Homosexuality and Publicness: Towards a

Political Theory of the Taboopost_884 921..939

Adam James Tebble
University of Buckingham
This article examines the relationship between homosexuality and the concept of publicness, including the idea of
the political. Building upon the liberal feminism of Susan Okin, as well as upon recent work in queer theory, this
article outlines an account of the ethic of unacknowledgeability, understood as the socially constituted physical
disappearance of, and discursive silence about, homosexuality. It will be claimed that the ethic of unacknowledge-
ability explains why, unlike gendered marginalisation, the marginalisation of gays, lesbians and homosexuality as a
subject matter is beyond both public and private and, as such, distinct. To conclude, this article will sketch a
political theory of the taboo in which the implications of the ethic of unacknowledgeability for normative political
theory are explored. More specically, it will be claimed that the political theory of the taboo presents a new and
unique challenge to politics, and establishes as a new standard of justice the extent to which a theory of justice
grapples with the undiscussable.
Keywords: taboo; public; private; politics; homosexuality
This article marks the start of a project concerned with the relationship between politics
and the idea of the taboo. More specically, it will serve as a rst step towards a theory of
the signicance of the taboo for public political communication and the institutions that
govern it. In order to get a clear idea of this subject matter, however, in this article I will rst
explore the more specic relationship of homosexuality, construed as a taboo social practice,
to the idea of publicness that underlies the political. It is, then, via an analysis of homosexu-
alitys relationship to publicness that we begin a journey towards a political theory of the
taboo.
What, though, do we mean by taboo? There is a vast literature on this subject which
encompasses the elds of psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology, with the work of
Sigmund Freud (1990 [1913]) and Mary Douglas (2002 [1966]) being perhaps the most
prominent, at least in the popular consciousness. In conformity with standard usage, we will
dene taboo as the status of social practices that are considered not only to be unacceptable,
forbidden and hidden from view, but also to be undiscussable in the vast majority of
circumstances.
For reasons to be outlined shortly, I will start this investigation by building upon liberal
feminist theory, in particular the work of Susan Okin (1989). Two aspects of Okins
contribution will be germane to our investigation: her analysis of the public/private
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00884.x
POLI TI CAL STUDI ES: 2011 VOL 59, 921939
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
distinction with respect to gender and justice, and her discussion of the private, non-
political domain of the home as the primary locus of our moral development.
1
The
public/private distinction will be important because it opens up the conceptual terrain
needed to begin to theorise homosexualitys relationship to publicness, especially to the
extent that it is marginalised from the public life of society. Okins idea about the home
being the primary locus of our moral development, furthermore, will allow us to make
some initial claims about marginalisation, especially with regard to the homes role in the
inculcation of moral values, life expectations and, most profoundly, deeply held assumptions
regarding which aspects of our lives are properly considered public and which are properly
considered private. Building upon Okins contributions, I will then seek to draw some
parallels between gender- and sexuality-based marginalisation, in so far as both are supposed
to occupy the private, non-political side of the public/private distinction, which is, perhaps
unjustly, beyond the scope of justice. Here gay and lesbian people, as well as homosexuality
as a subject matter, are removed from the public to the private domain, or what is
commonly called the closet.
However, in contrast to the view that the marginalisation of gays and lesbians is but an
aspect of gendered marginalisation, I will claim that the former is distinct because it
occurs not in virtue of the public/private dichotomy but, in a signicant sense, despite
it. Central to the substantiation of this claim will be a reworking of the notion of the
closet as but one aspect of the more general operation of norms of physical disappearance
and discursive silence which together constitute homosexualitys governing taboo
ethic, or ethic of unacknowledgeability. Thus, even though similarly to gender differen-
tiation, homosexuality has traditionally been publicly and therefore politically unac-
knowledged, in contrast to it, gays, lesbians and homosexuality as a subject matter are also
rendered unacknowledgeable in both the public and private spheres by the ethic of unac-
knowledgeability. Indeed, we will see below how it is precisely Okins conception of
the home as the locus of our moral development that plays such a vital role in this
process. In contrast to Okin, however, I will claim that the home is no longer a site of
injustice because the indispensable, gender-differentiated nurturing work that is done
within it goes unrecognised, but because that nurturing is one of the principal sources
of injustice to gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities.
Signicantly, and in view of this and other ndings relating to the nature of the closet that
will be discussed below, I will then claim that the all-encompassing, simultaneously public
and private nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability problematises the public/private
distinction. Precisely, that is, because this ethic operates across both domains, there is an
important sense in which the public/private distinction is ultimately of limited analytical
value. Of course, if this is so, then one may ask with good reason why we should begin our
analysis with this liberal distinction, or with Okin, at all. While acknowledging this and
other important objections to the approach adopted here, I will nonetheless defend the
necessity of the public/private distinction to any adequate theorisation of the taboo status
of homosexuality. This is because, although limited as an analytical tool, it is nevertheless
necessary for the theorisation of the politics of the taboo with which this project is ultimately
concerned. This is so not least because the very notion of the political which at some
922 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
stage must be invoked with respect to public debate and decision making about homo-
sexuality presupposes it.
Having defended the problematic but nonetheless theoretically indispensable role of the
public/private distinction, I will conclude by summarising three implications that this rst
step towards a political theory of the taboo has for normative political theory and the
practice of politics. The rst is that the ethic of unacknowledgeability claries the distinct
nature of the marginalisation of taboo sexualities such as homosexuality. Here marginali-
sation does not occur via the relegation of important concerns to a private, non-political
realm, as it does in the case of gender, but via their relegation to the realm of the invisible
and undiscussable. Secondly, the ethic of unacknowledgeability encourages us to look not
only at the justness or otherwise of how we decide what is and is not a subject of justice,
but also of how we decide what should and should not be discussed at all, and how this
impacts upon how we conceive of the political. Third, the efcacy of politics itself is called
into question, once the silencing and disappearing force of the ethic of unacknowledge-
ability is comprehended. The political theory of the taboo challenges us, then, to identify
and defend a theory of justice in virtue of which taboo social practices may be equitably
addressed in the public domain, yet which at the same time can adequately grapple with the
unique challenge that the ethic of unacknowledgeability presents to our notions of public
and private that the political presupposes.
Gender, Marginalisation and Publicness
I want to lay some groundwork for my argument about homosexuality and publicness by
briey analysing Okins critique of the distinction between the public and the private and
the role it plays in her account of gender, politics and society. Doing so is important because
it is through understanding the political signicance of the public/private distinction that
we may begin to understand one central ingredient of homosexualitys relationship to the
public sphere: its marginalisation from it.
