'Homophobia' in the university classroom : law and justice students' conceptualizations of queer identity

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy and all ‘others’ indeed ‘othered.’ This paper reports on research carried out by the authors in a core first year university justice class, in which students of law and/or justice were required to engage with, discuss, and reflect on discourses on sexuality. It uses a poststructural framework to identify how students understand non-heterosexualities and how they personally relate to queer identities, in the sense that it asks questions about gender and sexual identity, and the discourses surrounding them. It was found that strongly negative attitudes to non-heterosexualities are quite resistant to challenge, and that some students express being confronted with queerness as a deep-seated fear of being drawn into otherness against their will. The result was that, while many students were able to unpack their attitudes towards queerness and engage in critical reflection and re-evaluation of their attitudes, students with strongly negative views towards non-heterosexualities conversely refused to engage at all, typically perceiving even the engagement itself as a threat to their core heterosexual identity. However, the authors caution against relying on the idea that students are simply “homophobic” to explain this reluctance, as this term does not necessarily account for the complexity of the discourses that inform students’ reactions in this context. This “homophobia” may simply be related to a way of performing gender and sexual identity as opposed to overt discrimination and fear.

Homophobia in nursing : a concept analysis.

It could be argued that the term homophobia may have an array of meanings, which makes it difficult to truly define. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to explore homophobia in nursing using concept analysis as described by Walker and Avant (1995). Definitions of homophobia in general terms will be identified together with a working definition of homophobia in nursing in order for the critical attributes to be explored and identified. The formation of model, borderline, and contrary cases will exemplify the key characteristics of what homophobia in nursing is and is not. The examination of the antecedents, consequences, and empirical referents allows for further refinement of the key attributes, which define homophobia in nursing.

Improváveis relações: produção de sentidos sobre o masculino no contexto de amizade entre homens homo e heterossexuais

Esta tese é um estudo acerca da produção de sentidos sobre a masculinidade e suas relações com a homofobia. Parte-se da premissa de que tanto a masculinidade quanto a homofobia são fenômenos construídos socialmente. A adoção do regime de amizade entre homens de orientações sexuais distintas permite problematizar as dinâmicas de gênero presentes nessa relação específica de homossociabilidade e suas interrelações com as diferentes concepções sobre masculinidade, homossexualidade e homofobia. A homofobia é compreendida sob duas perspectivas: (1) como um preconceito que gera discriminações e violências contra pessoas não heterossexuais; e (2) como um dispositivo regulador da relação entre homens, constituindo-se como um dos pilares da construção da masculinidade heterossexual. O trabalho de campo incluiu entrevistas individuais com homens heterossexuais de camadas médias das cidades do Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo que mantém relações de amizade com homens homossexuais. O conjunto dos participantes é heterogêneo no tocante à faixa etária (entre 25 e 47 anos), exercício profissional e experiências diversas de convívio com pessoas homossexuais. São analisadas as tensões, dilemas e ressignificações que ajudam a produzir diferentes sentidos para a masculinidade. Os resultados apontam para a coexistência de sentidos convencionais e liberais acerca do gênero e da sexualidade masculinos.

Revisiting intersectionality for EU Anti-Discrimination Law in an economic crisis –a critical legal studies perspective

This article discusses the role of EU anti-discrimination law in challenging EU anti-crisis measures from a critical legal studies perspective. Critical legal scholarship is defined through its challenge of ‘lex’ through the vision of ‘ius’ and its critical links with social movements. EU anti-discrimination law attracts critique for constituting a compartmentalised socio-legal field, which prevents justice for those at intersections of inequalities. By defining as the aim of anti-discrimination law the combat of disadvantage resulting from ascribed otherness around the nodes sex/gender, race/ethnicity, and disability, the article suggests a convincing normative vision suitable to de-compartmentalise the field and adequately address intersectionality. This critical legal perspective on intersectionality differs from its sociological counterparts by omitting class as a category. The article demonstrates that this distinction is necessary for EU anti-discrimination law to maintain its critical edge.

