and reiteration of these images of queer trauma serve to discursively
materialize the queer body as always already traumatized, still in the name of encouraging desired
subjectivities while letting the undesirables languish. Queer Bodies, Traumatic Bodies In order to discuss the ways
queer bodies, as bodies out of use and out of time, become a traumatic threat to the continuity of
heterocapitalist subjectivity, it is crucial to note the way the abject is always already tied to the subject,
and we can understand this best by first examining psychoanalytic constructions of subjectivity. For Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
consciousness emerges as a result of a mental protective barrier, which, as a result of constantly
receiving stimuli, becomes hardened and immune to the impact of external stimuli and differentiates consciousness
from external stimuli and matter (607). Though this protective barrier serves to protect the consciousness from stimuli that would overwhelm it, the
consciousness only exists as a result of differentiation from the world without, and as a subject position can only exist by virtue of what it is not. Lacan takes up
the matter of differentiation 14 and separation and argues that the child becomes a “socially elaborated” being, or subject, by virtue of a severing from the
mother initiated by the Oedipal crisis (“The Mirror Stage” 79). For both Freud and Lacan, subjectivity demands a recognizable departure and differentiation,
irrevocably tying the subject to the space from which it came.
AT: Cap- Turn
Queerness functions as a revolt against the capitalists focus on productive labor- by
interjecting a form of “play” the queer refuses to allow the system to alienate and
estrange it from its work
Wesling 12 (Meg Wesling is associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches courses on US
literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. She is the author, most recently, of Empire's Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in
the Philippines (2011) and is working on a book about queer politics and globalization, Queer Value,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v018/18.1.wesling.html, Volume 18 Number 1 2012, anuss)
What kind of commodity is gender? Or, what happens to our understanding of the commodity when
we think of gender as the outcome of compulsory labor? As Marx explains, labor produces not just
commodities but the laborer as a commodity. To the extent that, under capital, the laborer does not
own the products of his or her efforts, the laborer is alienated from his or her labor. This is what Marx calls
the "estrangement" of the capitalist laborer, in which the product of the laborer's efforts becomes an object, with an
"external existence" that appears as "something alien" to the laborer: "The product of labor is labor
which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor."7
There is another sense of estrangement, however, in the very process of production as well as in its object. Because this labor is
compulsory rather than chosen, the laborer finds that toil "does not affirm himself but denies
himself."8 This labor thus separates the worker from what Marx affirms as the "life-engendering"
process of self-chosen work; capitalism alienates laborers by separating them from nature, from
themselves, and from their "species-being," their essential connection to the collective humanity
around them. For Marx, the distinction between chosen and unchosen labor is crucial, and we might distinguish between alienating labor
and self-actualizing work, to borrow Hannah Arendt's terms. The antinomy between work and labor is, for Arendt, a crucial marker of the
subject's alienation under capital. Labor, for Arendt, is the compulsory, repetitive, and alienated effort that produces commodities to which the
laboring subject has no connection. It is by necessity "slavish," [End Page 109] involving repetitive tasks that the laborer cannot claim or are
"unproductive" in the sense that they are ephemeral or immediately consumed. As she writes, "It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it
leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent."9 Work, on the other hand, is at least
one step removed from alienated labor, in that it produces something that carries within it the mark of its relation to the worker. Here Arendt
seeks to correct what she sees as a slippage in Marx between two distinct forms of production: labor and work. While Marx is most interested
in the predication of laboring subjects by extracting surplus value, Arendt calls to our attention the important relation between workers and the
object they produce. It
is the object's capacity to endure, at least for a time, its own usage without being
entirely consumed that marks the distinction between the activity of labor and that of work. This
durability, Arendt argues, "makes them withstand, 'stand against' and endure, at least for a time, the
voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users." In this capacity, "the things of the world have the
function of stabilizing human life. . . . Men . . . can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the
same table" (137). Laboring is the dull activity meant to sustain the living body, while work is what leaves a mark behind it, contributing to the
objective world. There is an additional distinction as well, however, which is that the capacity to work depends necessarily on one's freedom
from labor. Here is where Arendt reads the class distinctions of modern society. While in slave societies slaves could not work, it was their labor
that secured the master's freedom to work. This is a crucial distinction; as
the autonomy of "free" subjects rests in their
ability to leave a mark in the concrete world, this must mean that they are liberated from the
mundane routine of labor. Significantly, it is the mark of modern society, for Arendt, that this distinction