One of Okins (1989, chs 1 and 2) principal claims is that the gender-structured nature of
society serves to exclude, marginalise and oppress women. At the heart of this claim, and
of Okins wider political concern with the gender structure of society, is the distinction
between public and private. This distinction, she claims, makes it possible to separate the
family from what is considered the public realm in both our thinking about and practice
of politics. By thinking about politics in this way, therefore, it becomes possible to ignore
politically the family, its division of labour, and the related economic dependency and
restricted opportunities of most women (Okin, 1989, p. 9). The public/private distinction,
then, serves to make clear how our social institutions systematically remove a range of issues
and concerns about gender inequality from public contestation and thus from political
resolution. Okin (1989, pp. 1423) gives three reasons why the exclusion of gender from the
political is unacceptable: it makes any theory of justice that does so inadequate because it
fails to address the concerns of half the population; it serves to undermine equality of
opportunity; and the unjust family it presupposes leads to an unjust society, given the
centrality of the family to the moral development of all persons.
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 923
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
The idea of the home as central to our moral development is also of special interest for a
further reason that relates to political theory. Signicant here is Okins claim that, despite
assuming the subject of justice to be a mature and rational person capable of being guided
by principles of justice, contemporary theories of justice fail almost entirely to offer an
account of how the subject comes to be that way. The signicance of this is that it is in the
home and in the family that most of our moral development actually takes place and here
the vast majority of the work has been and still is done by women (Okin, 1989, pp. 910,
pp. 1723, pp. 1312; 1998, p. 119).
2
It is difcult if not impossible, therefore, to explain
how, within a formative social environment that is not founded upon principles of justice,
children can learn to develop that sense of justice they will require as citizens of a just
society (Okin, 1989, p. 17, emphasis in original).
It is clear, then, that thinking about politics in terms of the public/private distinction is
useful as a tool for revealing underlying social processes that leave women in a disadvantaged
position relative to men. This marginalisation occurs due to the supposedly private nature
of domestic relationships, meaning that they are never the subjects of public discourse and,
therefore, of political debate and possible reform. By having gender differentiation removed
from our idea of justice, that is, women are faced with the prospect of never having their
concerns properly addressed because that can only happen in the public political domain.
Furthermore, Okins account of the home as the primary locus of our moral development
claries the profound irony of this marginalisation: it is in the home that we are inculcated
with moral values and with a sense of justice, yet the very idea of justice we inherit omits
the home and its gendered division of labour as proper subjects of public political decision
making.
To overcome this and to recognise fully the fact that the just family, as a school of
justice, is not just one among many co-equal institutions of a just society but is, rather,
its essential foundation, Okin (1989, p. 17) discusses four different respects in which the
public/private distinction should be replaced with a perspective that concedes that the
personal is political, and the public/domestic dichotomy is a misleading construct, which
obscures the cyclical pattern of inequalities between men and women (Okin, 1989,
p. 111, emphasis in original). Of these the nal two that the family is undeniably
political because it is the place where we become our gendered selves, and that the
division of labour within the gender-structured family raises both practical and psycho-
logical barriers against women in all other spheres of life (Okin, 1989, p. 111, emphasis
in original) are of particular interest insofar as they relate to the essential features of
Okins two-pronged analysis of gender and justice. The rst builds upon her argument
about the importance of the family to the moral development of the individual, whilst
the second relates to the silencing of women in the public sphere owing to their being
viewed as lacking in authority in it. Okin thus concludes by claiming that, instead of
continuing to think about justice in terms of it, we need to advance a humanist account
of justice that transcends the public/private distinction. This is a justice for which the
personal that is, hitherto private relations that nonetheless carry with them profound
implications concerning the differentiated life chances of men and women becomes
political (Okin, 1989, ch. 8).
924 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
Gender, Sexuality and Processes of Public Disappearance
Politics and Silence
In the light of an albeit brief presentation of Okins accounts of the political signicance of
the public/private distinction and of the home as the primary locus of our moral devel-
opment, I would like now to utilise the former to begin an analysis of homosexualitys
relationship to the idea of publicness. Following Okin (1989, p. 8) we will understand the
idea of publicness as referring both to politics and to civil society/the marketplace.
Throughout the world, although clearly to very different degrees, homosexuality is
removed from the political arena as a subject of discussion.With the exception of a relatively
small number of jurisdictions, this occurs not only because heterosexuals are loath to discuss
homosexuality, but also because such feelings are often held on the part of gays and lesbians
themselves. Of course, an immediate objection here would be to point out that homo-
sexuality is explicitly mentioned in many if not most of the worlds legal codes. It is, then,
simply not the case that homosexuality is left undiscussed and, as such, banished from the
public in the way that the public/private distinction makes clear with respect to gender.
Moreover, gays and lesbians have participated and do participate in debates in the public
sphere, undermining still further the claim that they are somehow invisible.
Yet the historical example of the legal concept of coverture gives good reason to reject the
rst of these objections. The concept of coverture meant that, from a legal standpoint,
husband and wife were considered to be one person upon marriage, with that person being
the husband. This, of course, had the consequence of the wife losing the rights she enjoyed
as a single woman, such as those to property, a salary (when permitted to work) and to the
making of contracts, thus rendering her legally invisible. Importantly and despite being
codied into the law of the land, the status of women was therefore public only inasmuch
as at least some kind of public discussion was necessary to draft a law that rendered them
legally invisible after marriage. The discussion and ensuing political decision therefore may
have been in public, but the intent was nevertheless the maintenance of post-matrimonial
female invisibility.
Similarly, the issue of homosexuality has traditionally been brought up only within the
context of debates about the framing of laws that seek to make it disappear through
criminalisation. In the most extreme instances the intent behind such public political debate
and decision making is not to render just homosexuality but also homosexuals invisible, by
making the former a capital crime. Moreover, even in those places where homosexuality is
not a capital offence, it is still uncommon for there to exist legislation that deals with issues
that are important to gays and lesbians. Thus, debates about inheritance, tax, next-of-kin
rights, citizenship and marriage (understood as the right to marry, as well as the rights that
follow from marriage) are, in so far as they relate to gays and lesbians, systematically omitted
from political debate and decision making, because the majority would feel repulsed at
discussing them and the minority too afraid or ashamed to bring them up.
