*Counterpublics*
In this entry, I will examine the following critical question: How does this artifact exemplify an overall productive OR unproductive way to talk across (counter) publics in terms of rhetoric, timing, and circumstance?
To investigate this question, I will be looking at an Instagram post from June of 2022 on the account “@christian_calligraphy_,” which addresses how those with Christian beliefs should treat Pride Month. This post uses the overarching message of “Love them anyways,” the assimilation of homosexuality to everyday mistakes and wrongs, and a tone of pity to mask its undertones of homophobia and prejudice towards LGBTQ+ people. This exemplifies an unproductive way for a public to talk across a counterpublic because it limits the LGBTQ+ counterpublic and further marginalizes them from the public sphere using rhetoric backed by Christian beliefs and ideals on a platform in which users do not universally follow Christianity.
The artifact I am analyzing was posted on the public Instagram account @christian_calligraphy_ on June 5th, 2022. This Instagram page has a following of 180,000 and consists of many posts similar to the one being examined, with art featuring positive quotes and affirmations relating to Christianity. It has posts and story highlights dedicated to other controversial issues pertaining to Christian beliefs, such as abortion, as well. The bio of the account reads: “Sharing the love of Jesus one letter at a time.” The specific post I am focusing on features one image: an artistic graphic with the phrase “Love them anyways” lettered in 9 different colors. It has received 5,822 likes. The post I am examining specifically is a statement by the creator of the page in which they share their thoughts on how they believe homosexual people should be looked at by Christians and how Christians should respond to the events of Pride Month. The post is labeled under a plethora of hashtags, including ones such as “#prolife”, “#procreatecalligraphy,” “#positive,” “#love,” “#forgiveness,” “#bible,” and “#lgbtqpride,” all of which can make the post visible to people who have interacted with these hashtags.
The artifact being examined exemplifies a public talking across a counterpublic. Habermas defines the public sphere as "a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed" (Habermas 49). It is the assembly of private citizens into a public body (Habermas 49). The idea of a public sphere originated in Europe during the Middle Ages, when the bourgeois represented the public sphere which could bring the needs of the people to the state (Habermas 50-51). It claimed to be open and accessible to all citizens (Habermas 49). A group of people are said to be a public when they have the ability to engage in unrestricted discussion with the freedoms of speech and assembly guaranteed to them. It can be said that Christianity is a public. In fact, Habermas stated that the representative public sphere was first linked to feudal authorities, one of them being the church (Habermas 51). In a world where Christianity is a dominant religion, Christians represent a group of private citizens with the ability to converse freely in the public sphere and bring their discussions to the state. This is seen specifically when religion gets involved in political issues, which happens frequently in the pro-life side of the abortion debate.
Counterpublics, however, are not as privileged. According to Felski, the counterpublic is “an oppositional discursive space” (Felski 155). Members of counterpublics share the commonality of having experienced oppression or marginalization of a sort and do not concern themselves with the ideologies and majority opinion of the public sphere (Felski 167). The LGBTQ+ community is representative of a counterpublic due to its marginalization from the public sphere and the way it has challenged the status quo of heterosexuality through protests, marches and movements to achieve equal rights in society. Similarly to how participation in the discourse of the bourgeois public sphere claimed to be accessible to anyone (Habermas 165), Christians claim to be welcoming of anyone into their religion, or the Christian public. However, just as gender and class severely limited the number of people who could truly participate in the bourgeois public sphere (Habermas 165), the Christian public sphere also has implications for who can and cannot enter, with homosexuals historically being excluded and marginalized from the public with the belief that God created marriage between a man and a woman. The artifact I will examine is an example of how the Christian public uses rhetoric to claim to open their arms to the LGBTQ+ counterpublic, yet still prevents them from being accepted into the public sphere.