You know how I know you're gay? : masculinity and homophobia in mainstream comedy

You Know How I Know You're Gay?: Masculinity and Homophobia in Contemporary Mainstream Comedy is a three-part senior scholars project that consists of a critical analysis of homophobic humor in contemporary mainstream comedy, an original feature-length comedy script entitled Don 't Be that Freshman, and a DVD of selected scenes from Don't Be that Freshman. The critical analysis first establishes the existence of homophobic humor in mainstream comedy and then links this homophobia to masculine anxiety, applying the ideas set forth in Michael Kimmel's essay, "Masculinity as Homophobia," to contemporary, mainstream, homosocial comedies. The paper goes on to examine audience reactions to this homophobic humor, focusing on audience members who enjoy these movies, yet consider themselves to be accepting of homosexuality and against homophobia. I discuss ways of resistance and the importance of opposing homophobic humor, and finally, I look at comedy as a potentially transgressive medium that could be used to fight homophobia and social inequality. The critical analysis, therefore, leads into Don't Be that Freshman, a film that uses progressive humor to oppose homophobia and expose the potential dangers and pitfalls of conforming to social constructions of gender. Don't Be that Freshman is a film about three pairs of college roommates in their first semester at college who become each other's first friends on campus. It is a character-driven comedy that attempts to normalize non-heterosexual sexual orientation and gender non-conformity, to advocate a type of living that does not conform to problematic social constructions and cultural ideologies, and at the same time to appeal to a mainstream audience. The film version is twenty-five minutes long and consists of ten scenes from the script.

Homofobia familiar: abrindo o armário entre quatro paredes

Sexuality device authorizes families to become the guardians of its members’ sexuality, ensuring the exclusion of any kind of dissidence from heteronormativity by means of reinforcement of homophobia. This paper presents the analyses of female participants who are dissident of heteronormativity. They were accessed through snow-ball technique and were interviewed. After transcribing their interviews, the researcher produced narratives of their lives with were corroborated with the participants. Data were analyzed from a poststructuralist perspective. By then, we privileged the study of the manifestation of homophobia in the family, developing a genealogy of their detractors effects, but also highlighting modes of resistance to it. This locus of manifestation of homophobia, obscured by the intimacy of the private world, is still a fairly discussed topic in national studies and maximizes the damage caused by discrimination in macro social spaces. We pointed out, then, family as an important target of action for public policies which aim the protection of human and civil rights, as well as all kinds of violence and discrimination.

Reflexões sobre homofobia e educação em escolas do interior paulista

This is a survey conducted in 2009 with 2,282 students of both sexes enrolled in the three grades of high school in three cities of the west of Sao Paulo state (Assis, Presidente Prudente and Ourinhos). The data collection instrument was a self-administered and anonymous questionnaire with 131 questions. In this article, we reflect on how in schools the research participants reproduce and reinforce the hegemonic discourses of control of sexualities guided by the attempt to promote heterosexuality as the only form of sexual intelligibility, to the detriment of other forms of expression of sexuality. We discuss how homophobia and the devices of social control of sexuality (re) produce prejudices and stereotypies, resulting in vulnerabilities that non-heterosexual teenagers have, such as homophobic victimization, social and affective isolation, ideations and suicide attempts. The study shows that the invariant were discrimination, homophobic violence and the insults that are perpetrated in the values and discourses of adolescents at school and in their family, demonstrating the institutionalization of homophobia as a regulatory practice of the psychological and social construction of gender and sexual identities. We highlight how important it is for the school to appropriate the means of deconstruction of heterocentric normativity to preserve the rights and citizenship of the people who do not identify with the prevailing models of heterosexuality.

Gender und Genre in melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen der Gegenwart - Far From Heaven, The Hours, A Single Man

