“Homosexuality Is a Threat to Our Family and the Nation”: Anti-LGBT Movement

Abstract

Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which the Protestant Right has launched the anti-LGBT movement, specifically the anti-gay movement, by examining three loci—mass media, the grade school, and the military—where the Protestant Right has hostilely engaged in anti-gay bashing. Both the grade school and the military are the sites where socially prescribed gender roles and relations based on gender binarism are constantly regulated and performed, whereas mass media are a locus where gender hierarchies, rigid gender binarism, and limited gender roles and relations can be contested, resisted, transformed, or further reinforced. Understanding the significance of these sites as the loci of the Protestant Right’s anti-LGBT battle helps to acknowledge the complex interplay of homophobia, heteropatriarchy, ethnonationalism, and anticommunism in the Protestant Right.

The original version of this manuscript was published in The Independent Critic Journal, “Word and Bow,” Vol. 7 (February/March 2015): 277–309 (written in Korean). This chapter is its modified version. All translations are by the author.