between labor and work is mystified, and that the subject constituted in the wage labor system, by
extracting surplus value for labor, is offered as an alternative to alienated labor, not (socially meaningful) work
but play. As she writes, "All serious activities, irrespective of their fruits, are called labor, and every activity which is not necessary either for
the life of the individual or for the life process of society is subsumed under playfulness" (127). Within the structure of wage labor, the social
imperative toward "making a living" overrides the objective value of work, dividing all human activity into (profit-oriented) labor and (nonprofit-oriented) play. What
the "queer" brings to this discussion is a revision of the relation between work,
labor, and play. One thinks here of the example of drag, which is the practice at the center of the film
reading that follows. On the one hand, such [End Page 110] a distinction seems to match at least one
possible reading of drag performances, since the spirit of play is certainly present in each spectacle. Indeed, elements of
play are everywhere evident in the rituals of camp, and the drag performances as Mariposas presents
them are no exception to this logic. This play, however, might not be read as the antithesis of labor. It
is, rather, a kind of work that uses play, in some instances, to establish its autonomy as work, to
refuse the alienating or estranging effects of labor. As Matthew Tinkcom argues, the playfulness of camp allows for
glimpses of a certain kind of work, the (queer) subject's intentionality invested in the object, and thus switches such an object to a different
register of value — not purely exchange or use value but something else, the register of pleasure.10 Useful for us here is Tinkcom's emphasis
on camp as an altered mode of production, drawing
our gaze from the consumptive registers of the spectacle to
offer a vision of camp as "the marks of queer labor that allow for visions of work to emerge."11 To
speak of camp, or drag, as a productive form of work begs the question of value. That is, the "work" of
camp, which offers us insight into subjectivity produced through work, allows as well the chance to
consider how drag's performances of gender might constitute forms of value, produced through the
subject's perpetual labor. In other words, drag (as playful work) paradoxically reveals not just the social
construction of gender but its status as labor, as the coercive or compulsory efforts that produce the
gendered body which capital needs for its productive system.
Lesbian K
Queer women still ousted in Cuba- little research or attention
Connexiones 8 (Connexiones, “MA Thesis Prospectus: Queer Cuban Nationalisms,” 9 May 2008,
http://pabloarbolayjr.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/ma-thesis-prospectus-queer-cuban-nationalisms/)
kw
Discourse: The key conversation lacking from this discussion is namely how nationalism and gender
performance affected the lives of queer Cubans. Nationalism often produces gendered discourses of
the “new” woman and man that call for people to adapt their gender performance to acclimate with
the new nationalist gender discourse. Considering this causal relationship between discourse and
performance, it is only when the people allow these gender discourses to govern their gender
performance do they become citizens-subjects. What I attempt to convey is that when people
transgress gender norms in nationalist and revolutionary contexts, they are labeled deviant and antisocial. This was certainly the case for queers in Cuba. In this conversation on queers in Cuba, the voices
that still remain on the margins are those of queer women and trans people. In making female and
trans subjectivity central to a queer nationalist project, it begins to conceptualize nationalism in ways
that do not invariably replicate heteronormative and patriarchal structures of sexuality and gender
performance. At this point, most of my sources deal directly with queer men in Cuba. Nina Menendez’s
“Garzonas y Feministas in Cuban Women’s Writing of the 1920” in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America
offers some example of how I could engage in a textual reading of the cultural history of queer women’s
experience in Cuba. Menendez’s text, however, does not directly speak to the salience of nationalism in
1920s Cuba and the author does not offer any indication of the post-1959 situation of queer women in
Cuba. I have yet to find any primary sources that address queer women in Cuba, with the exception of
one. In appendix C of Machos,Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality, Ian Lumsden includes the
“Manifesto of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Cuba” (July 28, 1994). Like Young’s inclusion of the
“Letter from Cuban Gay People to the North American Gay Liberation Movement” and “Declaration by
the First National Congress on Education and Culture,” Lumsden does not offer any analysis of this
document, and I have been unable to locate any published scholarship that analytically addresses the
manifesto in Lumsden’s text. These three primary sources represent a valuable entrée to this
historiographical discourse on queer Cuba. I hope to expand my catalogue of primary sources through
archival research in Cuba in October and at other libraries, archives and depositories at the universities
with a history of scholarship focused on Cuba. I will also contact the Bildner Center for Western
Hemisphere Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York to gain access to any
archival documents they may have on sexuality in Cuba. Finally, I plan to visit the Gay Archives of
Quebec in June to the hope of locating possible primary sources that may not be located in the United
States. The three primary sources I have mentioned, nonetheless, represent a site for me to contribute
to this discussion in tracing how discourses on gender and nationalism have contributed to the
knowledge production of queer Cubans.
