"Containing" Gay People and Terrorists [View All]

[MountainLaurel]

A story about a scholarly article in the similarity in rhetoric about same-sex marriage and terrorism. It includes a link to the original article, published in Peace & Change.

http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005102601j.htm

Since September 11, 2001, government discourse about fighting terrorism has focused on protecting America by containing an "un-American" body. In this atmosphere, though, gay men and lesbians are easily conflated with terrorists, say Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, an associate professor of philosophy, and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies, both at Washington State University.

The similarity in rhetoric between the war against terrorism and a long-established war on homosexuality can be detected, they contend, in debates over same-sex marriage and in how talk of "containment" has crept into discussion about the increase of HIV/AIDS cases in gay and bisexual men. The authors say that President Bush has decried the "anti-family values" that underlie the issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples; those, he says, are "acts of municipal disobedience" that, like terrorism, "are not easily contained."

The Bush administration may argue that the war on terrorists is "a new kind of war," they say, but "the mind-set and rhetoric behind it lingers from previous eras when Americans feared the past and the present," as was the case when they feared communists and homosexuals during the cold war. Characteristic of both cases is "an effort at containment and a rendering of each as un- or anti-American."

The Bush administration, they assert, has employed a rhetoric of "containment" and "annihilation of all enemies" in the war against terrorism, while also commingling the same-sex marriage and AIDS issues. As a result, "lesbian/gay bodies have been equated with terrorist bodies while neither one has received renewed critical attention." Shoring up that rhetoric, the authors say, has been a renewed public discourse about "the so-called 'spirit of patriotism,'" which asserts that categories like "us/them, American/un-American, family values/anti-family values" are polar opposites.