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Nancy J. Chodorow, Ph.D.: It
is my great pleasure to speak to you today. As I was coming home last
night I was reminded of what this panel is about. There was a young man
screaming the most virulent "fag"-hating epithets at another
person he was angry at, or who was keeping him out of a club. It was really
scary. It went on and on and on and it certainly reminded me of why we
are here today.
 The topic of homophobia
is of course unbelievably complex, and I will just have time to make a
few points partly to help all of us generate discussion and to consider
the issue further. First, I want to begin by reminding us that prejudices
and permissible prejudices are always historical and cultural. From the
point of view of the person who holds a prejudice, it is not one. Women,
first in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties and then again in the ‘seventies,
noticed psychoanalytic writings that were prejudicial to women, that women
have a lesser sense of justice than men, that women did not contribute
to civilization, were narcissistic, and so forth. These were permissible
prejudices, as was racism among otherwise enlightened white people fifty
years ago. Conscious permissible prejudices, whether against blacks, Jews,
women, or gays, run the gamut from discrimination to rejection to hate.
In The New
York Times of Sunday, December 6th, there was a long article on how
women increasingly outnumber men on many college campuses. The article
quoted several college admissions directors and presidents as saying that
many colleges are now going "far down the list" and "all
the way down" to admit boys. Not once in this half-page article was
there a mention, or notice, that admissions policies that take into account
categories like race and gender have been under terrific scrutiny for
years, that states like my own have passed laws against racial, ethnic,
or gender preferences in college admissions. But when it came to men,
neither the writer nor the college officers quoted seemed to notice that
they were talking about blatant preferential policies.
I bring this up both
to begin with an example of a completely unselfconscious permissible prejudice
-- it is permissible to make sure that men do not fall below 55% of undergraduate
student bodies, even in a time when any other preferential policies are
virulently criticized. I also bring it up because I think that it gives
us some initial and immediate access to part of what is operating in what
we are today calling homophobia, prejudice against homosexuality. Operating
in homophobia is that in the most general way our culture, and, I believe,
our profession, rests on two contradictory facts. On the one hand, men
are considered powerful or dominant, and a male presence in an important
institution is assumed. On the other hand, masculinity is a fragile and
vulnerable business and needs to be carefully fostered and protected.
Thus permissible prejudices
seem natural. These can be taken-for-granted assumptions of basically
well meaning people, which have also led, in the case of some analytic
traditions and some analysts, to the real abuse of the psychoanalytic
situation, when homosexual object choice has been seen as a psychological
disorder, and people are thought to be in need of being cured of their
sexual orientation -- a distinctly un-psychoanalytic goal. In our society,
we pass laws against gay marriage, say that discrimination against gays
is okay, and people from ordinary citizens through the senate rail against
homosexuality. Homophobia on the individual level usually also has a conscious
rationalization in terms of the reasons for the dislike, or discrimination,
or hatred. A man explains his gay bashing as a reaction to having had
a pass made at him. A senator invokes the Bible.
At the same time,
I think we ourselves need to make sure not to assume that there is something
special about or innate to homosexuality that makes it more likely to
be subject to unthinking or permissible prejudice or to virulent violence.
In the context of current anti-gay hate crimes and the recent brutal murder
of Matthew Shepard, it is easy to think this. We might think that it is
closer to the body and sexuality than, for example, racism, anti-Semitism,
or prejudice against women. I would suggest, first, that it is dangerous
to compare oppressions or victimizations, what the African-American theorist
Barbara Christian calls the oppression derby. What is true, I think, is
that the parts of prejudice that are most deep and violent are often cast
unconsciously as well as in cultural tropes as bodily and sexual. For
instance, when you read the most virulent anti-Semitic tracts, or reflect
on the lynching of blacks in the South, and the accusations of interracial
rape and sex that often preceded these lynchings, it is sexual and bodily
imagery that stands out. In recent years, we notice that rape and even
more brutal and violent attacks on women are instruments of war, especially
in ethnic wars and in dictatorships that engage in kidnapping and torture.
Men also kill other men who perform abortions, although, whatever the
hate involved here -- and I do think it is extreme -- we still have to
notice that this is done with a single bullet rather than with prolonged
brutal torture, as in the case of violence against homosexuals.
What seems to be the
case is that there is a huge psychic faultline around the sexual body
in relation to masculinity. Images of men having sex with other men, a
black man having sex with a white woman, a woman who is sexual without
having a baby, are for some men extremely threatening.