Speaking For Others K
Speaking For Others Bad-Changes the Meaning and Reinforces Oppression
Alcoff 91 Linda Martin Alcoff is a member of the department of philosophy at Syracuse University,
1991, Alcoff.com, “The Problem with Speaking for Others”,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html
Singed
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread
acceptance of two claims. First, there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the
meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her
location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an
epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief:
that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done principally by the
oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social
location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what
is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next
section. The second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively
dangerous.5 In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged
persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group
spoken for. This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in
question, but the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors because it is Cameron rather than they who
will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers interested in Native women. Persons
from dominant groups who
speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility
on the demands of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the
discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors
who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those
oppressed groups themselves.
Processing
Things to Underline
Cuba counterfactuals empirically have the ability to change minds-Attempts to
analyze the Cuban Missile Crisis prove
Tetlock and Lebow 1 (Philip is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management at the University
of Pennsylvania, Richard Lebow is an American political scientist best known for his work in international relations and U.S. foreign
policy, “Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning”,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3117716.pdf?acceptTC=true)
Whereas the correlational studies rely on naturally ¶ occurring variation in theoretical beliefs and
cognitive- ¶ stylistic preferences to illustrate the deductive, top- ¶ down character of counterfactual
reasoning and the ¶ power of covering-law preconceptions to shape the ¶ conclusions that experts draw
about what was historically possible, the experimental studies encourage experts to perform, in effect,
an unnatural cognitive act: ¶ to give more thought than they normally would to ¶ alternative paths that
history could have followed. The ¶ goal is to test the notion that counterfactual reasoning ¶ also can take
an inductive, bottom-up form. In other ¶ words, the mental processes of imagining specific
counterfactual scenarios can induce us to change our mind ¶ and become more circumspect about the
power of our ¶ favorite causal generalizations to delimit the range of ¶ historical possibilities. Experiment
1 asks foreign policy ¶ experts to consider various scenarios, supported by ¶ varying amounts of detail,
that "undo" the peaceful ¶ resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. The net effect ¶ was to increase their
perceptions of the potential for ¶ alternative, more violent, endings. Experiment 2 shows ¶ that the
manipulations need not be heavy handed and ¶ that no new information need even be presented. ¶
Experts were asked to draw on their own historical ¶ knowledge in searching for possible pathways to
more ¶ violent endings of the crisis, and then to unpack these ¶ possibilities into progressively more
differentiated sub- ¶ sets; the net effect was inflation of the subjective ¶ probabilities of those alternative
outcomes. Moreover, ¶ consistent with Tversky and Fox's (1995) support theory, the more extensive the
unpacking, the greater was ¶ the resulting inflation of subjective probabilities. Experiment 3
demonstrates that these effects are not ¶ peculiar to the relatively recent and brief Cuban missile ¶ crisis.
It provides a conceptual replication in the con- ¶ text of the debate about the rise of the West, the ¶
historical transformation over several centuries of ¶ Western Europe from cultural backwater to global ¶
hegemon
Things to Tag
Ocasio 02 (Rafael Ocasio, B.A., University of Puerto Rico, M.A., Eastern New Mexico University, Ph.D.,
University of Kentucky, Gays and the Cuban Revolution: The Case of Reinaldo Arenas, pg. 78-82)kw
Details of the Night of the Three P’s are still scarce. Carlos Franqui, at the time director of the official
news and culture publication Revolución and today in exile, has spoken about his version of the events.