Die Dissertation Gender und Genre in melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen der Gegenwart untersucht das Medium Film anhand von Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), Stephen Daldrys The Hours (2002) und Tom Fords A Single Man (2009) als Quelle des Wissens über gesellschaftlich-normierte Geschlechterrollen und sozialkonstruierte Genderkonzepte. Die Arbeit versteht sich als eine nachhaltige Schnittstellenforschung zwischen Gender-, Literatur-, Film- und Medienwissenschaften und zeigt die Öffnung der Germanistik für den medial geprägten Kulturwandel, welcher den deutschen bzw. den deutschsprachigen Kulturraum betrifft. Gender und Geschlecht destabilisieren die Gesellschaft und die „heterosexuelle Matrix“ durch das individuelle Suchen, Finden, Konstruieren und Anerkennen einer eigenen, individuellen Genderidentität. Dieser Prozess kann unter Zuhilfenahme des Erzählens von Geschlecht im Film verdeutlicht werden, denn die audiovisuelle Fiktion modelliert Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und das Wirklichkeitsverständnis der Rezipienten. Wobei offen bleibt, ob die Fiktion die Realität oder die Realität die Fiktion imitiert. Denn es gibt nicht nur eine Wahrheit, sondern mehrere, vielleicht unzählige Bedeutungszuschreibungen. Die drei paradigmatischen Literaturverfilmungen wurden jeweils in Bezug zu ihren Literaturvorlagen von Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham und Christopher Isherwood gesetzt. Sie können als Beispiele für ein wissendes, postmodernes Pastiche des Themen-Clusters Diskriminierung/Homophobie/Homosexualität/„Rasse“ gelten. Alle drei Filme verhandeln durch gemeinsame, melodramatische Motive (Spiegel, Telefon, Krieg, Familie) die Darstellbarkeit von Emotionen, Begehren, Sehnsüchten, Einsamkeit und dem Verlust der Liebe. Durch Verbindungslinien zu den Melodramen von Douglas Sirk und mittels den Theorien von u.a. Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Carolin Emcke, Thomas Elsaesser, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Kappelhoff und Laura Mulvey wurde das Begriffspaar Genre und Gender her-ausgestellt und im zeitgenössischen Geschlechter-Diskurs verortet. Das im Verlauf der Arbeit erarbeitete Wissen zu Gender, Sexualität, Körper und Geschlecht wurde als ein Gender-Genre-Hybrid verstanden und im Genre des queeren bzw. homosexuellen Melodrams (gay melodrama) neu verortet. Die drei Filme sind als ein Wiederbelebungsversuch bzw. ein Erweiterungsversuch des melodramatischen Genres unter dem Genderaspekt anzusehen. Die Analyse und Dekonstruktion feststehender Begriffe im Kontext der Gender- und Gay Studies und dem Queer Cinema lösen produktive Krisen und damit emanzipierte Verfahren aus. Diese müssen immer wieder neu beschrieben werden, damit sie wahrgenommen und verstanden werden. Daher sind die drei melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen ein fiktionales Dokumentationsmodell gesellschaftlicher Konflikte, welches anhand individueller Schicksale verdeutlicht wird.

Disclosure, discrimination and desire: experiences of Black and South Asian gay men in Britain

Using findings from a qualitative investigation based on in-depth email interviews with 47 Black and South Asian gay men in Britain, this paper explores the cross-cutting identities and discourses in relation to being both gay and from an ethnic minority background. Taking an intersectional approach, detailed accounts of identity negotiation, cultural pressures, experiences of discrimination and exclusion and the relationship between minority ethnic gay men and mainstream White gay culture are presented and explored. The major findings common to both groups were: cultural barriers limiting disclosure of sexuality to family and wider social networks; experiences of discrimination by White gay men that included exclusion as well as objectification; a lack of positive gay role models and imagery relating to men from minority ethnic backgrounds. Among South Asian gay men, a major theme was regret at being unable to fulfil family expectations regarding marriage and children, while among Black gay men, there was a strong belief that same-sex behaviour subverted cultural notions related to how masculinity is configured. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of social location, particularly education and income, when examining the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality in future research.

Other Things Being Equal: A Paired Testing Study of Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

This article summarizes a recently completed study, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the Urban Institute, of discrimination against black and Hispanic homebuyers when they visit mortgage lending institutions in two major metropolitan markets to make pre-application inquiries. It represents the first application of paired testing to rigorously measure discrimination in the mortgage lending process. The paired tests disclosed significant levels of adverse treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity, with African Americans and Hispanics receiving less information and assistance than comparable whites, even at this very early stage in the application process.

Private (Brown) Eyes: Ethnicity, Genre and Gender in Crime Fiction in the Gloria Damasco novels and the Chicanos Comic Series

The representation of women in crime fiction has traditionally been a complicated one. Consistently forced into secondary characters (assistants, girlfriends, or damsels in distress) the most active role a female character could aspire to was that of the femme fatale, a pit of perdition, an unwelcome distraction for a man looking for truth and justice. This traditional approach to the genre has been challenged in the last decades by women acting as detectives, trusted with solving their cases in a hostile male world. Similarly, the traditional white male protagonist has been contested by fictions where ethnic minorities are not just consigned to the criminal world, but where detectives are members of ethnic groups, and can use their knowledge of the community to solve the case. This essay focuses on the crossroads of ethnic and women’s detective fiction, specifically the Gloria Damasco series by Chicana writer Lucha Corpi and the graphic novel Chicanos (Trillo and Risso, 1996). Both protagonists (Gloria Damasco, a Chicana clairvoyant detective, and “poor, ugly, and a detective” Alejandrina Yolanda Jalisco) must face both the dangers of investigating criminal cases and discrimination in their professional surroundings due to their gender and ethnicity. By contrasting these texts, the essay elucidates the importance of specific cultural products, their connection to (and defiance of) canonical forms of the genre, and their rejection of generic and gender expectations.

