When Homonationalism Becomes Hegemonic: “Homohegemony” and a Meaningfully Materialist Queer Studies

ABSTRACT

There is limited Marxist, Marxian, or otherwise explicitly materialist queer studies scholarship. While such scholarship is growing, it remains underdeveloped compared to the post-structural strain. This is a serious omission because we need the tools of materialist analyses now more than ever to grapple with incredibly important economic and political issues that are not being discussed nearly enough within queer studies/social movements, such as LGBTQI2S youth homelessness. This discussion can be seen as a modest move in this direction, arguing for the utility of a novel materialist concept, “homohegemony,” to describe, explain, and deconstruct queer new ideological and institutional realities that we find ourselves embedded in, over a decade since Puar’s pathbreaking and incredibly important coining of “homonationalism.” The article theorizes “homohegemony” in order to make a broader case that more materialist interventions into queer studies are needed and have value, particularly in times when homonationalism is increasingly “common sense.”

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this paper to my Mother, Cheryl Ann Cameron, and to my colleagues and students at St. Clair College.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Gary Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada (Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1987); M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 63–100; Carl Stychin, “Introduction,” in A Nation by Rights: National Cultures, Sexual Identity Politics, and the Discourse of Rights (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1–20.

² This can be contrasted with the more structural inclusion on offer under an anti-oppressive framework. See, for example, Theresa Anzovino, Jamie Oresar, and Deborah Boutilier, Walk a Mile: A Journey Toward Justice and Equity in Canadian Society, second edition (Toronto: Top Hat, 2019), 3–8.

³ Dorothy Smith, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2005).

⁴ Martin Moerings, “The Netherlands: Front Runners in Anti-discrimination Laws,” in Legal Queeries: Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Legal Studies, eds. Leslie Moran, Daniel Monk, and Sarah Beresford (London and New York: Cassell, 1998), 125–38.

⁵ Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

⁶ Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

⁷ Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire.

⁸ Donald Morton, ed., The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996).

⁹ S. Noyé and G. Rebucini, “Queer as Materialism,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (January 2021). Retrieved April 12, 2021.

¹⁰ Alan Sears, “Queer Anti-capitalism: What’s Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?,” Science and Society 69, no. 1 (January 2005): 92–112.

¹¹ Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020).

¹² Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies third edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

¹³ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

¹⁴ Miriam Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada (New York and London: Routledge, 2008); David Rayside, Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3–44.

¹⁵ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).

¹⁶ Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1.

¹⁷ Kinsman, The Regulation of Desir.

¹⁸ Roger Landcaster, Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

¹⁹ Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1.

²⁰ Carl Stychin, “The Sexual Citizen,” in Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2003), 7–24.

²¹ David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Cheryl Teelucksingh, ed., Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006); Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

²² Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

²³ Simone de Beauvoir, “Introduction,” in The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, August 1974), xv–xxxiv; De Beauvoir, “Chapter 12: Childhood,” in The Second Sex, 301–66. De Beauvoir’s writing about the construction of “woman” as man’s “other” is particularly relevant.

²⁴ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader 2nd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 533–42.

²⁵ Stychin, “The Sexual Citizen,” 8–9.

²⁶ Sedef Arat-Koc, “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant Workers,” in Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, eds. Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

²⁷ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London and New York: Lawrence and Wishart, and International Publishers, 1971), 137, 295.

²⁸ This is similar to how socialist feminist Heidi Hartmann, drawing on Gayle Rubin, conceives of various systems of domination or exploitation – namely patriarchy and capitalism – in “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader, 2^nd edition: 356–65.

²⁹ Stychin, “The Sexual Citizen.”

³⁰ Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–94.

³¹ Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2010).

³² Government of Canada, “Canadian Multiculturalism: An Inclusive Citizenship,” Citizenship and Immigration Canada, October 19, 2002, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/multiculturalism/citizenship.asp.

³³ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Quotations mine.

³⁴ Kazi Stastna, “Canada’s working moms still earning less, doing more than dads,” CBC News, May 11, 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/05/10/f-mothers-day.html.

³⁵ Sherene Razack, “The Muslims Are Coming: The ‘Sharia Debate’ in Canada,” in Casting Out: 145–72; Frances Henry, The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live With Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

³⁶ Idle No More, Home page, http://www.idlenomore.ca/.

³⁷ CBC News, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Statement of Apology,” June 11, 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2008/06/11/pm-statement.html.

³⁸ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12–13.

³⁹ Ibid., 12–13, 53.

⁴⁰ Ibid.; Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Koninklijke Brill, 2009).

⁴¹ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxiv, 27–28.

⁴² Ibid.; Sears, “Queer Anti-capitalism”.

⁴³ Mariana Valverde, “Bisexuality: Coping with Sexual Boundaries,” in Sex, Power and Pleasure (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1985): 109–20.

⁴⁴ Bakan and Stasiulis, Negotiating Citizenship.

⁴⁵ Rayside, Queer Inclusions, 105–10, 178–79.

⁴⁶ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 66, 126.

⁴⁸ Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

⁴⁹ For example, Anderson’s inclusive understanding of nationalism in Imagined Communities can be contrasted with the more exclusionary understanding of modern nationalism of Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

⁵⁰ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxiv, 2.

⁵¹ Ibid., 18–21, 28–29, 90–94, 111, 138–40.

⁵² Anderson, Imagined Communities.

⁵³ Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire.

⁵⁴ Think of the U.S. in the early 2000s, the context that Puar is mainly describing.

⁵⁵ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 27.

⁵⁶ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

⁵⁷ Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics”.

⁵⁸ Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire.

⁵⁹ Stuart Hall, “Introductory Essay: Reading Gramsci,” in Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, Roger Simon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), 7–10.

⁶⁰ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 235.

⁶¹ Stychin, “The Sexual Citizen.”

⁶² Michael Adams, “Why do we support gay rights? Because we know each other,” The Globe and Mail, July 2, 2013, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/why-do-we-support-gay-rights-because-we-know-each-other/article12894193/.

⁶³ Tom Warner, “Faith, Politics, and the Transformation of Canada,” in Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, eds. Maureen FitzGerald and Scott Rayter (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc./Women’s Press, 2012), 99–117.

⁶⁴ The Canadian Press, “Canadians expect government to speak out on Russia’s anti-gay law: Harper,” Global News, August 9, 2013, http://globalnews.ca/news/771747/baird-voices-concerns-for-canadian-athletes-spectators-over-russia-anti-gay-law/.

⁶⁵ Warner, “Faith, Politics, and the Transformation of Canada”.

⁶⁶ Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian, 98, 108.

⁶⁷ Rayside, Queer Inclusions, 93.

⁶⁸ Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian, 6; Rayside, Queer Inclusions, 93; Kinsman, 171–72.

⁶⁹ Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian, 2; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) (No. 02–102).

⁷⁰ Rayside, Queer Inclusions, 105–10, 178–79.

⁷¹ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12–13.

⁷² Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 105–31.

⁷³ Duggan, “The New Homonormativity”.

⁷⁴ Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1.

⁷⁵ Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

⁷⁶ Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (winter 2003): 11–40.

⁷⁷ Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 10.

⁷⁸ Ibid., xiv. Puar begins to explain her methodology on this page.

⁷⁹ Ibid., xii.

⁸⁰ Duggan, “The New Homonormativity”.

⁸¹ Morton, “Changing the Terms: (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Reality,” in The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader: 1–33.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Sears, “Queer Anti-capitalism”.

⁸⁴ Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire.

⁸⁵ Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization”.

⁸⁶ Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

⁸⁷ Kinsman, “Danger Signals: Moral Conservatism, the Straight Media, the Sex Police, and AIDS,” in The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities, revised edition (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1996), 330–74.

⁸⁸ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 163.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 53–120.

⁹¹ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, xviii.

⁹² Hall.

⁹³ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, xviii–xxv.

⁹⁴ Simon, 69. Italics his.

⁹⁵ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12.

⁹⁶ Simon, 70.

⁹⁷ Ibid.

⁹⁸ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 57–58.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 131, 421.

¹⁰² Ibid., 53.

¹⁰³ Ibid., 115–16, 421 f.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 12.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 52.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 12.

¹⁰⁷ Simon, 71; Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 246–47.

¹⁰⁸ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, 190.

¹⁰⁹ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 263.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 294–96. On pp. 294 and 295, Gramsci refers to the “regulation of sexual instincts,” and on p. 296 to “the regulation of sex” in the context of gender relations. “Bestiality and sodomy” are referred to on p. 295. It is not clear here whether Gramsci is in favor of the emancipation of the sodomite.

¹¹¹ See, for example, Gramsci’s treatment of “feminism” in Prison Notebooks, 297–98. He does not come out full force in support of the movement; he appears to be concerned about the problematic ways in which feminism may get taken up by conservative forces within society, a cautionary anxiety that remains relevant today for women’s and queer rights. There are other places, for example p. 296, where Gramsci sounds practically feminist, writing about the need for women to gain “not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations.”

¹¹² Ibid., 295–96.

¹¹³ Ibid., 418.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 421f.

¹¹⁵ Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).

¹¹⁶ Kinsman and Gentile; Kinsman, “Challenging Canadian and Queer Nationalisms,” in In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context, ed. Terrie Goldie (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001): 209–34; Kinsman, “Danger Signals”; Kinsman, “The Historical Emergence of Homosexuality and Heterosexuality: Social Relations, Sexual Rule, and Sexual Resistance,” in The Regulation of Desire, 37–61.

¹¹⁷ Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

¹¹⁸ Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics”..

¹¹⁹ Bob Rae, From Protest to Power: Personal Reflections on a Life in Politics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006).

¹²⁰ This echoes and joins longstanding Marxist, and especially socialist feminist, attention to what has variously been called “the sexual question,” “the woman question,” and “the feminist question” in Marxism.

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Kyle Brandon Jackson

Kyle received a President’s Entrance Scholarship to attend Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. There he completed a Bachelor of Arts in the Scholar’s Electives Program Honors Specialization in Political Science. He then completed his Master of Arts in Political Science at Western. He went on to complete a PhD in Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is currently working on a book project with UBC Press on “homohegemony” and is privileged to be a full-time Professor in the innovative Honours Bachelor of Applied Arts in Social Justice and Legal Studies Degree at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario. He enjoys engaging with his wonderful students and colleagues every day, turning social justice theories into social justice practices.