Homosexuality and metaphoric thinking

Abstract

Currently thinking about homosexuality consists mainly of unveil those metaphors which have traditionally veiled the social and sexual fact of sexuality between men. Some of those metaphors, equating homosexuality and sin, illness or crime, have been outlawed in modern states, but still keep being a quite strong social influence. In this paper i propose a revision of two metaphoric modes which became uncontentious under the umbrella of nineteenth-century sexology: metaphors of sexual dualism and inversion. As an inescapable development of this line of thought, i talk of stigmata in the homosexual body, in the sense of a marked oppositional term but also as the perennial feature of Otherness. Of course, the origin of this conception goes back to the myth of Abel and Cain.