I’ve never felt more seen than by the child who waved. Talking with one another introduces us to a wider array of perspectives. Communities are sites of queer potentiality because of the meshing together of various different individuals. I’m reminded of my favorite words by Charlene Carruthers in Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements: “[community] built on connections, not sameness.” Of course, the individualistic culture engendered by late stage capitalism, compulsory heterosexuality, and patriarchy must create and maintain counter-sites and mechanisms for population control and power maintenance.
This is why the United States- specifically- allocates billions of dollars to the police and military state- enforcing rigid isolation and conformity both internally and externally. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States by authors Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock record and discuss several archetypes ascribed onto queer people that justifies our containment, policing, and abuse. Ending chapter 1 with, “As queer identities substituted for individual perverse ascites, the process of criminalizing sexual and gender nonconformity was facilitated through the construction of ever0shfiting and evolving archetypal narratives,” the authors then outline various queer archetypes (“gleeful gay killer;” “man-hating lesbian;” “sexually degraded predator;” “disease spreader;” among others) that have been deployed to punish and confine those whom would transgress the rigidity of heterosexuality and/or heteronormativity. These archetypes are supported both socially, culturally, and legally, when, for instance, “the supreme court upheld laws that criminalized private sexual acts committed by “homosexuals” in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick [1986]. By finding that “homosexuals” did not have a right to have consensual sex within the privacy of their homes, while refusing to punish the same acts by heterosexuals, the court in effect ruled that queers as a class were worthy of punishment” (72). But of course, the enforcement and severity of punishment are wound up in racial and class politics, as well: “It is that sodomy statues were [are] used to enforce existing race, class, and gender power structures” (16).
Selective enforcement and variations in punishment set the grounds for homonormativity and homonationalism. Homonormativity, using Jasbir K. Puar in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, “can be read as a formation complicit with and invited into the biopolitical valorization of life in its inhabitation and reproduction of heternormative norms” (9). Homonationalism “operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexaulity, but also of the racialized and national norms that reinforce sexual subjects. Here is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of homosexualiy” (2). In other words, homonormativity is the cultural script that reinstills and reproduces compulsory heterosexual norms within and between queer bodies and additionally demarcates legible queerness at large. Homonationalism is another framework of normativity that introduced the incorporation of the legible (read clearly defined and recognizable) queer citizen (the non-citizen is automatically excluded from the national project but does not diminish the desire to be incorporated into the national project. See Ahmed The Promise of Happiness chapter 5) into the national imagery and imperial, white supremacist project.
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