Language matters: an introduction

That language and sexuality are closely connected is one of the enduring themes in human sexuality research. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality explore some of these language-centered insights as they apply to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices and to other dimensions of non-normative sexual experiences. The articles address language use over a range of geographic and social locations. The linguistic practices discussed are diverse, including the language associated with Santería, comments viewers make about gay pornography, homophobic discourse, coming out stories, stories where declarations of sexual identity are tacitly withheld, sexual messages in Black hip hop culture, assessments of urban AIDS ministries, and policies that limit transgender subjects' access to urban space. Taken together, these articles demonstrate that language matters in the everyday experience of sexual sameness and they model some of the approaches that are now being explored in language and sexuality studies.     

Neoliberal homophobic discourse: heteronormative human capital and the exclusion of queer citizens

In this article, I examine the relationship between homophobic language use and its broader social context, focusing on how a U.S.-based, conservative Christian organization's institutionalized homophobic text-making practices seek to derive legitimacy from the broader political economic discourses associated with the neoliberal moment. Using the Family Research Council's statement on marriage and the family as the basis for analysis, I demonstrate how the organization seeks to represent lesbian and gay subjects and their kinship formations as a threat to human capital development because they are based on affectional relationships that neither reflect nor respond to the kinds of self-governance and marketization that neoliberalism requires of all citizen-subjects and their families. Linguistic strategies for creating such representations include lexical choices that avoid overtly identifying lesbian and gay subjects as the object of discussion, the creation of a taxonomy for what constitutes "proper" families-based on neoliberal principles--that implicitly excludes lesbian and gay kinship formations, and the use of neoliberal discourses of self-governance and marketization as the basis for that exclusion.     

Adolescents’ Appraisal of Homophobic Epithets: The Role of Individual and Situational Factors

ABSTRACT

Homophobic epithets have become commonly used insults among adolescents. However, evidence suggests that there are differences in how these homophobic epithets are evaluated based on beliefs held by the observer and the context in which they are used. To examine this, Italian high school students were asked to rate the offensiveness of homophobic epithets, as well as to consider how they or others would react to homophobic epithets across various situations. Homophobic beliefs and beliefs about the social acceptability of homophobic epithets were also examined. It was found that greater perceived social acceptability of homophobic epithets was related to dismissive reactions to their use, whereas homophobic beliefs were predictive of negative emotional reactions but in varying ways depending on the specific context. The results indicate that homophobic epithets may not always be perceived as homophobic by adolescents, and that attempts to alter the social acceptability of these insults may be an effective manner of reducing their use.     

Persistent Ambivalence: Theorizing Queer East German Studies

ABSTRACT

The German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany) had an ambivalent relationship with homosexuality. Under the principles of socialism, everyone was welcome to contribute to the greater good. The situation for queer people, here lesbians and gay men, was different: one of illegality and invisibility. A difficulty in analyzing these experiences is the theory and methodology necessary to find them and draw them together in a historical narrative. This essay offers a mode of analysis in which theories of affect illustrate long-term trends in East German conceptualizations of same-sex sexuality. By discussing a 1950 court ruling and a 1989 film, the essay demonstrates the persistence of homophobic prejudice and fear of homosexual seduction of young people and the links to historical and legal developments.     

Destabilizing Science From the Right: The Rhetoric of Heterosexual Victimhood in the World Health Organization's 2008 HIV/AIDS Controversy

This article examines the 2008 World Health Organization/Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS controversy through original reports and media coverage. Analysis reveals that discourse rhetorically exonerates heterosexuals from HIV/AIDS while reifying homophobic and morally righteous ideology about HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. Discourses of “fraudulent science,” “heterosexual absence,” and reverse victimization destabilize meaning of HIV/AIDS and heterosexuality. “AIDS,” “heterosexuality,” and even victimhood and minority status were destabilized and resignified in a rhetoric that benefited from its status as science even as it rendered past science suspect as ideological.     

Heterosexual Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage

Negative attitudes of heterosexual people toward same-sex marriage relate to the degree to which they are homophobic. However, it has been understudied whether there exists a gender difference in this association. Our results indicated that homophobia was the best predictor of attitudes toward gay male and lesbian marriage, and this was equally true for both heterosexual men and women. However, the attitudinal difference between gay male and lesbian marriage was related to homophobia in men but not in women. That is, for men only, being less homophobic toward lesbians than toward gay men was associated with favoring lesbian over gay men marriage. Considering these results, the role of gender in attitudes toward same-sex marriage seems to be as an important moderator of homophobia.     

When the grass is greener: Fertility decisions in a cross-national context

In research and policy discourse, conceptualizations of fertility decision-making often assume that people only consider circumstances within national borders. In an integrated Europe, citizens may know about and compare conditions across countries. Such comparisons may influence the way people think about and respond to childrearing costs. To explore this possibility and its implications, we present evidence from 44 in-depth interviews with Polish parents in the United Kingdom and Poland. Explanations of childbearing decisions involved comparisons of policy packages and living standards across countries. Individuals in Poland used richer European countries as an important reference point, rather than recent conditions in Poland. In contrast, migrants often positively assessed their relatively disadvantaged circumstances by using the Polish setting as a reference. The findings could help explain why, despite substantial policy efforts, fertility has remained at very low levels in poorer European countries, while migrants from those countries often have higher fertility abroad.     

Let’s Not,and Say We Would: Imagined and Actual Responses to Witnessing Homophobia

We compared imagined versus actual affective and behavioral responses to witnessing a homophobic slur. Participants (N = 72) witnessed a confederate using a homophobic slur, imagined the same scenario, or were not exposed to the slur. Those who imagined hearing the slur reported significantly higher levels of negative affect than those who actually witnessed the slur, and nearly one half of them reported that they would confront the slur, whereas no participants who actually heard the slur confronted it. These findings reveal a discrepancy between imagined and real responses to homophobic remarks, and they have implications for the likelihood that heterosexuals will actually confront homophobic remarks.     

Exploring Homophobia in Tbilisi,Georgia

The purpose of this study is to determine statistical predictors of homophobic attitudes among the residents of Tbilisi, Georgia. We analyze 2013 survey data from a representative sample of the Tbilisi adult population. Residents were asked about their attitudes, beliefs, and political and social values in the context of the May 17, 2013 attack on LGBT activists on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT). Findings show that homophobia is significantly predicted by male gender, lower levels of education, acceptance of social inequality, nonliberal attitudes, and perceiving homosexuals as a “threat to national security.” However, psychological perceptions and personal experiences also indirectly influence homophobic attitudes: the findings suggest that males report homophobic attitudes more often than females do and tend to be even more homophobic when they believe that homosexuality is inborn rather than acquired. The study also found that people without liberal attitudes tend to be more homophobic when they have personal contacts with homosexuals. This article highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach to education and the promotion of liberal values as well as legal equality for LGBTQ individuals to decrease the level of homophobia in Georgian society and, specifically, in Tbilisi.     

Good Gay Buddies for Lifetime: Homosexually Themed Discourse and the Construction of Heteromasculinity Among Chinese Urban Youth

Starting as an Internet meme, the homosexually themed gao-ji discourse recently became popular among Chinese urban youth in describing intimate relationships among heterosexual men. Positioned within a body of scholarship on the interplay between language, homophobia, and the construction of heteromasculinity, this article suggests that the gao-ji discourse manifests a form of male homosociality, through which new boundaries of Chinese heteromasculinity may be renegotiated. Based on qualitative interviews with college students, the article first tracks the genealogy of the gao-ji discourse in the wake of China’s booming Internet culture. The main body focuses on unpacking the daily use of the gao-ji discourse, with an attention to the two latent functions it serves (i.e., expanding heteromasculine behaviors and reiterating heteromasculine identities). In conclusion, I argue that the prevalence of the gao-ji discourse mainly resolves straight men’s anxieties against the background of growing public awareness of homosexuality; therefore, it cannot necessarily translate into social acceptance of homosexuality.     

Imagined Rural/Regional Spaces: Non-Normative Sexualities in Small Towns and Rural Communities in Croatia

This research aims to critically examine how the complexity of the ongoing process of “coming out” in small towns and rural spaces in Croatia undermines the imagined hierarchical distinction between rural/urban spaces. The narratives of LGBQ individuals living in these spaces subvert imaginaries of their communities as homogeneously hostile and threatening. Some participants did, however, perceive other spaces as either “gay-friendly” or “deeply homophobic.” As Croatia is transnationally perceived to be a part of a larger “homophobic region,” the construction of the rural/urban hierarchical distinction is (re)produced and (re)configured within discourses that signify Western countries and so-called more developed regions within Croatia as “more open and liberal” as opposed to “more homophobic and backward” spaces. These distinctions between countries, regions, and the rural/urban spaces come into contradiction with each other and are undermined by my interviewees’ own incongruous experiences.     

Digital media responses to a feminist scholarly article: a critical discourse analysis

In this critical discourse analysis, I identified the linguistic tools and discourses used in the articles, blog posts, discussion forums, and tweets published in response to my article on STEM in Higher Education that identified gendered discourses in instructional language. Beginning from the standpoint of the author of the journal article, I examined digital media publications to understand how linguistic tools such as stance and deixis were used to convey meaning, emotion, and power and negotiated through language. Analysis suggested that linguistic tools and trolling strategies seen throughout the corpus were used to generate support for calls to denounce the research and silence me, as the author of the journal article. These findings provide insight into how opposition to academic feminist work builds, in many cases, in reaction to the recontextualization of the research instead of responding to the research itself.     

Debating LGBT Workplace Protections in the Bible Belt: Social Identities in Legislative and Media Discourse

ABSTRACT

This article reports a case study of the legislative and media discourse surrounding the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity language to the employment nondiscrimination ordinance of a city in the heart of the Bible Belt. The purpose of the study is to uncover how different identities were constructed and contested at city council meetings and in the news media on the way to passing legal protection for LGBT city employees in a region that is often characterized by anti-gay prejudice. This debate over the nondiscrimination ordinance centered on the question of whether LGBT identities are equivalent to identity categories based on race, gender, or religious belief, and it was shaped by various intergroup communication dynamics, specifically between members of the LGBT minority and the straight majority, between LGBT and Christian identities, and between “true” and “false” Christian identities.     

„Jemand kommt zu Dir und sagt bitte“: Eine empirische Studie zur Gewebespende im Krankenhauskontext

During the last decades biomedical research has gained substantial importance in Western societies. Due to the dependence on human biological material in research, an increasing number of people find themselves in a double role of being a patient and a donor of bodily substances. This paper deals with the decision making of hospitalised patients who are asked, through informed consent, to donate skin tissue that will be removed in the course of their scheduled plastic surgery. While bioethical debates often rely on the assumption that patients decide whether or not to consent according to the information provided, I will show on the basis of empirical work, which circumstances and considerations finally lead to their agreement. Mainly I will discuss how patients socially experience informed consent as a request and how such an understanding affects their decision. By that I aim to encourage a conception of informed consent beyond the dominant bioethical discourse of rational decision making.     

No homo

The phrase no homo arose in hip-hop lyrics of the 1990s as a discourse interjection to negate supposed sexual and gender transgressions. Today the phrase has gained currency beyond hip-hop culture and pervades racial and gender continua. As a result, its increasing prevalence in mainstream speech has caused critics to deplore no homo as outright homophobia. This article describes the origins and scope of no homo. Instead of easily identifying the phrase as homophobic, the article invites readers to examine the phrase as a way of understanding the complexities in gender identification processes along with the linguistic dexterity necessary for survival in certain sociocultural groups. By exploring the macrosociological issues which created and perpetuate the need for no homo, we arrive at a deeper understanding of sexuality, marginalized sexuality, and the (often unspoken) uneasiness with sexual and gendered nonconformity.     

From sexual identity to sexual relationships: a contextual shift

The article has three major purposes. First, it adumbrates four contexts within which the discourse on sexual identity has been carried on: the historical, bisexual, homosexual, and biological. Within these contexts sexual identity has been conceived in three general forms: the biological, psychological, and socio-cultural. The biological form is the most basic since all conceptualizations of sexual identity make the biological sex of partners in sexual relationships the criterial distinction. Second, the article addresses problems that have arisen in each of the contexts: the uncritical use of popular concepts and explanations of sexual identity, the incorporation of unacknowledged moral judgements, and the misapplication of the scientific method. Third, it identifies conceptual, methodological, and moral advantages in redirecting the discourse on sexual identity so that the focus of inquiry is on sexual relationships: (a) The focus is shifted from isolated individuals to their mutual associations. (b) Social scientists could conceive of sexual relationships in other than biological terms or metaphors. (c) The shift would capitalize on the advantages of the psychoanalytic method (the exploration of personally constructed meanings) and symbolic interactionism (the identification of socially constructed meanings) while avoiding the pitfalls of relying on one of these approaches to the exclusion of the other. (d) The shift would allow investigators to view sexual relationships from the vantage point of a morality of individual choice rather than a traditional morality of externally imposed obligation.     

Historicizing affect, psychoanalyzing history: pedophilia and the discourse of child sexuality

Within the last two decades in Australia, Britain, and the United States, we have seen a veritable explosion of cultural panic regarding the problem of pedophilia. Scarcely a day passes without some mention in the media of predatory pedophiles or organized pedophile networks. Many social constructionist historians and sociologists have described this incitement to discourse as indicative of a moral panic. The question that concerns me in this article is: If this incitement to discourse is indicative of a moral panic, to what does the panic refer? I begin by detailing, first, how social constructionism requires psychoanalytic categories in order to understand the notion of panic, and second, how a psychoanalytic reading of history might reveal important unconscious forces at work in the current pedophilia "crisis" that our culture refuses to confront. Here, I will suggest a repressed discourse of child sexuality is writ large. I will argue that the hegemonic discourse of pedophilia is contained largely within a neurotic structure and that many of our prevailing responses to pedophilia function as a way to avoid tackling crucial issues about the reality and trauma of childhood sexuality.     

“Some University Lecturers Wear Gay Pride T-shirts. Get Over It!”: Denials of Homophobia and the Reproduction of Heteronormativity in Responses to a Gay-Themed T-shirt

ABSTRACT

This article explores an incident involving a gay pride T-shirt, printed with the slogan “Some people are gay. Get over it!,” that I wore during a university lecture, and students’ predominantly negative responses to it. I use the lens of modern prejudice research, particularly discursive psychological approaches to modern prejudice, to interpret the students’ responses to a qualitative survey about their views on the T-shirt. They related strong feelings of upset and anger, particularly because I had—in their view—implicitly accused them of being homophobic. They passionately refused this supposed accusation on the grounds that “everything’s equal now” and “gay people are no different from us.” I argue that the ideological themes of cultural heterosexism and compulsory heterosexuality provide a productive framework for making sense of the students’ responses, as they sanction a rational neoliberal subject who is both non-homophobic and inculcated into heteronormativity.