"We Don't See LGBTQ Differences": Cisheteronormativity and Concealing Phobias and Irrational Fears Behind Rhetorics of Acceptance

Introduction

Recent advances in LGBTQ rights and visibility in the United States, along with global demonstrations for equality for same-sex-desiring individuals, have increasingly normalized LGBTQ identities. As we write this special forum introduction, same-sex marriage is legally available in twenty-seven countries, popular media portrayals of LGBTQ individuals have become more common, and the 2018 U.S. midterms resulted in the election of record-breaking numbers of LGBTQ politicians. Across the United States, state and local laws have been implemented to target child bullying, and California's Fair Education Act (Senate Bill 48) has required the inclusion of gays and lesbians in school curriculum. Pride events now draw corporate sponsors due to their mainstream popularity, and youth around the globe are being encouraged to believe that "it gets better."¹ In the face of such gains, prominent voices have broadcasted the contemporary era as "a good time to be gay!"²

Still, the structural forces of cisheteronormativity, historically having abnormalized and unnaturalized LGBTQ people, continue to organize the ideological, institutional, and everyday interactive and relational contexts in which LGBTQ people are positioned.³ The heteropatriarchal tradition of marriage remains the normative institution for intimate relationships,⁴ and although some LGBTQ people participate in this custom because it is now available to them, this does not undo the cissexist and heterosexist values the institution upholds. Ongoing discussions of gender inclusive restrooms (or washrooms) further illuminate how the powerful technology of cisheteronormativity disciplines, controls, and/or corrects the social and performative aspects of gender, sexuality, sex, and the body,⁵ and the dis-ease people accustomed to the gender binary system feel with gender remixing. At the same time, the particular sets of (white, affluent, and/or able-bodied) lesbians and gays who perform homonormative lifestyles such as getting married, buying homes, creating family, and/or raising children, are politically and economically welcomed into the U.S. nation-state,⁶ becoming progressive symbols and affirmations of U.S. liberalism in the historical continuum of global capitalism. These examples explicitly elaborate the endurance of cisheteronormativity as an undisrupted and taken-for-granted idea and social relation.

We are thus in a rhetorical moment where, even as cisgender, heteronormative, and homonormative performances prevail as structuring forces for personal and political lives, it is frequently proudly proclaimed that "you can love whoever you want" and that equality is available for persons of all genders, sexes, and sexualities. However, much like the logics of colorblindness and post-racialism elide and uphold racist structures and practices via claims of "not seeing race," claims to "not see LGBTQ differences" uphold cisheteronormativity by marking phobias and irrational fears including but not limited to homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia as passé or old-fashioned. Because people who are open and frank about LGBTQ phobias and irrational fears can be politically corrected, everyday enactments of cisheteronormative violence are becoming more nuanced, subtle, ambivalent, and ambiguous.⁷ In the context of enduring inequalities amid professed equality, this forum focuses on interrogating how anti-LGBTQ beliefs and practices are reproduced and reconstituted through the strategic sustainability of cisheteronormativity as the center. Examining lived experiences of queer exclusion that stand in stark contrast to the neoliberal rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, the articles in this forum make visible the heteronormative phobias and irrational fears concealed within ostensibly progressive languages that mask structural oppression behind the professed equal acceptance of all genders and sexes.

Shinsuke Eguchi kicks off the discussion by examining aggressions against communication scholars who perform queerness in their research, teaching, and service. Showcasing examples of masked, color-blinded expressions of queerphobia emerging from their personal observations in the academy, they illuminate institutional expectations for queer and trans scholars to conform to normative expectations. In the next article, Bernadette Calafell critiques university gate-keeping practices that tokenize students and faculty who are queer, trans, and/or people of color while positioning them as suspects and targets. Calafell argues that discourses of contagion create scapegoats to maintain cisheteronormativity. Continuing this theme, Benny...