THE OTHER CLOSET?: ATHEISTS, HOMOSEXUALS AND THE LATERAL APPROPRIATION OF DISCURSIVE CAPITAL

Abstract

Previous studies have considered different forms of economic and/or cultural appropriation between status-unequal groups, for example young, White, middle-class people cashing in on the music of urban, African-American culture. In this paper, however, we are interested in what we call ‘lateral appropriation’, the process whereby the discursive capital of one marginalized group is usurped by another similarly marginalized group. In particular, drawing illustrative data from a number of organizational websites, we examine the atheist movement's remetaphorized use of the homosexual ‘closet’ and the related notion of ‘coming out’. Within the framework of critical discourse analysis, we view this particular instance of appropriation as a discursive recontextualization achieved primarily by strategically establishing certain ‘relations of equivalence’ which allow atheists to invoke a more immediately recognized identity politics. Specifically, we show how their appeals to the closet metaphor provide a cathartic vehicle for individual identity formation, activate a marginalized status, and mobilize political action. On this basis, we reflect on the consequences this lateral appropriation might have for the personal and political experiences of homosexuals in the context of a hegemonic order in which marginalized groups are bound to compete over reduced material and symbolic resources.

Keywords:

• lateral appropriation
• discursive capital
• atheists
• homosexuals
• marginalization
• identity politics

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 90th annual conference of the National Communication Association (Critical Studies Division) in Chicago, November 2004. We are grateful to John Gastil (University of Washington) for initially suggesting the term ‘lateral’ as a way of describing the communicative process under consideration, and to Eric Aoki (Colorado State University) for his useful comments as our respondent at the NCA conference. We are very grateful for the careful insight and useful suggestions of an anonymous reviewer and for Phil Graham's editorial support.

Notes

1 This is not unlike the way the ‘hypercorrection’ (Labov, 1972) of a particular phonetic or grammatical feature can so easily betray the use and the user as inauthentic or illegitimate. Furthermore, Coupland (2004, p. 251) notes that the parodic sociolinguistic reframings of stylization may deliberately invite ‘reappraisal of the stylized performance’.

2 Scholars like Preston (1992) and Rampton (1995) have likewise examined how sociolinguistic stylization (in their terms ‘variety imitation’ and ‘crossing’, respectively) play out across otherwise hierarchically differentiated or power-unequal social groups.

3 The respective websites of these five organizations are: American Atheists http://www.americanatheists.org, the American Humanist Association http://www.americanhumanists.org, the Council for Secular Humanism http://www.secularhumanism.org, the Brights http://www.the-brights.net, and the Secular Web http://www.infidels.org

4 By ‘atheist movement’ we refer to the large-scale atheist and humanist organizations in the United States, epitomized by American Atheists and the Council for Secular Humanism. In recent years, there has been an effort by groups such as these to increase the prominence and awareness of atheism in the United States – an effort that can be seen, for example, in the attempt by some atheists, Humanists, and other non-believers to unite under the label ‘Brights’ (see Dennett, 2003).

5 In figure 2, we also see a kind of double-parodic intertextuality in that the image is itself strongly reminiscent in its style (i.e., the hand-drawn, square-jawed Caucasian) of a particular genre of Christian morality literature directed at young people. In this case, the discursive appropriation is also rendered multimodal through the use of visual as well as linguistic resources (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).