Homonormativity

The term 'homonormativity' was popularised by Lisa Duggan in her 2003 critique of contemporary democracy, equality, and LGBT discourse.[5] Drawing from heteronormativity, popularised by Michael Warner in 1991,[6] and concepts rooted in Gayle Rubin's notion of the "sex/gender system"[7] and Adrienne Rich's notion of compulsory heterosexuality.[8]

Duggan writes, "homonormativity is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormativity assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”[5] Catherine Connell says homonormativity "emphasises commonality with the norms of heterosexual culture, including marriage, monogamy, procreation, and productivity".[9][10] Queer theorist David M. Halperin sees the values of heteronormativity replicated and privileged as LGBT visibility and civil rights become normalised, writing “the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation…the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole.”[1]

Halperin says that the urbanisation, gentrification and recapitalisation of inner city queer areas and gay-ghettos contribute to the prevalence and privileging of established heterosexual norms.[11] Halperin has linked the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the advent of online dating as contributing to the displacement of LGBT people.[1] He also attributes the shift in political rhetoric, discourse, and attitude from liberation to assimilation as a further reinforcement of a homonormative binary.[1][11]

Gayle Rubin's notion of "sex hierarchy" - that sees Western heteronormative society graduate sexual practices from morally "good sex" to "bad sex" - delineates the forms of homosexual behaviour that engenders conditional acceptance.[12] She writes, "Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability [...] if it is coupled and monogamous, the society is beginning to recognise that it includes the full range of human interaction."[4] Rubin writes that these poles of acceptability and deviancy see a homonormative privileging of long-term gay couples over the bodies of transgendered, non-binary, and promiscuous members of these groups,[13] and that "Individuals whose behaviour stands high in this hierarchy are regarded with certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical mobility, institutional support and material benefits."[12]

Homonormative discrimination is deployed similarly to heteronormativity. Social institutions and policies reinforce the presumption that people are heterosexual and that gender and sex are natural binaries.[14] However, Rubin writes that homonormativity functions to displace the exclusive hold heterosexuality has over normative behaviour, instead selectively privileging cisgendered homosexuality (that is coupled and monogamous) as worthy of social acceptance.[4]

Politics and International Relations Lecturer Penny Griffin says that politically, rather than critiquing neoliberal values of monogamy, procreation and binary gender roles, homonormativity has been found to uphold values regarded as inherently heterosexist and racist.[22] Griffin sees homonormative behaviour intertwined with capitalistic world systems, with consumer culture and materialism functioning at its core.[23] Duggan asserts that homonormativity fragments LGBT communities into hierarchies of worthiness, and that LGBT people who come the closest to mimicking heteronormative standards of gender identity are deemed most worthy of receiving rights. She also writes that LGBT people at the bottom of this hierarchy (e.g. bisexual people, trans people, non-binary people, people of non-Western genders, intersex people, queers of colour, queer sex workers) are seen as an impediment to this class of homonormative people realizing their rights.[24][25][9][26]

Andre Cavalcante says that as homosexuality becomes socially tolerated, representations of LGBT characters in film and television have come to reinforce strictures of cisgender, white, and binary authority.[27] Gay writer and director Ryan Murphy's sitcom The New Normal has been critiqued for its of homonormative portrayal of queer culture and deemed “more damaging than entertaining.”[28] Homonormative media representations are seen only as mimetic of heterosexual normality, reinforcing gay caricatures and "palatable adherents to cherished societal norms and dominant ideologies."[29][30] Such representations, it is argued, omit the queer realities of non-white, non-binary LGBT people, papering over the lived experiences of variant identities and enforcing a "hierarchy by which individuals are expected to conform and are punished if they do not.”[31]

While studies show having LGBT characters appearing in the media decreases prejudice among viewers,[32] many network, cable and streaming services still lack diversity or cross-"community" representation when portraying queer characters.[33] A 2015 GLAAD report profiling LGBT media representation found gay men (41%) still overwhelmingly featured as primary queer characters, despite increases in LGBT representation across a variety of sexual and gender identities.[33] More LGBT content was produced in the media in 2018.[11] According to GLAAD’S Annual Where We Are on TV Report, which records LGBTQ+ representation on television, the number of queer characters on TV shows rose 8.8%.[34] Queer people of colour also saw an increase in screen time; they outnumbered white queer people on television for the first time in the report's history.[11] 1% of the population is intersex, so intersex people are almost completely omitted in the media,[35] with discourses of binary gender identity largely excluding and displacing those who do not fall into the two categories of sex and gender.[35]

• Marcus, Eric. "Silvia Rivera." Making Gay History, 1989.

• Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
• Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?
• Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality
• David M. Halperin, Queer Forever
• Eric Marcus, Making History
• Gayle Rubin, Deviations
• Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity
• Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet.