The Matthew Shepard Event Essay -- Gay Bashing Violence Law Papers

The Matthew Shepard Event The human body is an object in which one lives and the medium through which one experiences oneself and the world. The human body vests claims on ideology and space; and thus participates as the site on which conflicts about belief systems and territory contest violently. Gay bodies become entangled in violence when they enter into arenas that combat certain ideas. Gay bashing illustrates incidences all in which bodies experience physical injury. In modern U.S. communities various militant conservatives individually target homosexuals in "gay bashing." Though few conservative political groups explicitly avow targeting gays for physical violence, their members individually carry out anti-gay brutality. Mathew Shepard's brutal murder in 1998 illustrates a relatively recent incident in which the human body becomes politicized. What is the process by which the pain and death of Shepard's body transform the personal into the political? What does "gay bashing" mean to attackers, victims an d the state? The attackers' deliberate decision to raise Shepard's body stemmed from their intensions to make public what was private. To narrow the scope of analysis, I argue that by writing into law a "gay panic defense" statute the state establishes an anti-gay social atmosphere in which private citizens act as agents of the state to protect patriarchy by carrying out implicitly legalized physical violence against gays. The Gay Panic Defense uses the word panic to convey a sense of abruptness in the perpetrators' thought process during the moment they carry out the criminal behavior. The Oxford English Dictionary defines panic as "a sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety." The word panic projects the illusion that t... ...ial meaning becomes embodied by meaning within context that ultimately has a stake in the body. Participating in the transformation of the private into the public, the human body is both an object in which one lives and a site of political articulation. Works Cited 1. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish. New York: Random house. 2. Friend, Richard A. 1993. "Choices, not closets: heterosexism and homophobia in schools." Beyond Silenced voices. Albany: State University of New York Press. 209-235. 3. Kaufman, Moises. 2001. The Laramie Project. New York: First Vintage Books. 4. Nardi, Peter, Bolton, Ralph. 1991. "Gay bashing: violence and aggression against gay men and lesbians." Social perspective in lesbian and gay studies. New York: Routledge. 412-433. 5. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men. New York: Columbia University Press.