3
Similarly, with
regard to the second objection, it is undoubtedly true that gays and lesbians have always
participated in political debates and even in debates about (the criminalisation) of
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 925
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
homosexuality. Yet in the overwhelming majority of circumstances they have done so only
so long as the fact, let alone the defence, of their homosexuality remained concealed.
The explanation for this political disappearance is to be found in the way in which, by their
very nature, dominant norms largely preclude debate about homosexuality that involves the
challenging of its marginal status, for to do so would run contrary to all that we are expected
to think and feel about it in the public realm. As Michael Warner (2005, p. 54) comments,
[t]he public sphere as an environment ... is not just a place where one could rationally debate
a set of gender or sexual relations that in turn can be equated with private life; the public
sphere is a principal instance of the forms of embodiment and social relations that are
themselves at issue.
It is here where we may draw a parallel with Okins account of the public/private
distinction as functional to the marginalisation of women and girls. In the case of gender
the relegation of family relationships and the household division of labour to the private
sphere renders as apolitical, and therefore as non-subjects of justice, many issues that
profoundly affect individual life chances. Similarly, the preponderance of norms of physical
disappearance and discursive silence means that, in the overwhelming number of circum-
stances, homosexuality is acknowledged in the public domain only to the extent that the
purpose of doing so is the legal reinforcement of its invisibility. In all other instances it is
something that is best kept private and to oneself.
Violence, Suspicion and Secrecy in Civil Society
We have seen how our distinguishing between public and private serves to marginalise
females from politics, thus removing the question of their status and life chances from the
ambit of justice, and how feelings of shame, fear and disgust lead to a similar outcome with
respect to homosexuality. In the case of women, of course, this has not gone unchallenged.
Across the world women have and do seek to work, or take part in activities, such as sports,
considered unt for females, or wear clothing deemed as inappropriate or immodest.
4
What
happens, then, when the boundary that the public/private distinction demarcates is crossed
or challenged in the public realm of civil society and the marketplace? Responses can range
from quiet disapproval to harassment and violence as a means of pressurising women into
conforming to dominant norms concerning their role, their expected behaviours, appear-
ance and, ultimately, their physical positioning within society.
Similarly, gays and lesbians are subject to harassment, abuse and violence on a regular basis
because they are deemed to have violated norms concerning acceptable behaviour regard-
ing, for example, the public display of affection, or by behaving in ways that contravene
preponderant denitions of masculinity and femininity. Like women and indeed visible
ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians are the permanent possible targets of harassment and
violence in the public, civic social sphere, when they are perceived to have challenged a
social boundary.
However, in contrast to gender and to visible ethnicity (where, for example, members of
minority groups are harassed for venturing into the wrong part of town), such harassment
926 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
is not intended to put homosexuals where they belong in any spatial sense. Rather, it is
aimed at making them publicly invisible. Ultimately, then, and unlike women and visible
ethnic minorities, there is no place where gays and lesbians are expected to be because they
are deemed not to belong anywhere. Importantly, this difference is born of the possibility
that, as a behavioural rather than physical trait, homosexuality is capable of being con-
cealed.
5
Thus, social danger for homosexuals is contingent upon their obviousness as gay
or lesbian, with those that are unable or unwilling to conceal their sexuality, and thus who
come across to others as either effeminate males, butch females or as sexually predatory,
having to deal with the permanent possibility of public harassment and violence. Moreover,
even in the case of those who are incapable of concealing their sexuality, their obviousness
is often considered not to be an essential aspect of their demeanour but, rather, a premedi-
tated affront to society and received norms ( Warner, 2005, p. 24).
Importantly, the possibility of concealment also makes possible the avoidance of social
danger, a fact that places straight-acting gay men in an enviable position relative to visible
ethnic minorities and women.
6
Yet the idea that this is a good thing needs to be rejected
for a number of reasons. First, as we have seen, it is an option that is only open to some and
not all homosexuals. Moreover, concealment is a strategy whose availability decreases with
age. If you are young and do not out received norms then you can indeed hide your
sexuality. However, after a certain age your presumed homosexuality is considered very
visible. This is so, moreover, regardless of whether or not the homosexual remains single
after marrying age. Indeed, gays and lesbians often nd themselves between a rock and a
hard place here. If you choose to remain single, the excuse of being a bachelor or spinster
begins to wear thin in the minds of others. Yet if you do have a partner, it becomes
increasingly less plausible that you are merely best friends.
Most profoundly, the act of concealment actually reveals a second, more subtle, way in
which homosexuality is marginalised, which makes it different to gender and visible
ethnicity, and which is claried by the motivation of homosexuals to conceal their sexuality
in the rst place. This happens in the rst instance out of considerations of prudence and,
in extremis, self-preservation, because of the anxiety that comes with permanent exposure to
public humiliation, discrimination, or violence. However, gays and lesbians are not only
acting out of prudence, or responding as rational agents to a set of exogenous conditions
and probabilities. They may also be responding to endogenous forces, in the form of deeply
ingrained feelings of shame, disgust and self-loathing that motivate the strategy of conceal-
ment in virtually every social context.
7
Thus, despite signicantly reducing the probability
of the straight-acting gay or lesbian experiencing violence or harassment, as a long-term
measure concealing ones sexuality ultimately serves only to reinforce the very norms of
physical disappearance and discursive silence that lead one to feel obliged to do so. What
looks at rst like a strategy of social advancement is deployed not only at the cost of moral
and existential capitulation to those norms that necessitated the strategy in the rst place
but, indeed, to their continued social reproduction.
8
Beyond this, also distinctive of the public marginalisation of gays and lesbians is the social
context of suspicion to which they are continually subject. This context is rooted in the
way in which sexualities are public and private in very different ways ( Warner, 2005, p. 24)
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 927
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
and it is this difference, coupled with the possibility of concealment, that acts as a powerful
incentive for gays and lesbians not to disclose their sexuality, and to remain in what has
come to be known, in both queer theory and contemporary parlance, as the closet. The
upshot of living in the closet, however, is not a new-found feeling of protection and
liberation. Rather, it is a feeling of recurring anxiety at whether it is wise for others to know
about ones sexuality in the public domain (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 68; Warner, 2005, p. 52).
Thus, the difference that is homosexual marginalisation in public is born not only of the
operation of norms of disappearance and silence, but also of the capacity of gays and lesbians
to adopt a strategy of non-disclosure of their sexuality. This is a capacity which, while
making possible the avoidance of social danger, leaves one to navigate an often tortuous
private emotional journey against a background of communally induced self-loathing, not
to mention a succession of contexts of suspicion in which the supposedly private unspoken
fact of ones homosexuality is precisely what is so loudly at issue in the minds of others.
