Abelove’s Historical Vision: Gentle Warnings Against Moralism, Colonialism, and an Apolitical Identity Politics

ABSTRACT

Henry Abelove’s insightful and carefully researched book, Deep Gossip (2003), creatively opens up many important topics for exploration. I address 3 of these topics: Abelove’s appreciation of Freud’s refusal to moralize about homosexuality, the crucial difference between moralism and a hermeneutic vision of moral understandings, and Abelove’s discussion of the historical shift from gay liberation to a more recent postmodern identity politics and with it the loss of a more explicitly political anticolonialism. Compulsory heterosexuality can be understood as a key element that holds in place current arrangements of gender and the military-industrial-educational-surveillance state, which is currently justified by and in step with neoliberal economic theory and subjectivity, colonial wars of occupation, and the use of at-a-distance airpower.

Notes

¹ Scientism is the belief that all questions about humans must be determined by the application of physical science method.

² Neoliberalism is a political philosophy that emphasizes the virtue and utility of economic deregulation and privatization in order to spur economic growth and progressively limit the power of government.

³ This discussion is not, and not meant to be, a comprehensive explanation of sex, love, gender, sexual orientation, or partnering. It is simply a discussion of one element of these mysterious and extraordinarily complex phenomena.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Cushman

Philip Cushman, Ph.D., retired from doctoral teaching and is in private practice on Vashon Island, Washington. He is the author of “Relational Psychoanalysis as Political Resistance” (Cushman, 2015) and Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Cushman, 1995).