" Homophobia is far from dead in the United States. At least, she increasingly guilty conscience. And this despite the fact that it might seem if not encouraged, at least tolerated in most U.S. states by the absence of legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in areas such as employment and housing. In France, however, while such discrimination is prohibited by law, homophobia, judging by the panic triggered recently by the prospect of legal recognition of gay couples, seems to wear well. This apparent paradox is easily explained: The law "proves" that France is not a homophobic country, allowing homophobic arguments against gay marriage to stand as based on other considerations or requirements, a more about "high". Such unions would represent a threat to social, not to mention the natural order in which these arguments always presuppose the fragile but indisputable heterosexuality. It is thus quite possible to defend the civil rights of homosexuals (except the right to marry ...) while nourishing the belief more or less acknowledged that homosexuality is against nature '. It would be pure generosity that mainstream society would grant gays and lesbians some of the rights enjoyed by most citizens - the selection of these rights thus returning naturally to the majority itself. There would thus full citizens and citizens defective - with this strange paradox that one of the arguments against the formation of minority identity and gay (to mention only the minority one) is precisely that such formations are opposed to the rule and authority identity shared by all French people: the citizens of the Republic. Unlike all other societies torn by hatred between groups, each of which ferociously defends its particularity, France would offer the successful model of a society where the universal recognition of a common identity for all citizens to ensure everyone's rights. What evil, then the part of homosexuals to try to find a gay or queer identity, the ones who, unlike the racial and ethnic minorities, did not suffer a long history of identity are "individuals" that a simple sexual taste, and, not least thanks to the persecution that has always driven to hide the best among those who do not share this taste, so could easily pass for normal citizens!
One of the great merits of queer studies is to provide historical analysis to highlight the confusion and bad faith prevailing in the current controversy, not only about the legal recognition of gay couples, but especially against the search for a gay identity. Inspired by the work of Foucault on the history of sexuality (works whose resonance was much deeper in the U.S. than in France), American historians have emphasized the conceptual status of the homosexual. The sexual act between two men (or two women) is not a modern phenomenon, which is modern, according to this analysis is the invention of the homosexual as a psychological type. This reconfiguration of some erotic preferences in a typeface - a kind of gasoline to determine erotic - is, as Foucault has convincingly established, a project inherently disciplinary. Far from being what the French cohort of commentators have denounced as undemocratic a threat in a fundamentally democratic universalism, homosexual identity is in fact a heterosexual setting. It is an important link in a wider strategy to make classification totally understandable, and thus subject to manipulation, the erotic activities of humans. This is not the existence of a gay identity that disturbs his critics, but an identity Gay defined by gays themselves, and in their own terms. "
Leo Bersani, Homos, rethinking identity, Odile Jacob
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