9
The Ethic of Unacknowledgeability
The Home as a School of Injustice
What accounts for the public disappearance and silencing of homosexuality? To answer this
question we need to build upon the second aspect of Okins analysis of gendered margin-
alisation: her idea of the home as the primary locus of our moral development, including
the development of our moral capacity to be adult choosers possessed of a sense of justice.
Importantly and in contrast to Okin, however, the home is not held up as important to
underscore the undoubtedly signicant point that a vital sphere of our lives is not governed
by rules of justice, even though most of the work done in it to bestow us with a sense of
justice is done on a gendered basis. The important point here, rather, is that it is in the home
where we not only learn to be our private and public selves; it is where we also learn to be
complicit in the disappearance, silencing and, in extremis, the choosing of violence and abuse
that govern our practical and discursive attitudes towards homosexuality. Of course, we need
to be clear as to what the dynamics of this silencing are. It is not as if at some crucial
moment in the development of their gay children, nurturing mothers warn them that as
they enter society they had best not display or mention their homosexuality. Rather, the
stance that one adopts is a learned behaviour that is built up over the long term in the
domestic sphere. It is here where young gays and lesbians learn through imitation, obser-
vation, reprimand and fear of hurting loved ones, what does and does not get talked about
and what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
The effect of this silencing is that a signicant aspect of the moral development of gays and
lesbians is omitted from the very sphere in which it is supposed to take place ( Warner, 1999,
p. 8). Moreover, this has repercussions for both heterosexual and homosexual youth. For
heterosexuals this means that they are not brought up to acknowledge or accept homo-
sexuality in others, while for younger gays and lesbians it means both this and that they are
not brought up to acknowledge or accept their own homosexuality.
A particularly powerful although by no means unique example of the damaging effects of
the unacknowledgeability of homosexuality within the home relates to the issue of sex
928 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
education and puberty. Owing to rapid and unexpected hormonal changes, many teenagers
experience these years as deeply troubling and one of the important duties of the nurturing
parent is to help their child by discussing the changes that are occurring, including the
awakening of sexual desire. Yet at the very moment in which they need such guidance, the
sexuality of gays and lesbians has already been rendered unmentionable both in the minds
of their parents and, through their example, in the minds of the adolescents themselves. Of
course, this does not mean that in more liberal households sex is not discussed. Yet this
comes at the cost of it being discussed in heterosexual terms. Not only are the gay or lesbian
adolescents needs unacknowledged, they are introduced to a world in which they are told,
through omission, that they have no place (Sullivan, 1995, p. 12; Warner, 1999, p. 8).
The private sphere is marked not only by the absence of those moral values which one
needs to orient oneself in later life, but also by the presence of values that systematically
undermine that objective. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, p. 81) claims, gay people
seldom grow up in gay families andare exposed to their cultures, if not their parents, high
ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they
are among those who most urgently need to dene themselves against it. Thus, she
continues, they have with difculty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments
a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance. Ultimately gays and
lesbians are largely left without an intact and to hand ... identity and history and commit-
ments that are personied and legitimated in a visible gure of authority.
The idea of the home as the primary locus of our moral development also has important
implications for the role mothers themselves play in facilitating the reproduction of
marginalisation. If we agree with Okin that mothers are in the main responsible for
transmitting moral values to future generations, then does it follow that they are also
responsible for transmitting the idea of the public and private and, crucially, the idea of
gender-differentiated expectations and roles to them? To a certain extent this is acknow-
ledged by Okin (1989, pp. 1312) in her discussion of same-sex parentchild bonding with
respect to the social reproduction by mothers of the mothering role in girls. But if it is the
case that mothers play such a central role in the moral development of the young, it follows
that it is by and large mothers who are responsible for instilling expectations, not only
regarding gender, but also sexuality. At its most extreme this would mean that if we were to
describe mothers as the primary inculcators of moral values, then it is they who are in the
main responsible for bringing up straights to loathe gays and for gays to loathe themselves.
Are women therefore to be blamed for being responsible for the cultural reproduction of
homosexual marginalisation, not to mention the very sexism of the gender-structured
nature of society under which they labour? In the rst instance and, pace Okins charac-
terisation, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the home is the primary locus of our
moral development, for this all too easily omits other important institutions such as school
and church, both of which are male dominated. Moreover, and even if we concede the
primacy of the home, Okins account leaves little room for the authority of the male head
of household in exerting a controlling inuence over mothers, although this also begs the
question of the role mothers play in encouraging young males to view themselves in this
way. Perhaps more signicantly, however, in both cases the child is brought into the public
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 929
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
sphere of civil society/market at an early age where he or she is exposed to other inuences
beyond those of the home ( Warner, 2005, p. 54). Moreover, family members spend much
of their time outside the home. Fathers, in particular, are involved in a mutually reinforcing
migration between the values of the public and private spheres, while mothers talk with
other mothers and often work. Equally signicantly and particularly in an age of increas-
ingly sophisticated modes of communication and dissemination of knowledge, the child is
not only brought into the public sphere, but the home is experienced by the child as being
penetrated by the public sphere from the outset.
The upshot of all this is that the process of moral development is in many respects always
both a public and private one, where dominant norms concerning sexuality emerge in a
mutually reinforcing relationship between these two spheres (Sullivan, 1995, pp. 612). Talk
of apportioning responsibility for the moral deformation of gay and lesbian youth to
mothers, then, seems as unhelpful as it is sociologically dubious. Regardless of the degree to
which the home or mothers are responsible for this, the more important point is that the
home is complicit, not only in the removal of homosexuality as a subject of justice, but in
its removal as a subject tout court across all spheres, including its own sphere. It is in the home,
therefore, that we come to learn that the governing ethic of homosexuality is an ethic of
unacknowledgeability.
From the Home to the Clandestine Public
The ethic of unacknowledgeability presents families with a particularly stark choice, the not
uncommon result of which is also revelatory of how that ethic operates across all spheres.
