How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys

a guerra contra os meninos afeminados

Abstract

The following text presents the translation of the chapter How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay, published in the book Tendencies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), a central author in the formation of queer theory and one of the most influential figures in literary and cultural studies in the final decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter, Sedgwick critically examines the role of mental health professionals in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, particularly drawing on reports and theoretical formulations produced by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists committed to “preventing” nascent homosexuality in behaviors deemed effeminate in boys. Her analysis demonstrates how such clinical discourses contributed to naturalizing heterosexual behaviors and establishing them as a normative horizon and paradigm of health and normality, especially with regard to childhood, while simultaneously framing homosexuality as a deviation to be diagnosed, prevented, or corrected.

Although its primary focus is on the behaviors of effeminate boys, the discussion ultimately leads to a broader point for contemporary debates on gender and sexuality. Sedgwick argues that, in postmodern culture, the traditional opposition between nature and culture undergoes a significant shift: what was once attributed to culture—conceived as a malleable domain open to social intervention—comes to be perceived as relatively resistant to transformation, while biology, formerly understood as a fixed and immutable foundation, increasingly becomes an object of technical intervention and manipulative imagination. Within this shift, the appeal to biological explanation ceases to function as a guarantee of stability or “natural destiny” and instead begins to fuel projects of managing and modulating life, in a manner that may be described as Foucauldian biopolitics. At the same time, the social dimension of culture ends up fixing sexual identities (as in the case of Friedman, for whom masculine self-identification depends exclusively on validation by other men). This inversion of functions between biology and culture thus constitutes one of the central axes of Sedgwick’s argument, suggesting that, in postmodernity, the nature/culture polarization tends to obscure the role played by medico-biological discourses in the production and regulation of sexual identities.