One would almost think that people don't let historical facts stop them using 'history' to justify whatever they fancy.
History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
- Thread starter Plotinus
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Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Active homophobia as a pillar of "traditional" masculinity is relatively novel, though, because it require a visible gay population to react to, which doesn't really emerge until the 1960s. That's not to say that homophobia doesn't predate the gay rights movement, of course, otherwise you wouldn't have needed the movement, but it didn't haunt the imaginations of insecure men in the way it does today, so there wasn't the same impulse towards expecting everything for the barest trace of homosexuality. By the time that emerges, the cowboy myth is already well-entrenched in the American imagination.
I was only pointing out that the analogy to cheap immigrant labour actually helps explains why white men would and did become cowboys, rather than why they would refuse to become cowboys.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Thanks for the clarification.
jjkrause84
King
I don't think this is quite right. Barring a few well-known exceptions homosexuality has been viciously repressed for most of human history. The concept of 'homophobia' is almost unhelpful in this reflection because the entirety of most human societies was structurally anti-homosexual (well, anti- anything not heterosexual, I should say). Family composition, legal systems, religious teaching, all manner of cultural practices, norms and mores more or less completely excluded openly homosexual individuals. This is true throughout the world, and throughout the majority of human history (again, barring a few exceptions here and there).
I can't say whether or not it 'haunted the imaginations' of the people of the past, but many of them certainly showed a very strong aversion to it.
jjkrause84
King
One thing about the Ottomans you cannot forget is geography. Going back to John Darwin's "After Tamerlane" it is worth remembering that the advent of real oceanic trade, and its ascendancy over traditional land-based routes, cause serious and irreparable damage to many kingdoms and empires that relied on being middlemen in the old east-west trade. Combine that with the pressure to be focused on multiple areas at once and the Ottomans were always going to be in a tough spot. Think a bit about the difference between France and Britain: France had to focus on the Atlantic, Mediterranean and the Continent...Britain could focus almost exclusively on overseas expansion, giving them a huge advantage. For the Ottomans, having to manage a contiguous, polyglot empire across three continents was a huge challenge.
All of that is long before we get to the repeated Ottoman failures to modernize (there were strong forces in the empire that opposed sensible modernisation policies because it either threatened their socio-political position, or it challenged their concept of their leader and government). Even the most forward-thinking sultans (Selim III, etc.) were still just individuals and could not revolutionise the empire alone.
All of that is long before we get to the repeated Ottoman failures to modernize (there were strong forces in the empire that opposed sensible modernisation policies because it either threatened their socio-political position, or it challenged their concept of their leader and government). Even the most forward-thinking sultans (Selim III, etc.) were still just individuals and could not revolutionise the empire alone.
Alongside that, however, homosexual behaviour seems to have raised much fewer eyebrows - or at least raised them less far - than it does today. Pre-Christian Rome would be my classic example of that structural 'homophobia' operating alongside generally much more permissive social ways of doing things - yes, marriage and fatherhood were huge parts of what masculinity was supposed to mean, but it was almost expected that men would indulge in some level of homosexual sex, and far from uncommon for them to end up going without marrying, or marrying largely for the show of it. The institution of adoption - much more common than today - helped this along: it wasn't unusual to take a relative's child or a protege as your 'son', and that wasn't looked down upon at all. I certainly think that modern ideas of straight masculinity explicitly set themselves up against an idea of homosexuality - not just the acts, but also the stereotypes of what gay men are like. Thinking about what it means to be a straight/ordinary man means thinking about what it means to be a gay man, in a way that I don't think was true only a couple of centuries ago. It comes down to what TF was saying - that to have an identity which is essentially not-gay (that is, which defines itself as the opposite of whatever gay men are like), you need a visible number of people whom you can label as gay.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Well, as I said, homophobia certainly isn't new, but traditionally it was more narrowly about hostility to perceived sexual deviance. It's only relatively recently that "homosexual" has become a synonym for "unmanly", and so only relatively recently that "gay" and "straight" became the lines along which gender norms are policed.
Anxieties about sexual non-conformity and gender non-conformity have never been entirely distinct, certainly, but the particular anxiety that straight men in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries developed about being or being perceived as "gay" is I think fairly specific to this historical period. It wouldn't make sense to for somebody in the early twentieth century to worry about cowboys screwing each other, because cowboys were definitionally masculine. You need to develop the specific anxieties around homosexuality that emerge from the 1960s onwards for a person to become genuinely concerned that the existence of gay cowboys makes the cowboy archetype itself "gay".
I think you've got it backwards. As far as I can see, most of the anti-gay legislation seems to be pushed by religious conservative types, while it's universally considered insulting to refer to a straight man as a homosexual. The phenomenon certainly isn't confined to anti-gay circles.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I don't follow?
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I really don't get where you are going.
EDIT: What he said.
EDIT: What he said.
You're claiming that the modern day hostility to homosexuality is grounded in the notion of it being effeminate, and therefore repulsive. You also said that, before that idea took hold, homosexuality was simply viewed as a sexual deviancy. But I see the opposite trend: religious types who see homosexuality as deviancy are the ones resisting gay rights (or 'policing gender norms,' as you put it), while people which use homosexuality as a way to label someone as unmanly aren't necessarily hostile to gays. Look at Eminem, for starters.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I would say that labeling homosexuality as unmanly is being hostile to homosexuals, even if not in bad faith and borne out of sheer ignorance.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Yeah, I mean, homophobia isn't about how many placards you brought.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
TF, you are so quotable.
Lexicus
Deity
Completely true. The whole idea that people could be split into homo and hetero sexual is very new.
No it's not. I take it as a compliment.
trader/warrior
Deity
But from the same period there is the whole "Lie with a man as one would a woman and you gon' die" thing. I think as Lexicus pointed out that hetero and homo are relatively recent concepts, but is this due to increased acceptance and awareness of gay people being a legitimate thing or a rise of stereotyping and gender norms? I'll be my usual indecisive self and say a bit of both. Due to rigid historical societies (EDIT: By this I mean in a broader way than just sexually, because as you pointed out there were more open societies when it comes to this than even the modern day, but in a broader way i think things like cultural, familial and relational practices were generally more conformist, strict and pervasive), gay people could never form a group identity, but as they did so this obviously opened them up for stereotypes as a group by traditionalists as well.
I think a relatively modern thing that affected this as well is that love, sex, reproducton and marriage should be one and the same while say, in roman society marriage was more of a whole political family business separate from, ahem, more recreational activities with things like large dowries being an almost global phenomenon.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
The homo and hetero distinction is indeed new, but it is in not tied to an acceptance of homosexuality in any way, rather to its increased visibility. This was most probably due to, as Foucault proposed, an interest in repression.
Again it is this renewed repression that eventually lead to gay liberation movements, and these have afterwards shaped both the self-fashioning of gay men who came afterwards and the reaction of homophobes. These two obviously also influencing each other.
Again it is this renewed repression that eventually lead to gay liberation movements, and these have afterwards shaped both the self-fashioning of gay men who came afterwards and the reaction of homophobes. These two obviously also influencing each other.
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