Sporting Homonationalisms: Sexual Exceptionalism, Queer Privilege, and the 21st Century International Lesbian and Gay Sport Movement

This paper takes up the challenge posed by McDonald (2006) among others to interrogate queer privilege in the analysis of sport and sexuality. Using Puar’s (2007) concepts of sexual exceptionalism and homonationalism, and Morgensen’s (2010) notion of settler homonationalism, I analyze specific examples from the 2002 and 2006 Gay Games, and 2006 Outgames to demonstrate how emancipatory sexual identity events have also reiterated white, Western, bourgeois privilege through aspects of their instantiations. The argument is not just that race has to be added to the analysis of the international lesbian and gay sport movement, it is that relying on a primary focus such as homophobia actually contributes to the reproduction of other forms of potent oppression. The paper ends with a reading of the 2010 Winter Olympics as a new context for homonationalism in the production of queer abjection.