seriously though, I never want to hear “gender theory doesn’t erase homosexuality” ever again. like, ever ever again.
here’s the text, image quality is trash:
“Introucing the English translation of Mario Mielli’s 1977 “Towards a Gay Communism”, Tim Dean describes Mieli’s articulation of gayness as “loosening gayness for an exclusively sexual orientation to something more capacious”
i.e. loosening it from exclusive same-sex attraction to being inclusive of the opposite sex
“Yet Mieli was writing before the emergence of queer theory, and in contemporary scholarly work around sexuality and sexual identity, queer appears to have achieved a hegemonic status”
Yes being “queer” is all the rage at the expense of actually being gay, well done
“Over the past decade the articulation of theory or politics that is explicitly gay (rather than queer or LGBTQ) has often been attached to limiting, exclusionary and oppressive practices, particularly regarding race and gender.”
Almost like same-sex attracted people are uniquely vulnerable in terms of structural oppression and thus their politics don’t affect the hetkweers, and don’t necessarily need to include them. Almost like the science surrounding homosexuality and its origins is again exclusive to the study of same-sex attraction, and not opposite-sex attraction that involves mildly eccentric clothing. Saying that same-sex attraction is “limiting” implies that it’s a choice, saying that it’s “exclusionary” implies that its a crime and saying that it’s “oppressive” implies that sex is a human right that the evil gays are denying to the opposite sex. Making homosexuality inclusive of “gender” makes no sense because gender is an abstract social construct that you literally can’t experience sexual attraction towards, and race has no bearing on the definition of gay as “same-sex attracted” in the first place. I love how they have so little faith in their own bullshit that they have to throw race in there to make it seem like they’re complaining about racism and not about people being gay.
“As an unsurprising result, in both academia and activism “gay” is frequently framed as the normative, assimilationist and exclusionary past to queer’s fluid, radical and inclusive present and future.”
Being same-sex attracted, by definition, is not “normative”. Demanding the same civil rights as straight people is not “assimilationism”. And homosexuality describes a biological state of being, by definition it is going to exclude some people, it’s SUPPOSED to. Insisting that everyone’s sexuality is “fluid” is not progressive, it’s conversion therapy rhetoric. There is nothing “radical” about socially coercing gay people into considering opposite sex relationships using semantics. If homosexuality is inclusive of opposite-sex attraction and relationships then the word will cease to mean anything.
“We want to challenge and interrogate assumptions of how gay can be known and conceptualized, beyond conflation with / reduction to homosexuality.”
