Exploration Of The Matthew Shepard Event

Exploration Of The Matthew Shepard Event

The human body is an object in which one lives and the medium through which one experiences oneself and the world. Claims on ideology and space are ultimately vested in the human body, and thus conflicts about belief systems and territory are often contested violently on physical bodies. Gay bodies become entangled in violence when they enter into arenas that combat certain ideas. Gay bashing illustrates incidences all in which bodies experience physical injury. In modern U.S. communities various militant conservatives target homosexuals in "gay bashing." Mathew Shepard's brutal murder in 1998 illustrates a relatively recent incident in which the human body becomes politicized. What is the process by which the pain and death of Shepard's body transform the personal to the political? What does "gay bashing" mean to attackers, victims and their communities?

If gay bashing is about violence and being gay is at least partially about sex, then what is the relationship between them? What framework attends to both the sexual and nonsexual activities among contemporary American males? In Between Men, Eve Sedgwick sleds light on the boundaries separating sexual and nonsexual male relationships. According to the author, homosocial and homosexual do not necessarily have to occupy two different, non-overlapping spheres. " 'Homosocial desire', to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. "Homosocial" is a word . . . [that] describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed with analogy with "homosexual," and just as obviously meant to distinguish from 'homosexual'" (Sedgwick 1985:1). Sedgwick contends that it would be more useful to view homosocial and homosexu...

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...riarchy is the right of men to "hit on" women while remaining safe from not being "hit on" by anyone else, especially another man.

Patriarchy, imbued with hierarchical meanings, gives heterosexual men something to loose. As practiced in contemporary America, patriarchy uses homophobia as structural support. Gay bashing exemplifies homosocial behavior's contribution to US patriarchy. The human body is both an object in which one lives and a site of political articulation. The struggles within many societies begin and end within the terrain of the human body, which though has no referential meaning becomes embodied by meaning within context that ultimately has a stake in the body. .

Works Cited:

1. Kaufman, Moises. 2001. The Laramie Project. New York: First Vintage Books.

2. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men. New York: Columbia University Press.