Faced with the silencing of homosexuality in the private sphere, the gay youth can
internalise this silence and remain in the closet, or he can challenge it. Of course, and
similarly to the dynamic of disappearance and silencing in the public sphere of civil
society/market, if he breaks the silence he puts himself at risk of the withdrawal of love, of
domestic abuse or of eviction. Eviction from the home in particular not only represents the
physical banishment of what is considered to be shameful or disgusting, it represents a
catastrophic violation of the norms of love and trust that, it is claimed by those authors
discussed by Okin (1989, pp. 2633), are the proper governing conceptions of order in the
home, in the absence of rules of justice. Moreover, eviction represents the denial of that
which is so essential to our becoming rational choosers capable of acting justly. In this sense,
then, the idea of eviction also repudiates Okins claim that the home is the centre of moral
development, or a school of justice. For many gays and lesbians the acquisition of a sense
of morality and justice is something that they must complete on their own, outside the home
and without support (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 75; Warner, 1999, pp. 512). This is in contrast to
invisible ethnicities, such as many religious minorities, where families provide a context of
retreat and an accessible history which, while often deformed by the experience of
historical injustice and a shared sense of prolonged suffering, also offers deeply embedded
coping mechanisms that are handed down from generation to generation.
Moreover, and similarly to the double-edged effect of the inculcation of inappropriate
values, the effect of eviction is not only in what is withdrawn from the adolescent, but also
930 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
in the circumstances he or she is thrown into. Eviction, that is, not only represents a
profound betrayal of the nurturing and caring nature of the home and its supposed
governing bonds of love, but is potentially catastrophic from the evictees point of view. It
means in many instances exile into a public which may not only be governed by love but,
also, by sexual self-interest and the ever-present threat of public harassment and violence
from the dominant culture, a point to which we will return shortly.
Differentiating Gender from Sexuality
What lessons are we to draw, then, from the ethic of unacknowledgeability? Perhaps most
signicantly and in contrast to Okin (1997) and others ( Butler, 1993; Law, 1988; Pharr,
1988; Rich, 1994 [1980]; Sunstein, 1997) who have viewed gay and lesbian marginali-
sation as but an aspect of gender, in many important respects the former is distinct. As
we have already seen, this is so in the rst instance with regard to the norm of disap-
pearance where, in contrast to gender, gays and lesbians are not understood to be prop-
erly connable to the private sphere but, rather, not to belong to any sphere at all. With
respect to the norm of silence the situation is again distinctive. In the case of gender it
is not so much that women are silenced but, rather, that what they say is ignored, or
considered irrelevant. At least since Aristotle, this has been so typically because women
are deemed either to lack authority or, to the extent that they have authority at all, only
to have it in the home. In the case of homosexuality, by contrast, the silencing is quite
literal and dispositional in nature. Here homosexual voices are silenced, both by the
heterosexual majority, and by gays and lesbians themselves, where feelings of self-loathing
or, if not these, of the possibility of humiliation or violence, often lead them not to admit
they are gay or, if they do, to keep it to themselves.
Thus, it is not the case that gays are not allowed to speak, or that they speak only to be
ignored. Nor is it that what they say is only heard in some non-political private domain.
Rather it is that what gays and lesbians would say is unmentionable, often as much to
themselves as to others. By contrast, we are not encouraged to consider gender as an
unmentionable issue, even if the terms in which it is discussed serve to inhibit womens life
chances relative to those of men. It is in this sense, then, that we may fully understand Lord
Alfred Douglas famous description of his own homosexuality being the love that dare not
speak its name (Douglas, 1894). Distinctive of gay and lesbian marginalisation is the idea not
of being unacknowledged but, rather, of being unacknowledgeable.
This notwithstanding, the ethic of unacknowledgeability does share much in common with
Judith Butlers conception of the unintelligibility of sexualities that deviate from or do not
t within the dominant heterosexual matrix ( Butler, 2004, ch. 1, esp. pp. 301, pp. 346;
2006, pp. 2234).
10
A gay couple defending their moral claim to walk down the street
holding hands, for example, will do so in terms of their public display of affection carrying
the meaning of love, bonding and commitment. Yet what many understand in this defence
is an impermissible and aggressive assertion of decadence. Despite this, the ethic of
unacknowledgeability also differs from unintelligibility in that it draws attention not to the
fact that queer utterances and, in the Butlerian sense, performances, are unintelligible
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 931
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
within a heteronormative frame; rather, central to the ethic of unacknowledgeability is that
non-heterosexual utterances and performances should not be heard or seen at all. Second,
the ethic of unacknowledgeability differs from the idea of unintelligibility in that it is
specically conceived with politics and public political communication in mind. Unacknowl-
edgeability, that is, does not just refer to the taboo social status of minority sexualities, but
also to the consequences of that taboo for public political communication, and the impact
these have upon individual life chances of gays, lesbians and others.
The Closet is Not Gay
I want now to look at some of the implications the ethic of unacknowledgeability has for
the ways in which we commonly think of the gay closet and, ultimately, for the relevance of
the public/private distinction to the analysis of the taboo. There are at least two. First, the
ethic of unacknowledgeability calls into question the idea that the closet uniquely affects
homosexuals. There are, for instance, many effeminate men and masculine women who are
not gay or lesbian, yet who nonetheless encounter harassment or abuse because they are
presumed to be gay and either very inept at, or deliberately failing, to hide it ( Warner, 1999,
p. 37). Furthermore, in many if not all societies it is still common for gays and lesbians to
marry under social pressure to prove their heterosexuality, only to let down their (hetero-
sexual) spouses and children through the discovery of long-term sexual indelity. Moreover,
the closet is a phenomenon that heterosexuals can also nd themselves in when they are not
sure if a third party knows that a loved one, friend or colleague is gay. Under such
circumstances heterosexuals also become acquainted at rst hand with the deep anxiety that
comes with the possibility of inadvertent and damaging disclosure (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 80).
The Gay Public, or the Closet Writ Large?
Most signicantly, the ethic of unacknowledgeability calls into question both the private
nature of the closet and, simultaneously, the public nature of the gay public space. To be
exiled from the home for daring to leave the closet is to be placed beyond the domestic
sphere, but without being properly placed in the public sphere. In such a regime of sexual
domination, writes Warner (2005, pp. 523, emphasis in original),
publicness will feel like exposure, and privateness will feel like the closet. The closet may seem
to be a kind of protection. Indeed, the feeling of protection is one of the hallmarks of modern
privacy. But in fact the closet is riddled with fear and shame. So is publicity under the
conditions of the closet. Being publicly known as homosexual is never the same as being
publicly known as heterosexual; the latter always goes without saying and troubles nothing,
whereas the former carries echoes of pathologized visibility. It is perfectly meaningless to
come out as heterosexual. So, it is not true, as common wisdom would have it, that
homosexuals live private lives without a secure public identity. They have neither privacy nor
publicness, in these normative senses of the terms.