He claims that two raids took place: in one, certain Havana neighborhoods suspected of homosexual
activities were raided; a second, selectiva (selective) one picked up at their homes (away from the
above gay neighborhoods) men accused of engaging in homosexual activities by neighborhood watch
groups (Franqui, 1981: 280).Among the “thousands detained” was Virgilio Piñera, arrested by the police
at his home. The men detained were sent to hard-core prisons including the infamous El Príncipe,
where, according to Franqui’s testimony, they were “stripped [and then] dressed in the appropriate
uniform: a striped suit with a P on the buttocks. Capital P: pederast, prostitute, pimp” (1981: 280).In
prison Franqui met with Piñera, “thin, aged, with the stripes and the P,” who was concerned,
“trembling,” in Franqui’s words, that someone might recognize him as a writer and then he would be
“accused of being a spy for Revolución, infiltrated to inform and to cover the news story” (1981: 283).
Franqui goes on to describe his visit with Fidel Castro to intervene on behalf of Piñera. Castro promised
Franqui that all cases would be examined in detail and that prostitutes would be assigned to escuelas de
reeducación, rehabilitation and technical centers for arrested prostitutes (1981: 285).Castro added,
however, that homosexuals would not be allowed to have an influence in the arts, cultural life, or
education: “It is necessary to bring morality to the country. To create a strong revolutionary morality”
(1981: 285). The next recorded major official confrontation with homosexual behavior took place in
1965 with a nationwide campaign for ethical policies leading to acceptable revolutionary behavior. In
this movement, which centered around open trials described by eyewitnesses as “moral purges”
(Almendros and Jiménez, 1984: 65), academic authorities aided by the Communist Youth Group claimed
to have identified individuals suspected of engaging in homosexual behavior. The informants were
family members, work associates, or friends organized into neighborhood watch groups or “Committees
for the Defense of the Revolution.” This process appears in narratives by university students dismissed
from their academic institutions and subjected to public humiliation after being forced to make public
confessions (quoted in Almendros and Jiménez, 1984: 30): There were many people who left the
university because of that; they got busy and went away. Others, however, couldn’t do that, for one
reason or another, and then they had to stay put, and they had to stand up and answer when people
asked, “What do you think about John Doe?” Later John Doe was there, poor fellow, and somebody
would come and accuse him, “Yes, because John looked at me with a suspicious glance the other day,”
or “The other day when I shook hands with him, he held my hand longer than necessary.” Some
students, unable to cope with the process, committed suicide (1984: 30). Two incidents stand out from
this period in 1965: the inauguration of the Unidad Militar para el Aumento de la Producción (Military
Unit for the Increase of Production—UMAP), a system of work and rehabilitation camps for social
misfits, including homosexuals (Johnson, 1993: 149), and a visit by the late U.S. poet Allen Ginsberg.
Invited to Cuba as a judge for a national literary contest, Ginsberg, a committed gay activist, confronted
official spokesmen with the reports he had heard from young writers he had met in Havana. He
attempted to shock reporters by saying that Castro should not persecute homosexuals because
“communism is a thing of the heart, and so is homosexuality, because when two men lie together they
contribute to peace and solidarity, therefore being compatible with communism” (quoted in Mario,
1969: 49).Although Ginsberg obviously meant to move Cuban authorities to reconsider their position on
gay and lesbian rights, this startling remark, which in the United States would only be disconcerting, got
him into trouble in Cuba. Quick action by Cuban intelligence forces interrupted his stay and led to his
expulsion from the country after other extreme declarations: “Well, the worst thing I said was that I’d
heard by rumor that Raúl Castro was gay. And the second thing that I said was that Che Guevara was
cute” (quoted in Young, 1981: 20).These comments never found their way into the Cuban media. After
Ginsberg’s exit, several of the intellectuals associated with him found themselves involved in judicial
processes. For instance, Editorial El Puente, under the direction of the young poet José Mario and one of
the few independent publishing houses left in the nation, ceased to function. According to Mario’s
testimony, the accusation of ideological diversionism that led to its final collapse was the work of Fidel
Castro, who in a student meeting at the University of Havana had promised to “blow it up personally”
(quoted in Mario, 1969: 52).Mario’s friendship with Ginsberg provoked his downfall; he was arrested
and taken to a UMAP camp on charges of “looking gay” and “having foreign friends” (1969:
51).According to Mario’s account of the events, the police confirmed their suspicions by ordering him to
walk around a room and diagnosing him to be a homosexual because of his style of walking (Almendros
and Jiménez, 1984: 33).On similar charges, the poet Manuel Ballagas had to serve four years in prison
for “sending social information to yankee poet Ginsberg” (Young, 1981: 29). World personalities publicly
denounced these events. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, a former ally of the
revolution, must have taken Cuban officials by surprise with his seeming criticism of the persecution:
“There are no Jews in Cuba, but there are homosexuals” (quoted in Almendros and Jiménez, 1984: 79).A
Mattachine Society protest against the Cuban government at the United Nations building on Easter
Sunday of 1965 alerted the international public about Cuba’s campaigns “intended to round up Cuban
homosexuals and put them in work camps” (Marotta, 1991: 32). Finally, in response to these charges,
Castro took a clear position in 1965 during an interview with the U.S. journalist Lee Lockwood (quoted in
Lockwood, 1967: 92): Nothing prevents a homosexual from professing revolutionary ideology and,
consequently, exhibiting a correct political position. In this case he should not be considered politically
negative. And yet we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and
requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist
militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist
should be.
