175s

[Otto]

> I Preface my question with a link to Katz.
>
>
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/context/katzhistory.ht
ml
>
> Katz is required reading in one of my classes. I agree with
> arguments.
>
> "They are the 175s--homosexual prison-camp inmates. They
> have come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till
> the land ended, and have set up an all male community
> between this marsh and the Order estuary. Ordinarily, this
> would be Thanatz's notion of paradise, except that none of
> the men can bear to be out of Dora--Dora was home, and they
> are homesick. Their "liberation" was a banishment." GR.665
>
>
> Why is that these men cannot bear to be out of Dora?
> Why is the "liberation" a banishment?


Beginning with the last I would say it's the usual reversal of the sides of
a binary opposition. The release becomes a punishment because in the camp
they did not have to hide their sexual orientation. The fact that they were
there, their "Rosa Winkel" made that clear that they are. Released into
"normal" society (which isn't normal as Katz shows) they fell again under
the §175 StGB (Strafgesetzbuch). Let me refer to Dave Morris' post from
today to this.

The het/homo binary

"Kinsey also explicitly contested the idea of an absolute either/or
antithesis between hetero and homo persons. Stressing the variations between
exclusive heterosexual and exclusive homosexual behavior and feeling, he
denied that human beings "represent two discrete populations, heterosexual
and homosexual." The world's population, he ordered, "is not to be divided
into sheep and goats." (That revealing Biblical metaphor positions
heterosexuals as sheep, coupled with conformity, and homosexuals as goats,
linked with licentiousness). (...)
The hetero/homo division of persons is not nature's doing, Kinsey stresses,
but society's. As sex-liberal reformer, he challenged the social and
historical division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals because he
saw this person-labeling used to denigrate homosexuals. Motivated by a
reformist impulse, he rejected the social reality and profound subjective
force of a historically constructed tradition which, since the early
twentieth century in the U.S., had cut the sexual population in two--and
helped to establish the social and personal reality of a heterosexual and
homosexual identity (...) a norm that worked to affirm the superiority of
men over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/context/katzhistory.ht
ml

What follows are more binaries:
citizen vs alien
insider vs outlaw
center vs margin
majority vs minority.

And as things usually are going wrong and into the opposite direction as
planned even Kinsey's contestment couldn't prevent that his ideas
"reaffirmed" the binary as Katz points out, inevitably, the
deconstructionist says, because his scientific approach cannot work without
categories and researches with similarities and differences.

Otto