deconstructing silence: the queer political economy of the social
articulation of desire
abstract
Queer theory offers insights for political economy on how humans induce
categories and conflate traits in ways psychologists know as "illusory
correlations." A Bayesian simulation is constructed of people interacting
and using probits to compare their rankings of alternatives to estimate
the subjective probability i.) that others have the same tastes as them
and ii.), for each alternative, that it is their best choice. These simulations
are found to, at least simplistically, resemble a type of illusory correlation
which gained increased prominence in the U.S. from 1930 to 1960 and earlier
in the U.K. when queer panics conflated "predatory" and "traitorous"
with lesbian/gay.
This modeling of the social articulation of preferences leads to conjectures
on the role of Michel Foucault's épistémè [1972], Barbara
Ponse's principle of consistency [1978], Jeffrey Escoffier's master code
[1985], Sandra Bem's schema [1981], John R. Searle's Background [1990, 1992,
1995] and Judith Butler's linguistic norms [1993]. Here these are called
cognitive codes and are seen as social structures which grow as individuals
try to form homopreference networks to process information in parallel,
collectively. The concept of identity or ideology entrepreneurs is used
to establish the importance of institutional analysis for political economy.
Such an incorporation of desire on a par with logic - "rationality"
- is called post/modern and is used to overcome the silence in both neomarxian
and neoclassical political economy on queer theory and queer issues.
If you want to see the whole paper, send me an email and I shall send it
to you.
Back to my home page