The Argonaut #4

Queer World

Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age

by Sean Chou

How do you invent a “homosexual”?

‘Coming-out’ is the Euro-American paradigm which frames how homosexual identity is constructed in the West. It usually involves the homosexual subject confiding in close friends and family, casting themselves as the ‘gay’ or ‘queer’. But with this revelation come the ambiguous logics of guilt and shame. These are challenging because – while the homosexual subject optimistically hopes to regain selfconfidence and agency by revealing their sexuality – by participating in the ‘coming-out’, they confess the secret of their same-sex attraction. An act of ‘revelation’ is also an act of ‘confession’. The power of the ‘gay’ label becomes essentialized and fixed.

Something striking about the coming-out is the sexual binary. ‘Gayness’ assumes a counter-balancing ‘straightness’. The coming-out becomes a self-reinforcing control mechanism that classifies and regulates individuals and whose bodies they choose to desire and share with.

In ‘History of Sexuality Vol 1’ (1998), Michel Foucault contends the self-confession is a ‘ritual of discourse’ which produces sexuality as a ‘truth-effect’; it lends power to social forces which go on to ‘judge, order, forgive, console, reconcile’ (61-62). But how do we move forwards with this discussion and think more broadly about how sexuality is

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