Status Updates From American Homo: Community an...

"Gramsci that in Europe's & North America's highly developed civil and market societies, an oppositional political movement must wage ... a war of position (ex, by building communities) & a war of maneuver (direct action + political alliances). ... the movement can resist hegemonic institutions & ideologies, (heterosexual, male-centered, and reproductivist cultural norms) & institutions that stigmatize homosexuality.

interesting lil discourse on the relationship between 'community' and 'academic' intellectuals

"Although collective action hinges on shared knowledge and beliefs, social and political movements often inspire the creation of knowledge" (144).

And organization. Collective action also hinges on organization

"During the late 1940s and 1950s at least, the homosexual closet was constructed by the dialectic between the management of information and the threat of violence posed by visibility." (pg 68)

"The political mobilization of the New Right can only succeed in defending a particular sex / gender subculture. It cannot restore the heterosexual and paternalistic family form to its earlier position of unchallenged dominance."

Speaking of the New Right's rise in the 1970s

"Political action eventually provokes internal conflict or splits movements along the most significant social fault lines of a historical period—such as class, religion, race, or generation." pg 68

"Historical and anthropological research has shown that homosexual persons (i.e., people who occupy a social position or role as homosexuals) do not exist in many societies, whereas homosexual behavior occurs in virtually every society." (pg 37)

Difference in behavior vs identity

[in Escoffier's reading of Barthes, Homosexuality and the Sociological Imagination]

. . . Homosexual readers emancipation themselves by coding over the guilty knowledge they acquired by growing up in a homophobic society. By reading, they were able to discover practical knowledge of homosexuals who live communally and can transform this knowledge for their own use.

Camp rested on the assumption that gender behavior is a role, something that can be adopted, changed, or dropped. It was a style of humor that allowed homosexuals to react to their situation with wry humor rather than despair.