Homophobia and the Cycle of Prejudices in Othello

In this paper, I will develop a psychoanalytic form of cultural criticism that provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of homophobia, sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism. In order to relate these different modes of oppression to each other, I will define a fundamental cycle of prejudices that is based on the homophobic rejection of same-sex desires, which results in the racist projection of unwanted libidinal impulses onto culturally debased Others. Within this structure, the dominant social order equates homosexual desire with a loss of linguistic control and a break down of the symbolic structure of sexual difference. In order to overcome this sense of symbolic confusion, subjects often force others to submit to a sexist form of symbolic castration.

In order to counter this cycle of prejudice, my work explores the unconscious desires and fears that lead to socially destructive modes of behavior. But while this project stresses the role played by unconscious and subjective aspects of prejudice, it does not concentrate on a purely individual or character-based form of analysis; rather, it emphasizes the way that all unconscious and subjective formations are shaped by larger social forces.1

An example of how subjectivity and prejudices are determined by cultural structures can be found in the fundamental role that homophobia plays in other forms of discrimination. Homophobia is never a purely subjective or personal experience; the rejection of same-sex desire is always tied to a cultural intolerance of a form of sexuality that threatens the foundations of a society based on male-bonding and patriarchal heterosexuality. This means that when particular people or literary characters express their homophobia, they are manifesting an ideology of oppression that has deep structural and cultural roots. Moreover, the general acceptance and internalization of homophobia helps to clear the way for other forms of prejudice that feed off of the rejection and projection of