In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Rethinking Homophobia
  • Karl Bryant (bio)
Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space. David A. B. Murray, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. ix + 227 pp.

Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space concerns itself, not surprisingly, with antihomosexual sentiments, expressions, and broader patterns of social and political life — in short, with phenomena often referred to with the term homophobia. Consisting of essays mostly by anthropologists, Homophobias covers topics that are fairly familiar, or if unfamiliar at least quickly identifiable, as being about homophobia: mainline US Protestantism on same-sex marriage; Jamaican dancehall lyrics; a series of “gay murders” in India; and so on. Yet I am tempted to say that the book is not about homophobia, at least not in any straightforward way. This is because one thread that ties these essays together, and one of the volume’s considerable strengths, is the authors’ collective wariness about, and critique of, taken-for-granted discourses and uses of homophobia. They leverage this wariness to analyze cases that might seem to the casual observer to be obviously about homophobia, and then show how they are (or are not) about that, and about so much more.

Introduced by David A. B. Murray as a corrective concerning anthropology’s engagement with (homo)sexuality, the volume’s contributions far exceed this disciplinary framing. The essays bring careful attention to the conceptual pitfalls of typical understandings of homophobia and look instead for the complex cultural logics and constellation of social, political, and economic factors that undergird antihomosexual expressions. Ultimately, Homophobias invites us to rethink what we mean by “homophobia” and to think more complexly about the particular, changing sources and meanings of antihomosexual phenomena.

The book consists of two broad sections, “Displacing Homophobia” and “Transnational Homophobias,” with an excellent editor’s introduction that lays out the volume’s key critiques and insights. Don Kulick opens the first section with what amounts to a second introduction outlining the work of problematizing homophobia. He does this partly by critiquing the way that “homophobia appears [End Page 618] to locate the source of prejudice against homosexuals not in social structures but in the individual psyche” (23). In calling for an “anthropology of homophobia,” however, Kulick asks for not merely a reordering of terms, with structural sources as the locus of analysis, but rather the more complicated and difficult task of identifying points of interimplication between structural arrangements as they connect with and shape the psyche.

Subsequent essays continue “displacing” homophobia: through close readings of four instances of putative homophobia, Martin Manalansan demonstrates how accusations of homophobia normalize practices and political agendas of groups with the most power to make such accusations stick; rhetorics of homophobia thus work to normalize white and middle-class modes of gayness (as well as white and middle-class responses to gayness), deeming other modes necessarily or potentially expressions of (“internalized” or “cultural”) homophobia. Through interviews with mainline US Protestants, Constance R. Sullivan-Blum argues convincingly that same- sex marriage debates are less about homosexuality per se than about thematizing an epistemological crisis for adherents on the “role, place, and significance of American Protestantism in late modernity” (61). Steven Angelides’s analysis of a 1980s media firestorm over pedophilia in Australia shows how a broad spectrum of political forces (including critiques of patriarchal power) provided fodder for reworking public anxieties about childhood, sexuality, and abuse into the narrow figure of the “homosexual pedophile.” And Brian Riedel’s analysis of homophobia’s (omofovía’s) lack of traction as a discourse about discrimination in Greece, and the widespread use of ratsismós (loosely translated as “racism”) instead, shows the importance of different linguistic and conceptual framings (along with the social and political substrate that animate them) in making sense of and addressing what “homophobia” might otherwise, but sometimes cannot or will not, do.

The book’s first section works to dismantle homophobia through critiques of its conceptual underpinnings, its inability to contend with a full range of intersecting inequalities, and the untenability of assuming any universal, essential notion of homophobia. The second section, “Transnational Homophobias,” continues this work through a series of case studies in Jamaica, Indonesia, Barbados, and India (with a poignant...

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