This brings us back
to where I began, homophobia and masculinity. I have begun with extremes,
gay bashing and murder. It is here, parenthetically, that I question the
term homophobia as a clinical term. Phobias imply fear and avoidance,
but homophobia is really a counter-phobia which, in its extremes, leads
to attacks and seekings out, and which is constituted by virulent hatred
that I think we can only understand in terms of primitive splitting and
projection -- more like ethnic hatred of those who are so threateningly
like someone that all likeness has to be denied and difference exaggerated.
In the Matthew Shepard case it is reported, although it may not be true,
that one of the young men said first that they were gay and then that
they were not. Within psychoanalysis nothing is so toxic but the extreme,
which most enlightened and well meaning psychoanalysts now reject -- the
idea that one can and should work in analysis to change a person’s sexual
orientation.
I do not want to minimize
the anti-homosexual prejudice against women or the fear of lesbians and
lesbian sex. To do so -- and this panel runs such a danger because no
one speaks strongly here for the lesbian experience or position -- re-capitulates
and reproduces the very male norm that contributes to anti-homosexual
prejudices and that any panel on homophobia must challenge.
The day after the
article on recruiting men to colleges, The New York Times
had another article describing a student challenge to Barnard College.
In its recruiting brochure, and in a contemporary climate in which women’s
colleges are thought to attract lesbians disproportionately, Barnard had,
with witting or unwitting homophobia, claimed that women’s colleges produce
more women MBA’s, more women at the top of the corporate ladder, more
women scientists, and a higher number of women graduates who marry.
Nonetheless, in spite
of this absence today of a discussion of women, I do think that by and
large what we are calling homophobia or defense against one’s homosexual
impulses is strongest in heterosexual men. We know, thanks to the research
of Carla Golden, Arlene Stein, and others, that by and large the divide
between heterosexual and homosexual in women is less absolute. This research
finds that there are "primary lesbians," who always knew that
they were attracted to women and were never attracted to men, and "elective
lesbians," those who came out during the women’s movement or afterwards,
those who have a sense of making a more active choice or who go back and
forth, depending not on the gender of the lover, but the particular personal
qualities of a particular woman or man: Tom, yes, John, no, Susan, yes,
Tamara, no. We do not find that as much in men. Also -- and I actually
checked this out with a colleague who studies hate crimes -- it seems
that hate crimes against lesbians are far fewer than those against gay
men and are carried out largely by the same consciously and behaviorally
heterosexual young men. It also seems that gay men are attacked when they
are alone, whereas lesbians tend to be attacked when they are in a couple.
The primary issue in homophobia is men not being men and women
not being with men.
Briefly, here is how
I think the dynamics of homophobia, or homo-counterphobia, work. Psychodynamically,
masculinity is a tenuous business. In psychoanalysis from Stoller and
Greenson to myself and other feminists, and in psychological anthropology
from Margaret Mead to John Whiting to Gilbert Herdt, we see in boys’ difficulty
in separating and differentiating from mother, the fact that femininity
is ascribed and assumed, a natural progression from mother to daughter,
while masculinity as it is defined intrapsychically and in relation to
others is defensive, earned, and constantly threatened. I have also argued
that issues of selfhood tend to differentiate men and women. Seeing the
self as not the other, defining the self in opposition, does not seem
generally as important to women as to men, nor does merging seem as threatening.
 From Freud, we also learn
of the defensive and traumatic construction of male sexuality and object
love in relation to the father: the greatest threat, and one experienced
in relation to the father, is castration. So there is a father-son link
here, as well as, a mother-son link. There is a difficult double demand
on the oedipal boy. He is supposed to identify with his father without
loving him, or love him without "loving" him. "Normal"
masculinity I think demands this homoerotic admiration and identification,
which is certainly a form of love, while at the same time, masculinity
is supposedly by definition not homoerotic, not affectionate, not softly
loving. From the side of the father, we know from developmental research
that fathers are more invested than mothers in gender-differentiating
their children -- in the masculinity of their sons and the flirtatious
heterosexual femininity of their daughters.
Masculinity then ties together
gender and heterosexuality -- a gender defined around active and even
aggressive maleness and a heterosexuality that is by definition male dominant
and active. I want to emphasize here that there is nothing innate in being
male that requires this and it is not universal. It is a joint outcome
of cultural and interpersonal and family processes that masculinity must
be different and dominant. Masculinity here is cast psychodynamically
and culturally both as an adult/child dichotomy (being a powerful adult
man versus being a little needy homoerotic boy or potentially humiliated
by other men) and as a man-woman dichotomy, in which being male is not
being female. In both cases, masculinity contains and is based on splitting:,
adult man/little boy, man/woman. Male homosexuality threatens both of
these dichotomies.