???
Zerubavel 12 (Eviatar Zerubavel, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and a prolific and notable writer on the standardization of
time and the sociology of cognition, Oxford University, New York, "Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community",
http://www.questia.com/read/121627369/ancestors-and-relatives-genealogy-identity-and)
Given their social nature, the contours of our genealogical landscape are also affected by various
(demographic, cultural, technological) forms of social change. Several such recent changes in particular
affect the way we now envision genealogical relatedness. Increasing immigration, for example, entails
increased contact among hitherto more isolated ethnoracial communities. Such contact, in turn, is
also increasing our rates of intermarriage, thereby “destroying the old, regional patterns of genetic
diversity [and] replacing them with cosmopolitan melting pots of markers”1 as well as more “braided”
genealogical identities. Further acknowledging their multiethnic makeup, modern nationstates are also
increasingly held together by civic rather than tribal notions of nationhood, thereby essentially
embracing “post-ethnicity.”2 In such a “post-tribal”3 world, of course, one would expect visions of a
common future to supersede those of a common past as a basis for social solidarity, or in the words of
John Quincy Adams, social communities whose members actually look “forward to their posterity
rather than backward to their ancestors.”4 Modern birth-control practices (such as the use of oral
contraceptive pills) and policies (such as China’s one-child rule) are also changing our micro-genealogical
landscape, as families are getting smaller. If this trend continues, the very notion of siblinghood, for
example, may ultimately become obsolete.5 At the same time, however, our traditional notion of having
only one set of parents and siblings is constantly being challenged by increasing rates of remarriage6
that have given rise to the “stepfamily” or “blended” (“reconstituted,” “recomposed,” “recombinant”)
family7 a new form of genealogical community based on new kinds of genealogical ties such as stepparenthood and half-siblinghood. Membership in such communities implies having multiple sets of
ancestors and therefore also multiple sets of relatives as well as multiple genealogical identities. It
also raises new definitional dilemmas. After all, how exactly is one genealogically related to one’s
mother’s new husband’s ex-wife’s stepchildren?8 New reproductive technologies such as surrogacy
further complexify our genealogical landscape by introducing a major new distinction between the
genetic mother who donates the egg and the gestational mother who carries it to term,9 thereby also
posing new dilemmas such as whether Jewish identity, for example, which is conferred matrilineally, is
“embedded in bodily substance [or] created in gestational environment.”10 Indeed, as we may soon be
able to produce a child with genetic contributions from more than just two biological parents,11 he or
she would actually have several “fractional parents,” as biological parenthood may become “just a
matter of degree.”12
???
