Do not distract us

RACHEL MARIN

More information

• Lives marked by LGTBIphobia: "I know how I get out of the house, but never how I am going to return"

After a brutal homophobic attack that had shocked the entire country, the discovery that the event was not real has left us all even more shocked. The right, which rubs its hands, has seen in this twist of the script a perfect occasion to question the conquests of one of the most tolerant European countries with diversity and proudest of its advances in the area of ​​LGTBI rights. There will be provocations for a while. But we and we, who consider that homophobia continues to be an important enough problem to dedicate our time, our hours of militancy and our political intelligence, I think that, instead of getting involved, we should take the opportunity to reflect on some things. A few months ago, after Samuel's murder,a group of activists wrote a manifesto to which many and many subscribed.

One of the things that this manifesto has already pointed out has also been pointed out by critical feminism many times: messages of panic are not good allies for doing politics. Neither feminist politics, nor LGTBI politics. What has happened with this case reveals how volatile certain speeches of alarm and danger are and how important it is not to do politics due to a media case, which often ends up being a

that hits us around the corner. Regardless of whether the complaint has ended up being false, even if the case had been real, it is worth asking: Was it a good case to make politics based on it, to take it as a model, to exemplify the social problem that we must address? It is normal that in the face of such a sadistic, premeditated and brutal aggression like the one we met two days ago, all of us go out to the streets to express our outrage, and whenever something like this happens, we will go out to report it. Now, it is no less true that precisely the most extreme examples, the most mediatic and most capable of ending up in a program of events, may not be the most representative of the social reality that we have before us and may contribute to distorting the focus of the problem.A case in which there are eight hooded men in a portal will receive much more media attention than other more common and persistent forms of homophobia and it is clear that especially alarming events are more profitable in the politics of the

Quick

and viral videos. But I sincerely believe that the left have to think about what speeches we want to build apart from political opportunism, the logic of Twitter and the waves of the media and imagine our political projects not in the heat of court cases. It seems to me enormously problematic to contribute to feeding imaginations in which homophobic violence is the thing of a group of Vox ultras who go out “hunting”. And it seems to me, precisely, because I believe that we should not be distracted, because we have to take homophobia very seriously and continue with the background work.

Homophobia can be radically confronted when we conceive it not so much as something that organized groups, Nazis or Vox ultras do, but when we think of it as a structural issue. Homophobia is a social problem when it permeates the common sense of a society and, therefore, when it not only has to do with vandals, radicalized and crazy, but with our grandmothers, our neighbors of the fifth and our own friends. And how do you get rid of the homophobia of our relatives, neighbors and friends? Well, in a radically different way than how you fight a group of Vox hooded men. A perspective of the problem leads us to make policies to address social prejudices that are part of normality and that includes all of us.Another perspective leads us to draw homophobia as a monstrous exception against which we have to implement an equally exceptional policy and, therefore, eminently punitive and criminal. As a sign that we are in this drift, it is worth the photo of these days, with part of the LGTBI associationism and the left parties calling for an anti-fascist alert and focusing their proposals on indices of "hate crimes", monitoring commissions of "crimes of hatred ”or police forces specialized in“ hate crimes ”- a legal concept, by the way, about the pros and cons of which an in-depth debate is urgently needed. As a sign that others will reap these fruits, it is enough to see who has dedicated themselves to doing more or less the same:Abascal warning of the rise of insecurity and Espinosa de los Monteros denouncing a hunt against his own and warning that "these hate crimes are going to be prosecuted." Don't we see that we are getting into a trap?

Deep down, it is very reassuring to imagine that evil - machismo, racism, homophobia - is only on the other side and to deposit all those things in an other radically different from ourselves.

But let's not get distracted.

The best we can do against the Vox ultras is to make policy against the LGTBIphobia of our neighbors, our friends and our grandmothers - and analyze, by the way, what homophobia has to do with the hegemonic form of masculinity.

To vaccinate a society against hate is to implement educational and cultural measures, invest in training for public personnel and dedicate budgets to policies that perhaps do not give much revenue on Twitter and that will not appear in programs with large audiences but that the left, more even if they are in the government, they have to get started.

The

Of this deformation of the image of evil, of this caricature of the bad, it is, of course, an equally Manichean image of "the good". To think of evil as a quality concentrated in a small part of society requires, on the other side, our absolute virtue. And under the need of the flawless goodness of ours (in this case LGTBI people) a false complaint is destructive, devastating, simply inconceivable. "It can't be", "Isn't it a police setup?" You hear people say these days. We cannot assimilate that a gay boy, that is to say one of ours, has invented a complaint. And that is why, by the way, Twitter has been - of course - the scene of punitive and punitive responses from those who have stopped considering it theirs. If this case has done so much damage, it is not just an individual mistake.It is also the identity frameworks and the sanctification of the victims in which we have installed ourselves from the left that make a false report so devastating now.

We need less politics of urgency and alarm, less tweet populism, more care and responsibility with appeals to fear and more substantive politics.

We need a less moral and more structural look.

Doing transformative politics is doing it counting on racism, machismo or homophobia - as, of course, error or lies - they are not alone on the other side.

To think that evil is wearing a hood and swastikas and to demand virtue and holiness from our own, is rather to go to the crusades.

Let's not get distracted from what's important because if we go down that path, Vox will only end up getting a slice of it.

Clara Serra

is a philosopher and researcher at the University of Barcelona.