Movements championing civil liberties for historically minoritized people also gained momentum during this era and subsisted into modern times. Gay men and lesbians, Black people, women, and migrants began to hold space in public Discourses—either as participants or subjects—where they had been previously precluded or excluded. Their participation signaled challenges to the patriarchal social order that had governed the province until the mid-twentieth century. Challenges to patriarchy fueled the Quiet Revolution. Access to resources, support, and spaces relied upon how people were framed in overarching conceptions of identity, specifically “Who is Quebecois?”.
This project delineates how news media about gay rights inscribed maintenance of heteronormative social order (Warner 1991) thereby promoting homonormative (Duggan 2002, 2003) ideologies in the Quebec social imaginary contingent on defining the new Quebecois identity. I demonstrate the power that language practices hold over social order, politics, and cultural understanding of sexuality and desire. My project explores almost a decade’s worth of media—two major daily newspapers complemented by activist literature, theatrical plays, novels, and political propaganda—to qualitatively trace how the public discourses around homosexuality systematically transform in effort to sustain a status quo that marginalized gay men and lesbians within Quebec’s sociopolitical hierarchies.
The poster will make use of primary resources—news articles, theatre screenplays, literature, and activist propaganda—that contributed to publicly circulating discourses around (homo)sexuality after the Quiet Revolution. Following an intersectional approach (Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1989) to critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989), I highlight discourses that deploy medicalization, respectability politics, and citizenship to describe and reference minoritized homosexuals in Quebec mainstream media.