Pathologised visibility, moreover, impacts profoundly upon the very nature of the gay public
itself, in contrast to ethnic minorities, whose members may retreat into public spaces that
afford respite from the social pressures that come with negotiating contexts of minority
932 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
status, exposure and disclosure. Most obviously until the very late twentieth century and
even then only in the urban centres of the wealthy liberal democracies the gay built
environment was typically marked by anonymous signage and dark-tinted windows, or no
windows at all. Thus, while we can agree with both Sedgwick (1990) and Warner (2005, p.
52) that the metaphor of the closet is to a certain extent misleading because it implies a
physical, spatial repression, this does not mean that its operation is not materialised in the
public domain.
Another example of the clandestine nature of the gay public is with respect to jokes made
within the gay community about homosexuals who are considered too effeminate. Much is
made of the obviousness of queens who are deemed to behave too effeminately, whereas
masculine, straight-acting gays are more acceptable and desirable because they are not so
obviously gay. Effeminacy, then, is a marker of homosexuality that wrongly brings it into
the open, while acting straight properly conceals it, revealing that the gay public itself
reproduces the very norms that lead to its formation. Similarly, the signalling of homosexu-
ality through discrete dress codes and the social signicance of the gaydar in virtue of
which gays are said to be able to recognise one another as gay in circumstances that would
otherwise forbid it reveals that, while public in the sense of not being a private world but
rather a shared one, with respect to society at large the gay public is in a signicant sense
merely a reproduction of the private closet in an inter-subjective, public mode.
Importantly, the closeted nature of the gay public space calls into question the conceptu-
alisation of the public sphere as an emancipatory zone for marginalised social groups (Fraser,
1997; Young, 1990). For, without wishing to deny its value as what Nancy Fraser (1997, p.
82) calls a zone of regroupment for such groups, to the extent that it is permitted to exist
at all, the gay counter-public at least can also be interpreted as being no more than a rather
large public closet. It is a space where one can be public about ones homosexuality but
only in so far as it is beyond the view of society at large, and without having any direct
inuence on the political sphere where ultimate authoritative decision making takes place.
The question as to whether the gay public is an emancipatory counter-public at all, or
merely the closet writ large, where so many of the social processes it is supposedly an
antidote for end up being reproduced, is an important question that merits further
consideration.
The public sphere of gays and lesbians, then, is largely constructed around an architecture
of invisibility and is often subject to the behavioural imperatives of concealment. Yet, as we
have seen, at the same time the private sphere in which gays and lesbians nd themselves is
already and always marked by norms of disappearance and silence and, if not this, then
devoid of a shared history.
11
The simultaneously private and public nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability is made
manifest by the social genesis of what are commonly understood as privately held feelings of
guilt and shame. Far from being merely private in nature, these are ultimately part of a
process in which gays and lesbians are held individually responsible for actions that are
sourced in societys attitude towards them, and to which they are merely trying to respond.
As Warner (1999, p. 8) tellingly explains, in later life many gays will be told that they are
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 933
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
closeted, as though they have been telling lies. They bear a special burden of disclosure.
Yet, he continues, [i]t seldom occurs to anyone that the dominant culture and its family
environment should be held accountable for creating the inequalities of access and recog-
nition that produce this sense of shame in the rst place. Thus, as he ( Warner, 2005, p. 52)
writes elsewhere,
common mythology understands the closet as an individuals lie about him- or herself. We
blame people for being closeted. But the closet is better understood as the cultures problem,
not the individuals. No one ever created a closet for him- or herself. People nd themselves
in its oppressive conditions before they know it, willy-nilly. It is experienced by lesbians and
gay men as a private, individual problem of shame and deception. But it is produced by the
heteronormative assumptions of everyday talk. It feels private. But in an important sense it is
publicly constructed.
Instead, then, of thinking of the closet as private and impacting only upon the lives of gays
and lesbians, the ethic of unacknowledgeability encourages us to think of it also as a public
phenomenon in both its genesis and material and cultural manifestation and, importantly,
as one that can impact negatively and unequally upon the lives of all. In an important sense
the ethic of unacknowledgeability transcends the public/private distinction.
Is a Liberal Queer Theory Possible?
The all-pervasive nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability, of course, also presents us
with an important problem. For if it reveals the public/private distinction to be ultimately
limited in its contribution to the analysis of homosexuality and publicness, then we also
have good reason to doubt its relevance to a political theory of the taboo.Why, that is, begin
an analysis of gay and lesbian marginalisation in terms of the public/private distinction if the
ethic of unacknowledgeability that underlies that marginalisation ultimately transcends it?
It is precisely for this reason that much contemporary feminist and queer theory eschews
liberal approaches such as Okins and the one defended here. Rather, they examine
marginalised sexualities in terms of the operation of preponderant social norms, as evidenced
in the resonance of notions of compulsory heterosexuality, the heterosexual matrix,
unintelligibility and heteronormativity in the work of Adrienne Rich (1994), Monique
Wittig (1992a; 1992b), Butler (1993, pp. 22342; 2004, pp. 4156; 2005, pp. 79; 2006, pp.
2234, pp. 47106) and Warner (1991, pp. 317; 2005).
12
Despite this, there are at least three reasons why the public/private distinction is indispens-
able to an adequate exploration of the marginal status of homosexuality, and why these
approaches may be insufcient, especially if they are intended to serve as the basis for a
normative theory, such as the political theory of the taboo. First, this is because of the
unavoidably public as opposed to private nature of those political debates about sexuality
that at some point must be had.Without such debates and the institutions that make them
possible, it is difcult to see how issues such as the legality of homosexuality itself, or the
legal rights, responsibilities and protections of gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities can
be addressed.
In contrast to these reasons for the necessity of a conception of publicness to a political
theory of the taboo, there is also the question of the value of the private sphere when
934 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
construed as a bulwark against intrusion. This, of course, is what Warner (2005, p. 26, p. 53)
has called the kind of privacy that you value and is also an important aspect of Okins
(1989, pp. 1278) liberalism when she discusses the role of the state with respect to gender.
Moreover, the idea of the private sphere and of privacy not only underlies the idea of
protection against the state, but also against the civic social tyranny of the majority. At the
most extreme, this is made clear by the historical example of the Nazis outing of
homosexuals in the concentration camp system via the enforced wearing of the inverted
pink triangle badge. This institutionally sanctioned obliteration of privacy not only exposed
gay men to the Nazi states power to determine where the public/private boundary should
actually lie; it simultaneously exposed them to the now publicly legitimated, non-statist
abuse and degradation meted out even by fellow Holocaust victims who, despite awaiting
the same unavoidable and tragic end, nevertheless viewed gays as in the meantime worthy
of abuse, humiliation and worse (Heger, 1994; Seel, 1995; 1997).
