Abstract
This chapter explores how racial discourses inform notions of sexuality by critically unpacking audience reactions to an opening gala film screening at the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival in Toronto. Specifically, I question how audience reactions mobilize dominant discourses of race and sexuality that silence and Other those who threaten the inherently unstable white gay identity. I ask how race and sexuality are regularly implicated in (re)producing a whitened homonormativity that excludes racialized bodies from gay or queer sexuality. I argue that along with the dominant white subject, non-white gays are implicated in (re)producing homonormativity’s racial itinerary and consolidate whiteness in ways that permeate racial boundaries. By way of praxis, I reflect on how I employed a strategy of decentring whiteness to bring awareness to how sexuality is regularly (re)produced as white, and especially how non-dominant or racialized bodies also reproduce homonormativity. Throughout this chapter I employ a narrative structure, in which I weave personal reflections as well as the issues the film surfaced in the audience members with whom I engaged, to illustrate the racial discourses used by dominant and non-dominant gay subjects to regularly reify a singular, white shade of gay.
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Notes
- 1.
Although I intentionally use the term racialized to self-identify, I want to acknowledge the tension and conflict this term surfaces. My belief is that we are all racialized and, according to George Dei, that we are racialized differently, some for privilege and most for subordination. I acknowledge that I regularly access privilege, and because so many do not, I recognize that my experience of racialization is different than those who are racialized for subordination. However, in many circumstances, I equally do not consider myself to be read as a white. My experiences consistently indicate that others read me in a particular classed way based on my ethnicity – not in the same way as a white person might be classed but specifically because of my Portuguese ethnicity, which evidently is an identity I cannot deny given my Mediterranean dark complexion and my surname (I am often assumed to be Middle Eastern of Persian or Lebanese roots).
- 2.
Because my focus, and the focus of the film, is on ‘gay’ male populations, and since I am writing of the hegemonic norm (that of a white male body), I want to acknowledge the exclusionary manoeuvre of intentionally naming ‘his’. This is informed because the experiences and reactions on which I draw occurred with male identified individuals.
- 3.
I have chosen to use the name Mohamed in part because it appropriately reflects a cultural resemblance to my informant’s actual name and because it is such a common Muslim name that I can ensure to protect his real identity.
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Pereira, D. (2014). Homonormativity Inside Out: Reading Race and Sexuality Into an LGBT Film Festival Opening Gala. In: Dei, G.J.S., McDermott, M. (eds) Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7627-2_3
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