Blackwashing Homophobia

Violence and the Politics of Sexuality, Gender and Race

Melanie Judge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138219045
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315436357
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex identities increasingly secure legal recognition across the globe, these formal equality gains are contradicted by the continued presence of violence. Such violence emerges as a political pressure point for contestations of identity and power within wider systems of global and local inequality. Discourses of homophobia-related violence constitute subjectivities that enact violence and that are rendered vulnerable to it, as well as shaping political possibilities to act against violence.

Blackwashing Homophobia critiques prevailing discourses through which violence and its queer targets are normatively understood, exploring the knowledge regimes in which multiple forms of othering are both reproduced and/or resisted. This book draws on primary research on lesbian subjectivity and violence in South Africa examining the intersections of sexual, gender, race and class identities, and the contemporary politics of violence in a postcolonial context:

• What are the contending ways of knowing queers and the violence they face?

• How are the causes, characters, consequence of, and 'cures' for, violence constructed through such knowledges and what are their power effects?

The book explores these questions and their implications for how violence, as an instrument of power, might be countered.

Blackwashing Homophobia is a timely intervention for theorising the discourse of homophobia-related violence and what it reveals and conceals, enables and hinders, in relation to queer identities and political imaginaries in times of violence. The book's interdisciplinary approach to the topic will appeal to social and political scientists, philosophers and psychology professionals, as well as to advanced psychology undergraduates and postgraduates alike.

1
“DOUBLE THE TROUBLE”

Gender and sexuality (un)corrected

PART 1: GENDER AND SEXUAL DISCIPLINING

Violence pervades the lives of all women, whether as its target, through fearing it, or in struggling against it. In this context, the chapter explores lesbian subject formation, in times of violence, within wider systems in which gendered identity, practice and performance are normatively regulated and disciplined. It traces how lesbians both comply with and resist the hetero-patriarchal discourses through which femininity and masculinity are violently forged and defended. The chapter also charts the politicisation of lesbian identity in discourse, as well as the various modes of agency this makes possible in the encounter with violence.

Feminists have long viewed violence as multi-faceted and as inclusive of emotional and psychological dimensions (Morgan & Björkert, 2006) to which physical violence is inextricably linked (Duffy, 1995). Women’s susceptibility to gender violence is also compounded by gendered socio-economic inequality (Jewkes & Abrahams, 2002). This classed inequality and its intersection with gender points to a set of structural conditions within which women are subordinated to men, often through violent means. Violence also reflects power struggles over the maintenance of a particular social order (Breines & Gordon, 1983, p. 511) in which hetero-patriarchal and heteronormative relations of power are dominantly established and maintained through violence. Consequently, gender and sexual hegemonies are characterised by men’s violence against women, and among men (Connell, 1987). Heterosexual practices in South Africa show high rates of violence against women, including sexual violence and femicide, as well as high rates of male homicide.¹ The latter is illustrative of the centrality of violence to the maintenance of masculine hierarchy and domination (Ratele, 2010).² Gqola (2007) links this persistence of gender-based violence in the post-apartheid period to violent masculinities and ‘the cult of femininity’. As an instrument of social disciplining, violence is integral to technologies of gender (de Lauretis, 1987) and is part of a wider system that regulates compliance with strict gender and sexual codes (Nel & Judge, 2008). It operates to keep both men and women compliant with the patriarchal mandate of compulsory heterosexuality around which gender is policed (Bem, 1993; Lee-Lampshire, 1999; Rich, 1980; Rubin, 1984). Both the shortfalls and the overflows of sexuality and gender are regulated through violence as a disciplining strategy employed against all social subjects, crafting the contours of what ‘real men’ and ‘real women’ should be, and what happens to them if they are not (Judge, 2014a). The first representative quantitative studies on LGBT-related violence were conducted between 2002 and 2006 (Polders & Wells, 2004; Rich, 2006; Wells, 2005), together with a later study in 2016 (Love Not Hate Campaign, 2016). These reveal widespread experiences of verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, attacks on property, and secondary victimisation against lesbian and gay people across South Africa. Such violence is attributed to the interlocking dynamics of patriarchy, heterosexism, racism and classism (Holland-Muter, 2012), while the rape of lesbians in particular has been linked to performances of hetero-masculinity (Gqola, 2015; Martin, Kelly, Turquet & Ross, 2009). Public visibility, the subversion of patriarchal gender roles, and non-conforming gender presentation render lesbians disproportionately vulnerable to violence (Mkhize et al., 2010; Muholi, 2004; Nel & Judge, 2008; Reid & Dirsuweit, 2002). This signals how the violent repudiation of lesbians is integrally linked to both sexuality and gender (Butler, 1993, 2007; Mason, 2002).

