The Good, the Bad and the Homo: On "Others" and Discriminations

If the individual life is an empty piece of paper, at its beginning, than no one, except the owner, has right of sketching it. While today the majority of humans agree on that by accepting democracy as a way of living in modern era, the people who have doing “different” than others are being pushed aside from the society. Goffman referred it as “stigma”; immediate discrediting and “absolute” re-identification with your “deviancies”. But why this happens in a way that it does? Freud puts it the argument that, civilization (Kultur) has discontents, which I agree. We are coming together in order to survive and benefit from each other, and many times those who wants to benefit more stigmatizes the “others” –no matter who they are, what they are, where they are.

In my opinion, there is nothing worse and inhuman than labeling individuals’ life only from a single dimension and obligating them to live according to the frames of their labels and seeing it as “natural”, if we speak about modern democratic way of living. I would have been chosen to be a homosexual, but that would be only one single thing in my whole life. I am still a leftist sociology student living in Turkey who likes to make trips around world, occasionally speaks about politics, and hates fruit cakes. It is my freedom to identify myself with any of these characteristics of mine because these are my choices; they are not dictated to me. It is these choices and their positioning and organizing in the social life what we call as “self” or identity. Then how do we become our choices?

In terms of sexuality, if it develops as we socialize, then there many of “choices” that is to say, it is not because I thought being straight would be fun, but my decision went through a process; therefore has its own dynamism as we internalize them. However, when these choices are vastly unaccepted and over-problematized, than the real essence of the action within our choices disappears and substitutes with the manifestations of “existence” and respect. Then our identification becomes the matter of politics. For Weeks, this is “strange”.

It is already so strange to carry weapons to “protect” your privacy in your neighborhood and keep people away from your property, while you meant to live in a society to benefit from civilization. Also, killing three women per day is strange, seeing homosexuals as “defected” is strange, ruling a country for generations arbitrarily is strange, making war overseas in the name of brining democracy is strange and making IQ test for the ones who wants citizenship from your country is strange in order to benefit from civilization. But the real strangeness lies here: these all are products and dictates of patriarchy which gives us bad faiths about many people.