Language struggles in gay rights controversies: How anti-gay discourse shapes contemporary United States politics.

Abstract

Political successes of the anti-gay right, including the resonance of its claims in mainstream media and political discourse, have produced truths about gays and gay rights controversies: Gays rights are special rights, threatening individual freedoms. Gays are ravenous pedophiles, a small, inscrutable minority pulling the strings of power from behind the scenes, bullies who intimidate and threaten violence. Gays are bearers of disease and death, and hypersexed, criminal sodomites. Gays are active, aggressive; straights are passive, unwillingly dragged into divisive controversies. Gays threaten national security and Western civilization. These statements about gay people are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak in Foucault's phrase, constructing individual subjectivity. They are performative statements, citing Butler's term, in that they exercise a binding power through the construction of laws that ascribe sanctions to homosexuality which limit our ability to live autonomous and free lives. In resistance against homophobic discourses and their political manifestations, gays deploy a counterdiscourse that has liberatory potential. ACT UP, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers--are seminal examples of resistance against the limits imposed upon the self by heterosexist power relationships. Other less radical formations, like gay families with children, also manifest this phenomenon, embodying the potential of resistance to normalizing processes to produce new forms of subjectivity. Because of the fear that straights' tolerance has limits, many within queer communities have rejected our diversity. But diversity is something that gay conservatives will never be able to control. Queer-positive languages and carnivalesque celebrations will continue to subvert the unicity of the centralizing, normalizing systems within gay communities and the larger culture. Queerness is desiring-production, becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. Moderating our behavior to gain admittance to the club on its exclusivist terms is a dead-end. The agents of normalization are everywhere and never satisfied. Instead of seeking admission to the heterosexist club, we must smash down its walls, de-striating it and smoothing space that is open for everyone.