The construct of modern sexuality, significantly influenced by Freud, has produced a discourse of sex that is foundational to the vocabulary of heterosex as a hegemonic system (Potts, 2002).³ Against this backdrop, heterosexuality operates as the privileged, universal and unmarked sexuality in relation to which the lesbian is minoritised, problematised and marked (Butler, 2007; Halperin, 2003; Stoler, 1995).⁴ As the repudiated sexual identity within a classificatory system that defines the terms of the sexual, the lesbian represents an abjected status within the “heterosexual matrix”, which is the obligatory schema for sex, gender and desire and their materialisation (Butler, 2007, p. 7).⁵ It is in accordance with this matrix, as a configuration of gender power, that sexual and gender practices are identified, classified and socially ordered. In this sense, homosexuality is “a category that only exists in relation to normative heterosexuality” (Jackson, 1999, p. 154). The homosexual is thus recruited into social existence through a “shaming interpellation” and comes to signify the prohibition that is inherent to heterosexuality (Butler, 1993, p. 226).⁶

Hegemonic masculinity is necessarily heterosexual (Peterson, 2000) in that within its rules ‘a real man’ is not a woman and is not gay (Harris, 2011). Both hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity are thus predicated on the vigorous disavowal of the homosexual (Connell, 1987; Schippers, 2007) and, as such, the gay/lesbian subject is the quintessential threat to masculine and feminine status (Bem, 1993).⁷ In applying Butler’s formulation of the threats and dangers that compel masculine and feminine gender identification, violence against lesbian/gay subjects operates as follows: the “phallicised dyke” must be the phallus, otherwise she will be punished with homosexuality; and the “feminised fag” must have the phallus, otherwise he will be punished with homosexuality (Butler, 1993, p. 103). Here homosexuality is regulated through the policing and shaming of gender (Butler, 1993). This is concretely evidenced in violent practices that punish, constrain and seek to ‘straighten out’ lesbian sexualities through, for example, targeted rape (Mkhize et al., 2010; Nel & Judge, 2008). Similarly, homophobic violence

executes (or ‘enforces’) the political, social and ideological institution of heterosexism; it punishes non-heterosexual practice, and it aims to prevent future challenge to heteronormativity by employing the threat of violence to attach fear and stigma to non-heterosexual intimacy and desire.

Hutchinson, 1999, p. 19

Supported by heterosexism, this works to naturalise and valorise heterosexual desire (Peterson, 2000), in relation to which the lesbian is constructed as non-normative. Consequently, the binary configuration of normalised heterosexuality and repudiated homosexuality is central to the production and sustaining of gender and sexual normativities (Butler, 2007). In this way interpellation works to “put someone in their place” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 79) by subjecting the queer subject to their subordinated position within dominant gender and sexual norms. Building on Connell’s (1987) theorisation of gender hegemony, Schippers (2007) contends that the lesbian is a “pariah femininity” that is socially undesired and stigmatised due to her “refusal to embody the relationship between masculinity and femininity demanded by gender hegemony” (p. 95).⁸ In this sense lesbians represent a subordinated femininity within the gender hegemony (Collins, 2004; Connell, 1987). Consequently lesbian subjectivity is “a site of ambiguity within the regime of gender” (Mason, 2002, p. 62). Lesbian subjectivity is thus embroiled in gender and sexual regulatory regimes, the violent underpinnings of which are the source and sustenance for hetero-patriarchal and heteronormative orders of meaning and materiality.⁹

The relationship of lesbian subjectivity to the transgression of sexual and gender norms, and to women’s structural vulnerabilities and subordinations to men, are central to dominant understandings of why lesbians face violence. These understandings coalesce around violence against lesbians as a form of gender disciplining and punishment, the various dimensions of which will now be unpacked.

“There’s a human, and then there’s a lesbian”: the lesbian-as-lack

There are multiple dynamics at play when women take up and/or take on lesbian identifications. As a floating signifier (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) ‘the lesbian’ is open to diverse ascriptions of meaning.¹⁰ The stigmatising interpellation of becoming lesbian takes on “a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (Butler, 1997c, p. 3), the exclusionary effects of which are also negotiated by women. While its normative meanings might be othering, the reclamation of ‘lesbian’ as a self-declaratory is also a form of resistant self-affirmation.