Workplace Discrimination Climate and Team Effectiveness: The Mediating Role of Collective Value Congruence, Team Cohesion, and Collective Affective Commitment

This study explored the relationship between workplace discrimination climate on team effectiveness through three serial mediators: collective value congruence, team cohesion, and collective affective commitment. As more individuals of marginalized groups diversify the workforce and as more organizations move toward team-based work (Cannon-Bowers & Bowers, 2010), it is imperative to understand how employees perceive their organization’s discriminatory climate as well as its effect on teams. An archival dataset consisting of 6,824 respondents was used, resulting in 332 work teams with five or more members in each. The data were collected as part of an employee climate survey administered in 2011 throughout the United States’ Department of Defense. The results revealed that the indirect effect through M1 (collective value congruence) and M2 (team cohesion) best accounted for the relationship between workplace discrimination climate (X) and team effectiveness (Y). Meaning, on average, teams that reported a greater climate for workplace discrimination also reported less collective value congruence with their organization (a1 = -1.07, p < .001). With less shared perceptions of value congruence, there is less team cohesion (d21 = .45, p < .001), and with less team cohesion there is less team effectiveness (b2 = .57, p < .001). In addition, because of theoretical overlap, this study makes the case for studying workplace discrimination under the broader construct of workplace aggression within the I/O psychology literature. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis found that workplace discrimination based on five types of marginalized groups: race/ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and disability was best explained by a three-factor model, including: career obstruction based on age and disability bias (CO), verbal aggression based on multiple types of bias (VA), and differential treatment based on racial/ethnic bias (DT). There was initial support to claim that workplace discrimination items covary not only based on type, but also based on form (i.e., nonviolent aggressive behaviors). Therefore, the form of workplace discrimination is just as important as the type when studying climate perceptions and team-level effects. Theoretical and organizational implications are also discussed.

Black-White Wage Gap Among Restaurant Servers: A Replication, Extension, and Exploration of Consumer Racial Discrimination in Tipping

There is a rich history of social science research centering on racial inequalities that continue to be observed across various markets (e.g., labor, housing, and credit markets) and social milieus. Existing research on racial discrimination in consumer markets, however, is relatively scarce and that which has been done has disproportionately focused on consumers as the victims of race-based mistreatment. As such, we know relatively little about how consumers contribute to inequalities in their roles as perpetrators of racial discrimination. In response, in this paper we elaborate on a line of research that is only in its’ infancy stages of development and yet is ripe with opportunities to advance the literature on consumer racial discrimination and racial earnings inequities among tip dependent employees in the United States. Specifically, we analyze data derived from a large exit survey of restaurant consumers (n=378) in an attempt to replicate, extend, and further explore the recently documented effect of service providers’ race on restaurant consumers’ tipping decisions. Our results indicate that both White and Black restaurant customers discriminate against Black servers by tipping them less than their White coworkers. Importantly, we find no evidence that this Black tip penalty is the result of interracial differences in service skills possessed by Black and White servers. We conclude by delineating directions for future research in this neglected but salient area study.

Modeling the impact of social discrimination on the physical and mental health of portuguese gay, lesbian and bisexual people

Background: Despite growing acceptance of same-sex sexuality in Portugal, identity development of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals is still restricted by negative societal attitudes, which maintain the experience of stigmatization and discrimination. The purpose of this study is to document the frequency of discriminatory events experienced by sexual minorities and their association with indicators of physical and mental health in Portugal. Methods: A total of 610 LGB participants completed an online survey (mean age = 34.48, SD = 11.54). Most participants were single and self-identified as gay (73.8%). The survey included five categories of survey items: demographic information, social support, physical health, mental health, and discrimination experiences. Results: Physical and mental health results revealed that bisexual people were more likely to report higher levels of psychological distress than gay men. Overall, between one-fifth and one-fourth of the participants in this sample frequently felt the need to hide their sexual orientation to prevent discrimination experiences across the different settings. Regarding actual discrimination experiences, close to 20% reported having suffered from verbal abuse, followed by close to 10% who suffered from written threats, harassment, and physical threats. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed to assess the effects of anticipated and actual discrimination on mental health. Possible confounding variables were added in the first block – age, sexual orientation, being in a relationship, body mass index, and HIV status. Anticipated and actual discrimination experiences were added in the second block. The first block of the analysis explained 6% of the overall variance, while the second block – discrimination experiences – explained an additional 17%. Conclusion: Portuguese culture and stigma/discrimination create discriminatory experiences which impact LGB people’s health. Unless policies are changed to allow for the acceptance of LGB people, they will continue to experience violence and discrimination as a result of homophobia.