Normative Claims

I had a bunch of feelings about Jasib Puar's piece on homonationalism. Then I read Scott Long's Contemporary Politics article and I forgot what my feelings were out of outrage. I feel like I need to reiterate that rape is bad, that victim-blaming is not okay, and lying about the facts at the risk of someone's life is wrong, even though I am sure all of you agree. Obviously the execution of juvenile defenders, and worse the execution of someone with literally no evidence of the crime is abhorrent. I know I have liberal moral values and distortions, but I feel confident that none of you disagree with me, especially on the second half. But what struck me (and what Long was very obviously trying to evoke) was the injustice of having the narrative around ones death stolen, rewritten, and used as propaganda to further political ends that one probably wouldn't have supported.

The "LGBT community" had no right to adopt these stories as its own, as there wasn't any evidence that the executees identified as gay or even acted in a way that westerners would categorize as such. I personally found Outrage!'s piece describing their relationship (a work of complete fiction, regardless of whether it resembles the truth or not) disturbing. Imagining my experience of love was to be rewritten after my death, forcing fabricated relations and emotions on my memory, offends me. It is impermissible audacity to attempt to write the personal stories of another person based on no real knowledge of that person or zer emotions.

Now that I've ranted, I'd like to mention that I found Puar's perspective on the interaction of the othering of ethnic minorities and the othering of gender and sexual minorities interesting. Events like Dan Savage blaming black Californians for proposition 8 made the opposition described ring true to me. In addition, the mainstreaming of heterosexualized homosexual families in modern culture seemed to fit quite well with the respectability hypothesis.