Zerubavel 12 (Eviatar Zerubavel, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and a prolific and notable writer on the standardization of
time and the sociology of cognition, Oxford University, New York, "Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community",
http://www.questia.com/read/121627369/ancestors-and-relatives-genealogy-identity-and)
Although usually seen as an attempt to reconstruct the past, genealogy also plays an important role in
efforts to shape the future. Effectively projecting our visions of relatedness not only back but also
forward, we thus use our genealogical imagination retrospectively as well as prospectively. As
exemplified by teknonymy, the practice of naming someone after his or her children, grandchildren, and
even great-grandchildren,1 thinking genealogically involves not only ancestors and relatives but also
descendants. Indeed, given the reality of Jewish-Christian intermarriage, for example, Jews may soon be
defined not by who their grandparents were but rather by who their grandchildren will be. Our
prospective genealogical visions certainly affect the way we reproduce ourselves, and as evidenced by
the eugenics movement, which has carried the connection between the two to its extreme, such
“genealogical engineering” is actually modeled after the basic philosophy and techniques used by
animal breeders, (indeed, eugenicists dream of a future “when a woman would no more accept a man
‘without knowing his biologico-genealogical history’ than a stockbreeder would take ‘a sire for his colts
or calves … without pedigree.’”)2 As such, it involves the use of various genealogical tactics that are but
the prospective forms of lumping, braiding, splitting, and pruning.
???
During 92 (Simon During, a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where he also served as Director of the Film and Media
Programme and a PhD in Victorian Literature from Cambridge, "Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing", 1992,
http://www.questia.com/library/107602585/foucault-and-literature-towards-a-genealogy-of-writing)
Genealogy cannot remain as conceptually simple as this though. Even in this definition certain phrases
have a more particular meaning than may meet the eye. Genealogy is an erudite knowledge, for
instance, not in the sense of "the great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition" (79) but in
the sense that erudition is required to release forgotten memories and documents. For genealogy is
also an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" (81). Not only does it retrieve the buried texts of
those whom history has silenced (though Foucault is appealing to the "plebs" in us all (138)), it uses
methods that previous historical procedures ignore. Genealogies are not, like most marxist histories,
nostalgic or utopian, pointing back or forwards to better eras that have been, or will be, distanced from
the present by the veil of vast socio-historical change. Thus, at a more conceptual level, functionalism
and systematization are procedures which Foucault especially disowns; for him, institutions and
discursive formations cannot be understood in terms of their role in maintaining social stability or
permitting cultural or social reproduction. The word "local" takes on its particular resonance in
Foucault's genealogy too, for it does not attempt systematically to draw particular events into
connections with a wider sphere. Genealogy is also defined in opposition to the universalism of the
marxist and sociological history in two other ways. First, the place of each individual is not
substitutable for the place of any other. Second, it is focused on the body, both on the way in which
the body is historically, culturally and socially "imprinted" (by housing, training, diet, manners and so
on) and the way in which the constantly shifting distinction between the self and the body is
organized at particular historical moments. What makes a genealogy urgent is a particular need, the
sense that a research project written now, here, would reveal weaknesses, and historical connections,
that might have a specific political effect; which might, in particular allow the unvoiced to find a voice.
Thus, for instance, Foucault claimed that the notion of disciplinary power, which he developed in his
genealogical analyzes, came from his experience with the group GIP (Groupe Information sur les
Prisons). This groups attempted to provide occasions in which prisoners could articulate and distribute
their own éconcés in the early 1970s. 3 He was also, though more peripherally, involved in GIS (Groupe
Information Santé), a group of medical professionals who worked towards the de-medicalization of the
health-care system by attempting to reduce the gap between medical knowledge and hospital practice,
to provide care more attuned to the patient's needs and wants, and to place medical questions to the
political arena. (See 1972c). Thus, genealogy also circulates knowledge and information. Again one can
see that, despite its anti-theoretical bias and its avowedly political impetus, genealogy has affinities
with archaeology: it is against totality, it is against the received unities, it does not operate in terms of
deep structures, it does not work in terms of essences or origins or finalities. For it, discourse is not
produced by a subject "behind" a particular utterance or group of utterances, for it, the past is not
"dead"-condemned to an irretrievable otherness. And whereas archaeology aims to be about the
ordering of one kind of material thing-the éconcé, genealogy aims to be about the ordering of anotherthe body. Genealogy also resists that kind of "continuous history" which emerged as the central
theme of secular humanism-or, rather, as a "screen memory" covering up the reality of modern state
administration (a "screen memory" is a Freudian term for an image which stands in the place of,
though it retains traces of, a repressed idea). It is in these terms that, unlike continuous history,
genealogy is tuned to the contemporary social world: "Evolutive" historicity, as it was then constitutedand so profoundly that it is still self-evident for many today-is bound up with a mode of the functioning
of power. No doubt it is as if the "historyremembering" of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns
and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power. With the new techniques of subjection, the
"dynamics" of continuous evolutions tend to replace the "dynastics" of solemn events.