Equally importantly from the standpoint of a political theory of the taboo, an account of
public and private is needed even by those who favour subaltern and/or performative
activisms over the formal political arena as a means of publicly subverting heteronorma-
tivity. In their differing ways these activisms, such as those evidenced in the work of Wittig
(1992a; 1992b), in Butlers (2004, pp. 20431; 2006, pp. 194203) theory of performativity
and, relating to marginalised groups more generally, in Frasers (1997) conception of the
sub-altern counter public, all explore the possibilities of agitational politics which serve as
alternatives to more formal political decision making.
13
Yet, even here, a conception of
public and private is still required, although not in order for marginalised voices to be heard
in a formal political arena. As we have seen, that all too often merely replicates the very
exclusions that are at issue. Rather, it is necessary so that the rights and protections that
secure such street-level oppositional activisms can be identied and juridically secured by
the state against intrusion by social forces that are hostile to them.
Acceptance of the need for formal public political debates about homosexuality, and of a
notion of the private to secure gays and lesbians from the decisions resultant from those
debates and to secure them to a space in which to contest them, however, also implies a
workable conception of public and private.
14
Even if therefore one may have well-founded
reservations about the relevance of the public/private distinction as a methodological tool
for the analysis of taboo social practices, owing to the all-pervasive nature of the ethic of
unacknowledgeability, it remains indispensable to the political theory of the taboo and, as
such, must at some stage gure in that analysis, however problematically.
A second objection to the argument made here is that it bears little relation to the status
of gays and lesbians today. Indeed, one need only visit San Francisco, Sydney and London
to see just how visible and accepted homosexuality is. What the gay urban renaissance so
clearly illustrates in these places is that the ethic of unacknowledgeability has been
overcome and that mainstream culture is modifying itself with respect to homosexuality,
just as it did with respect to gender and race before. To accept what happens in such places
as indicative of a global trend, however, would be at best nave, not least when viewed from
the perspective of sexual minorities in, for example, Guatemala City, Teheran or Lagos. In
any case, for whole swathes of the non-urban regions of the wealthy liberal democracies,
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 935
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
the ethic of unacknowledgeability captures something that is all too real in the lives of
countless lesbians, gays and members of other sexual minorities. Yet perhaps most impor-
tantly, even in the cities mentioned above, the transformation of the ethic of unacknowl-
edgeability is still at best a partial one. In these supposedly tolerant places, it is still not
uncommon for gays and lesbians to nd themselves alternately in and out of the closet,
depending upon social circumstances (Sedgwick, 1990, pp. 678). Moreover, the gay urban
renaissance is in any case contingent. Cultural change brought on by shifting demographics
can have very deleterious consequences indeed for the new-found openness toward
homosexuality (Tebble, 2006, pp. 47981).
Conclusion
Homosexualitys relationship to publicness is of importance to political theory because it
makes real the need to extend an insight rst had by feminist theory. We have seen how,
similarly to gender, homosexuality is removed from the public sphere and, as such, from
considerations of justice. Yet, in contrast to gender, we have also seen that the relationship
between homosexuality and publicness is a complex one which needs more than an
account of the public and the private to be properly explained. The signicant difference
here is that, in the case of homosexuality, it is the taboo ethic of unacknowledgeability in
both public and private that ultimately explains its removal from both spheres. In contrast
to gender, which is thought about in a way that serves to remove the inequalities it sustains
from politics and justice, homosexualitys marginalisation is sourced in a governing ethic
that precludes it being discussed at all. Thus, the political theory of the taboo to which the
example of homosexuality gives life leads us not to interrogate the boundary between
public and private, but to interrogate the ethic of unacknowledgeability whose all-
pervasiveness, unlike other processes of marginalisation, makes the marginalisation of gays
and lesbians distinct and not reducible to, or merely an aspect of, gender.
Importantly, this article has not only been about analysing a relationship. It has also been
about clarifying the implications of that relationship for politics and political theory, two
of which appear to be salient. The rst is that the distinctiveness of the relationship of
homosexuality to publicness provides the opportunity for us to build upon the advances of
feminist political theory. If feminism has taught us to look at how we practise politics and
how we think about that practice, the study of homosexualitys relationship to publicness
encourages us to look very carefully at the ways in which our social norms encourage us
not to discuss or confront certain issues. In both cases, the way in which we think and
practise has profound consequences for individual life chances, and it is this that should
motivate us to consider the political theory of the taboo as profoundly important. That is,
we should consider the taboo as a proper subject of reection upon the nature and demands
of justice, just as we have come to consider the claims of feminist theory ostensibly
dealing only with issues relevant to women as rightfully falling within the ambit of
political thought in the most general sense.
How, then, should we think about politics in the light of the ethic of unacknowledgeability?
The answer to this leads to the second implication of this study. If the resolution of political
936 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
questions is understood as being predicated upon a public, usually face-to-face, discourse,
then any aspect of the life of society that is governed by an ethic of unacknowledgeability
would appear to fall beyond the reach of effective, let alone equitable, political decision
making. Given, however, that the operation of this ethic can have enormous consequences
for individual life chances, we are faced with a special challenge. If the very dynamic of
marginalisation at issue is one of disappearance and silence that is, of taboo status then
it seems that politics as a general approach is precluded in advance from being an effective
social decision-making mechanism with respect to it. The political theory of the taboo
therefore introduces a new standard for the appraisal of theories of justice. This is the extent
to which they are capable of responding to the unacknowledgeable, and at the same time,
of adequately grappling with the unique challenge that this ethic presents to our concep-
tions of public and private that politics inevitably presupposes.
(Accepted: 28 June 2010).
About the Author
Adam JamesTebble is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Buckingham and has previously taught
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University College London and Brown University. His
research interests include contemporary liberal political theory, the politics of culture and identity and the idea of public
communication. Dr Tebble is the author of Hayek (Continuum, 2010) and he is currently completing a book on the
role of the state in culturally diverse societies for Routledge Press. He has previously published in the journals Political
Theory, Political Studies, Economics and Philosophy and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Adam James Tebble, Department of Economics and International Studies, University of Buckingham, Buckingham
MK18 1EG; email: adam.tebble@buckingham.ac.uk
Notes
I would like to thank the reviewers at Political Studies, and especially Mary Dietz, Sharon Krause and Ccile Laborde, for their
extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
1 For discussion of differing conceptualisations of public and private see Squires (1999, pp. 2432) and Weintraub and Kumar (1997).
