33

"In recent debates over multiculturalism and Islam, homosexuality has played a remarkable role, in several European countries and elsewhere, in attempts to redefine the nation and to re-establish its boundaries. This essayeeks to explain why this is the case by concentrating on the signifying power of homosexuality in modern political culture. It argues that homosexuality's signifying power derives from its cultural status as a fundamental and natural truth about the person. The combined elements of truth and nature make homosexuality a cultural category that can effectively be deployed to establish truths in fields other than those that pertain to same-sex sexuality strictly speaking. Of particular relevance to debates about the nation and its identity is the fact that the notion of homosexuality as natural partly rests on nineteenth-century discourses of racial difference. The racial elements in the construction of modern homosexuality re-appear in contemporary attempts to redefine the nation and to re-establish its boundaries, but with an important difference. Homosexuality is no longer, as in the past, associated with blackness and Jewishness; it has become white."