The lesbian is dominantly depicted as an embodied failure of gender and sexual norms. Consequently, being lesbian is strongly associated with a series of ‘lacks’ that relate to her gender (as a ‘failed’ femininity), to her humanness (as not fully human) and to her sexuality (as not having ‘real’ sex). These failings are articulated through a discourse of lesbian-as-lack, with which lesbians (dis)identify in complex and contradictory ways.

MOHAU: It’s more of people – I don’t know if they don’t understand or – it’s like when you are a lesbian you are an alien. There’s a human, and then there is a lesbian. So I think people they feel that I am less of a woman if I am like this.

PULENG: Because you are lesbian.

MOHAU: And yet I am still less of a man, even if I am wearing masculine. So I don’t know where do they put me actually.

In this focus group conversation the lesbian is characterised as the embodiment of incorrect gendering, as flouting gender norms, and consequently, as neither fully woman nor human. In terms of the latter, the categorisation of “alien” works to distinguish “spaces of belonging” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 3) in which the lesbian is abject, and, as with homosexuals more broadly, is not fully human (Lugones, 2010). These gender (mis)representations position the lesbian outside of the normative category of woman and as a distinctively repudiated sexual and gender subject. As incomplete women, lesbians are constituted as not having, or not being able to have, ‘real’ sex. Below, Ilze describes how ‘real sex’ is defined as penetration with a penis. Not considered to be ‘real sex’, lesbian sexuality is rendered socially illegible and invisibilised.

ILZE: And I’m speaking especially in my family, my brother is a farmer and his father is an old farmer as well. I mean they can’t think that a woman can be gay. I was in Uganda for three months. Six months all together: three months, three months. And there being gay is totally out of the question; it’s only men. When you’re a woman in their minds a woman can’t be gay, it doesn’t exist.

MANDY: Serious?

ILZE: Only when you’re a man, you are gay. When you’re a woman, you’re not gay. ‘You can’t be gay, how can you be gay. How do you do it?’

MELANIE: So why do you think it’s that they can’t or don’t see it?

ILZE: They see only being gay as the act. Men with men, penetration with penis, that’s being gay. We don’t have a penis. So, you’re not gay.

Interestingly, Ilze describes how male homosexuality is cast as a recognisable site of sex, while, in contrast, lesbian sexuality is not. Here, gayness is conflated with a phallogocentric notion of sex in which the penis (and its penetrating capacity) is the legitimate marker of the sexual. Consequently, lesbian sexuality subverts the phallogocentric symbolic order (Wittig, 2007) by virtue of her embodied failure of femininity and her female gender, which is already constituted as Other (Waugh, 1992).¹¹ This construction of lesbian subjectivity as a gendered lack also reflects the gendering of sexual orientation (Lorber, 1997).

ILZE: And then they look at me: ‘Ok, you’re gay, of course. You wanna be a man cos you’re big’, and what what. But, at the end of the day it’s not like that. I mean she’s gay, I’m gay, and we’re both women and so that’s it. I mean it’s not that. I don’t want to be a man at all. But they put you in those folders and say, ‘Ok, you’re big, you look like a man so you want to be a man, and you’re gay. Ok, but oh, you’re a tricky one, you are small so how does that work?’

By marking her body as “big”, Ilze legitimates her own representation as a failed femininity. This aligns with wider tropes of female excess – of woman as “too much” – and thus beyond the prescripts of the intelligible female body (Bordo, 1993, p. 163). Drawing on a discourse of hegemonic femininity, Ilze positions smaller women as more closely aligned with normative femininity, and therefore as more socially acceptable.

The discourse of lesbian-as-lack illustrates how being human is constituted through ‘correct’ gendering (Butler, 2009; de Lauretis, 1987), indicating the alienation of the lesbian from being fully constituted as woman and as human, her status subordinated (Collins, 2004) to that of a “pariah femininity” (Schippers, 2007). Lesbian subjectivation is routed through these multiplicities of lack, the functions of which are to place lesbians outside normative accomplishments of sex, sexuality, gender and humanness itself.

“Something tragic happened to you”: injurious origins of an identity

W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: (un)settling violence
• 1 “Double the trouble”: gender and sexuality (un)corrected
• 2 The violence of racialisation, the racialisation of violence
• 3 View to a kill: the politics of spectacle
• 4 Assimilation and ascendance: violent differentiation in post-colonial context
• 5 Law, education and a not-only-LGBT revolution
• Conclusion: troubling the dreams of political possibility
• Bibliography
• Index