???
Tensuan, 9 (Theresa M., coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Haverford College, Winter
2009, “Crossing the Lines: Graphic (Life) Narratives and Co-Laborative Political Transformations”, Biography,
Volume 32, Number 1, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/biography/v032/32.1.tensuan.html>)ZB
Through nuanced delineations of differences in inflection, articulation, and representation, Sexile schools its readers in the complicated
dynamics in which social conventions, sexual exchanges, geographic locations, and creative rearticulation engender identities. In characterizing
Cortez's comic as "a fine weave of Adela's many yarns," Hebert offers a description that speaks to the ways in which Sexile draws together
Adela's narratives and acts of self-invention in frames that show how the sexual is interlaced with the
political, how economic exchanges and acts of desire are intimately interrelated, and how the
movement between worlds can be like entry into an amniotic state of suspension—one that engenders the
promise of transformation, as well as the specter that the oppressions one is trying to escape can themselves shape-shift and be found in new
forms in the promised land. Next to a montage that juxtaposes the sinuous lines of a Corvette and the emblematic swoosh on a can of CocaCola with Marilyn Monroe's curves—manifest in the iconic image of the star in a form-fitting white dress with a plunging neckline and
accordion-pleated skirt billowing in an updraft—the narrator notes that in the face of schoolyard bullying: I escaped and started to read my
mother's magazines like bibles, and I learned all about couture, makeup and glamour, the fabulous glamour of America. I knew Americans had
cars shaped like women. That even farmers or plumbers can buy them. That you could open a can of soda and it was cold. That you can go buy
a pill to make your mustache disappear! . . . This is a big deal when you are a girly boy in a place where people can't remember steak and
people aren't supposed to want special shit for themselves. This
fantasy of America—the miracle of a soft drink that is
cold out of a can, the dream of access to pharmaceuticals that do the work of tranny magic—functions
as a siren call, but the narrator gives props to certain aspects of Castro's administration. Adela declares that
"[o]ne thing about the revolution, they were serious about education" (15), a situation that provides the opportunity for Jorge to go to boarding
school—where he finds himself in the heady atmosphere of the company of 500 boys—and to get his degree in teaching. Despite Jorge's
successes in the classroom as a teacher of math, the school's director reluctantly asks him to submit his resignation because of the fact that his
daily preparation for class includes "a little foundation and some tasteful rouge" (15). One could read this incident as emblematic of the
homophobic restrictions of Castro's regime, but one would have to question whether Jorge's injection of pageantry into workaday life would
have been embraced in an average Midwestern high school in the late 1970s—or today. [End Page 180] In the
wake of the mass
emigration in 1980 in which over 100,000 declared dissidents made their way from Mariel Bay to the
Florida coast, Castro was both vilified and celebrated—oft times, as Ruby Rich and Lourdes Arguellos argue, by precisely
the same people, for "having gotten rid of the homosexuals." Rich and Arguellos detail how members of the Cuban émigré community in Miami
who had joined hands with Anita Bryant in her 1977
anti-gay organizing effort found space to include figures such as the
writer Reinaldo Arenas (whose posthumously published memoir Antes que anochezca [1992] was popularized by Julian Schnabel's 2000 film
adaptation Before Night Falls) alongside
other Cuban intellectual dissidents, some of whom were themselves
virulently homophobic, as a means of "portraying socialism and homophobia as inextricably linked.
This strategy seemed to be designed especially for U.S. gay and liberal consumption" (132). Under the Carter
administration, the United States government suspended laws "prohibiting admission of homosexual aliens . . . prioritiz[ing] anticommunism
over homophobia" (Rich and Arguellos 122–28); indeed, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act explicitly excluded anyone "afflicted with . . . sexual
deviation," language that stood until Barney Frank crafted a new comprehensive immigration exclusion amendment in 1990.8
Things to Add
Secomb