Introduction to Retheorizing Homophobias

Abstract

The first inklings of this special issue surfaced in conversations we had on our seemingly divergent projects ‐ projects that were decidedly not focused on the question of homophobia. Salvador was completing his study of gender and sexuality in Santeria. Karl was working on a social history of the psychiatric diagnosis Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood. While these projects seemed quite distinct, in our conversations we kept coming back to a recurring similarity: discourses of homophobia circulated in each of these sites in ways that created a set of unintended and often nefarious consequences. It seemed to us that the full range of effects of such discourses was not being adequately considered. We offer this special issue as one attempt at more complexly addressing the ways in which discourses of homophobia circulate, and the effects that they produce. This introduction offers a general discussion on the uses of the term ‘homophobia’ in extant scholarship; an overview of some of the problems that have been associated with homophobia, including the subsequent formation of concepts such as heterosexism and heteronormativity that have acted as correctives to some of homophobia’s limitations; and an

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