See also Squires (2003, pp. 13144). For an account of the complex relationship of the public/private distinction to liberalism see
Pateman (1989, pp. 11840).
2 Friedrich Hayek (1976, p. 87), too, emphasised the home as the most important institution in this regard, although he is silent on
the issue of its internal justice, and on the idea of ones moral inheritance being so deforming as to lead to self-loathing.
3 For an argument against the morality of marriage, including gay marriage, because it serves to reinforce an unjust hierarchical norm
of normality that is instrumental to the politics of shame, see Warner (1999, ch. 3).
4 A good example of the rst of these is the 2005 lm North Country which documents the story of Lois Jenson, a miner who
initiated the rst sexual harassment class action lawsuit in US legal history.
5 We should not mistake homosexualitys being a behavioural trait for the rst phase of Foucaults (1990, p. 43) historical account
of the transformation of the public imagination of (male) homosexuality from an act (sodomy) to an identity (species). By
behavioural trait we mean as much to fall in love, form a relationship and share a life with someone of the same sex, as we do
to have sexual relations within those contexts. See also Sedgwick (1990, pp. 448).
6 Although in the case of lesbians this leaves them still subject to the effects of the gender-structured nature of society.
7 On the role of shame and disgust in politics see Nussbaum (2004).
8 An interesting depiction of this dynamic with respect to the possibility for people of mixed race to hide ethnicity in the public
space is the subject of the 2003 lm The Human Stain.
9 In the modern era, of course, HIV/AIDS both mimics and reinforces the dynamic of the closet, with all its deleterious
consequences. Like the invisible, unspeakable homosexual, HIV/AIDS shows no visible symptoms, thus making the homosexual
no longer merely an object of disgust and shame, but also of hidden danger. The stigmas associated with HIV/AIDS, and with
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 937
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
homosexuality itself, thus combine to create an enormous pressure to avoid disclosure of ones health status. This, of course, is
precisely what the virus needs to thrive, just as the pressure to avoid disclosure of ones homosexuality is what the disappearance
and silencing of homosexuality needs to maintain itself.
10 See also Chambers and Carver, 2008, pp. 12530.
11 On the relationship between race and heteronormativity see Butler (1993, pp. 16785).
12 See also Chambers, 2007, pp. 65679; Chambers and Carver, 2008, pp. 805, pp. 12136; Jagger, 2008, 1416; Lloyd, 2007, pp. 336,
pp. 1436.
13 See also Chambers and Carver, 2008, pp. 13757.
14 This, of course, is not to say that Butler is not aware of this issue. See Butler, 2000, pp. 201, p. 33, pp. 20431; 2006, pp. 194203.
See also Chambers and Carver, 2008, pp. 13757; Jagger, 2008, pp. 325; Lloyd, 2007, p. 150, p. 180, n. 34; Zivi, 2008, pp. 15769.
References
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2000 [1990]) Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism, in J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. iek
(eds), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. NewYork: Verso, pp. 1143.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. NewYork: Fordham University Press.
Butler, J. (2006) Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.
Chambers, S. A. (2007) An Incalculable Effect: Subversions of Heteronormativity, Political Studies, 55 (3), 65679.
Chambers, S. A. and Carver, T. (eds) (2008) Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. London: Routledge.
Douglas, L. A. (1894) Two Loves, The Chameleon, 1 (1), p. 28.
Douglas, M. (2002 [1966]) Purity and Danger. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1990 [1976]) The History of Sexuality:Volume 1: An Introduction. NewYork: Vintage Books.
Fraser, N. (1997) Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in
N. Fraser (ed.), Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Postsocialist Condition. London: Routledge, pp. 6998.
Freud, S. (1990 [1913]) Totem and Taboo. NewYork: W. W. Norton and Company.
Hayek, F. A. (1976) The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Heger, H. (1994) The Men with the Pink Triangle. Boston MA: Alyson Publications.
Jagger, G. (2008) Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative. London: Routledge.
Law, S. (1988) Homosexuality and the Social Meaning of Gender, Wisconsin Law Review, 2, 187235.
Lloyd, M. (2007) Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2004) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Okin, S. (1989) Justice, Gender and the Family. NewYork: Basic Books.
Okin, S. (1997) Sexual Orientation and Gender: Dichotomizing Differences, in D. Estlund and M. C. Nussbaum (eds), Sex,
Preference and Family: Essays on Law and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 4459.
Okin, S. (1998) Gender, the Public and the Private, in A. Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 11641.
Pateman, C. (1989) Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy, in C. Pateman (ed.), The Disorder of Women.
Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 11840.
Pharr, S. (1988) Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism. Little Rock AR: Chardon Press.
Rich, A. (1994 [1980]) Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, in A. Rich (ed.), Blood, Bread, and Poetry. New
York: Norton, pp. 2375.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990) Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Seel, P. (1995) I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror. NewYork: Basic Books.
Seel, P. (1997) Liberation was for Others: Memoirs of a Gay Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.
Squires, J. (1999) Gender in Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
938 ADAM J AMES TEBBLE
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)
Squires, J. (2003) Public and Private, in R. Bellamy and A. Mason (eds), Political Concepts. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, pp. 13144.
Sullivan, A. (1995) Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. NewYork: Vintage Books.
Sunstein, C. (1997) Homosexuality and the Constitution, in D. Estlund and M. C. Nussbaum (eds), Sex, Preference and Family:
Essays on Law and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 20826.
Tebble, A. J. (2006) Exclusion for Democracy, Political Theory, 34 (4), 47981.
Warner, M. (1991) Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet, Social Text, 9 (4), 317.
Warner, M. (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Warner, M. (2005) Public and Private, in M. Warner (ed.), Publics and Counterpublics. NewYork: Zone Books, pp. 2163.
Weintraub, J. and Kumar, K. (eds) (1997) Public and Private in Thought and Practice. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wittig, M. (1992a) The Straight Mind, in M. Wittig (ed.), The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston MA: Beacon Press, pp.
2132.
Wittig, M. (1992b) On the Social Contract, in M. Wittig (ed.), The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston MA: Beacon Press,
pp. 3345.
Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Zivi, K. (2008) Rights and the Politics of Performativity, in T. Carver and S. A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butlers Precarious
Politics: Critical Encounters. London: Routledge, pp. 15769.
HOMOSEXUALI TY AND PUBLI CNESS 939
2011 The Author. Political Studies 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(4)