We know especially
from Klein what happens with splitting and this is, I think, exactly what
happens with homophobia. Attraction to men from a boy, identification,
attraction to passivity and receptivity, and feminine identifications
vis a vis men, are deeply threatening to masculinity, are bad, and threaten
the goodness of active, aggressive masculinity and heterosexuality.
In particular men and in
particular situations, both gender and sexual orientation are rigidly
dichotomized, fragmented identifications, and any internal challenge to
the separateness of maleness and femaleness or of heteroerotic and homoerotic
fantasies and attachments threatens real disintegration. Characteristically,
the badness, femininity and submissiveness to men has to be split off
and projected outward where these in turn become extremely persecutory
potential identifications. Those who represent the split off and bad projections
threaten not only persecutory return, but also disintegrative flooding
to meld and fuse with the self. They need to be attacked and destroyed.
But I want to leap right
back to normality. Because I have a sense actually that even in the contemporary
psychoanalytic concern about homophobia attested to by this panel, there
is projection going on. It is extremist gay bashers and extremist psychoanalysts
who are homophobic, not us. This is theoretically explicit in French psychoanalysis,
in which there is an argument that you are psychotic if you do not recognize
differences of gender and generation and where the recognition of gender
requires heterosexual object choice and the primacy of the phallus, and
in British theory, in which thinking is cast as acceptance of the heterosexual
primal scene, but where you cannot explicitly accept the primal scene
developmentally and still make a non-heterosexual object choice yourself.
But even less explicitly, psychoanalysis still holds what phenomenological
sociologists call a natural attitude -- pre-theoretical assumptions that
link gender to object choice and do not question a normatively heterosexual
Oedipus complex. Within psychoanalytic theory, gender still means desire
for the other sex. This is grounded in taken-for-granted bio-evolutionary
assumptions about species reproduction. It is our own normative and normal
theory that makes us still unable to fully conceive of homosexual object
choice as just as normal and just as abnormal as heterosexual object choice,
which was the point of my paper, "Heterosexuality as a Compromise
Formation."
It is also our absolute
polarization of sexual orientation into a single homosexuality and a single
heterosexuality that leads us not to notice the very great variety of
homosexualities and heterosexualities, the particularity of most people’s
individual object choice and sexual fantasy. I even speculate that in
the case of homophobia, transferential entanglements may complicate rather
than automatically illuminate our understanding. It is my impression that
in some cases patients, regardless of their sexual orientation, are most
comfortable developing and expanding upon fantasies that rule out the
analyst. Thus, a male, heterosexual patient may speculate easily about
what a homosexual relationship would be like for him because it gets him
away from his female analyst. Or a female patient may be terrified of
being gay if she thinks this means being sexually attracted to her female
analyst, but comfortable with gay male fantasies and identifications.
More significantly,
I think, for our understanding of homophobia, is that even with all of
the work on femininity and psychoanalysis since the 1920’s, there has
been almost no serious investigation of masculinity. This is a case in
which psychoanalysts do not follow Freud’s claim that the pathological,
by revealing the lines along which the crystal shatters, illuminates the
structure of the normal. The fact that although both sexes are equally
susceptible to paranoid schizoid splitting, men are much more likely to
act violently in the context of persecutory fears, the rigid and defensive
structure of ordinary masculinity is based on the traumatic fear of castration,
and requiring active rejection of passivity, are all taken for granted
-- passivity in its double role, one of being submissive to other men
and one of being feminine. Freud and most psychoanalysts have never questioned
this linkage. Becoming a man has to do with identification, not just with
the father, but with the aggressive father, so that the dynamics of masculine
identity are centrally about aggression or aggressivity, and oedipal identification
with the father casts heterosexuality as a matter of male dominance, not
just sexual object choice.
My own completely
wonderful psychoanalytic institute in perhaps the most gay-affirmative
city in the country -- and I raise this because I am sure we are typical
and not unique -- still asks as a question on its written application
form about the marital status of applicants, and its newsletter reports
the marital and parental status of new candidates. In one class I taught,
discussion turned to how closely applicants were questioned about their
sexuality in their personal interviews. The gay man was grilled most closely
and intensively, followed by the married man and the married woman who
do not have children, followed by the twice divorced women. The married
women with two children who spoke up said that she was not questioned
at all. Now this is what we mean by a permissible prejudice. Thank you.
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