The primary way this artifact conceals and validates its marginalization of the LGBTQ+ counterpublic is by centering itself around the theme of love. The calligraphy in the post’s graphic reads “Love them anyways.” A Bible psalm is incorporated into the caption to reinforce this theme, which quotes “‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.’ -John 13:34.” Referencing the Bible, the creator gets the message across to Christian users that people must be loved unconditionally. However, the way that the creator views love is not universal: in this post, love is correlated with the following of God. The way the post claims Christians should love the LGBTQ+ community is by leading them to adopt their beliefs. The caption states, “The Bible is clear. Our job is to love others. To lead them to Jesus. To show them His love.” In this circumstance, repetition of the word “love” is problematic because it takes on a meaning in this artifact that is not applicable to those who do not follow the religion. By making use of a strongly positively-connoted word like “love,” it is easy to mistake the message of this post as friendly and inclusive towards the LGBTQ+ community. However, there is no mention of providing love in the form of support, recognition, or resources, the things that are necessary for marginalized counterpublics to sustain their well-being. Instead, the creator contradicts their claims to care for the LGBTQ+ community by saying that the key to loving these people is convincing them to change a part of themselves. Therefore, the true meaning of the word “love” in the context of this post makes it an unproductive use of rhetoric due to the fact that it only suggests ways of loving that coincide with the beliefs of their own Christian public and not with the LGBTQ+ counterpublic who they are claiming to love.
Another way this post appears to be inclusive of the LGBTQ+ counter public but actually rhetorically limits them is with its comparison of homosexuality to the mistakes that Christians and heterosexual people make on a daily basis. The creator begins this comparison by prefacing “Homosexuality is a sin,” a common belief of Christians that comes from the Bible’s claim that marriage is to be between a man and a woman. The caption later appears to counter the judgment of homosexuality by asking users to consider their own sins as equivalent or just as sinful as theirs. The creator writes, “When is the last time YOU sinned? What sin do you struggle with most? What have you done wrong in the first 24 hours?” By affronting Christians in this way, it appears that the intentions of the creator are to lessen judgment toward the LGBTQ+ community and foster a sort of equality between the public and counterpublic. The creator goes on to say, “ALL sins are equal in God’s eyes. They ALL lead to death. Your constant gossip is no better than somebody else’s homosexuality. You are NOT more worthy of heaven because homosexuality isn’t a sin you struggle with.” Here, the creator calls out the hypocrisy of hatred towards homosexuals for committing a sin when in reality, Christians commit sins as well. As much as this could be viewed as a productive use of rhetoric for taking some of the heat off the LGBTQ+ community, it is still not productive in terms of improving equality between the public and counterpublic. Comparing attraction to the same sex with mishaps such as talking badly about someone behind their back is still harmful to the LGBTQ+ community and continues to transmit the ideology that homosexuality is wrong. If Christians and others interacting with this post receive the idea that being homosexual is a mistake, the LGBTQ+ counterpublic will continue to be looked down upon and become further separated from the public sphere. This kind of analogy could also be damaging to the self-esteem of any LGBTQ+ identifying person who stumbles upon this post, who will see that their sexual identity is being deemed as a screw-up.
The tone used in the caption of this artifact comes across as pitying and patronizing with the intent supposedly being to show sympathy towards the LGBTQ+ counterpublic. In reality, it comes across as condescending and still reveals oppression of the counterpublic. In concluding the caption of the post, the creator suggests that the readers of the post “Pray for their hearts. That they would meet Jesus and that He could fill that empty void that is in their hearts.” In this statement, the creator uses wording that makes it seem as if LGBTQ+ people are victims suffering from a sort of condition (i.e. “empty void in their hearts'') that Christians are responsible for curing them from. By advising people to pray, it seems although they care deeply for these people and their well-being. However, the seemingly caring and concerned dialect being used when discussing members of the LGBTQ+ community in this post is only confirming their lower status in society. Patronization is also at play when the creator uses the term “struggles'' in reference to the homosexual lifestyle. An example in the post reads, “HE is greater than any of their struggles.” Typically, when someone is struggling, human instinct tells us to help them be rid of their struggles. By telling the audience that homosexuality is a struggle, it characterizes those in the LGBTQ+ community as victims who need to be rid of their sexual identity. Choosing this sort of tone for this post enables the creator to come across as caring while they simultaneously tell the audience that homosexuality needs to be exterminated. Praying for and pitying same-sex lovers is simply an extension of homophobic feelings, and hoping that their identities will change and they will become Christian is not a productive way to show love and inclusivity to the counterpublic. Feeling sorry for those in the LGBTQ+ counterpublic is only further isolating them from the public sphere.
Social media and other online spaces are typically places for counterpublics to take part in oppositional discourse and challenge the status quo without as much interference from the public and the state (Lo 140). Iris Po Yee Lo’s “(Dis)Engagement with queer counterpublics: Exploring intimate and family lives in online and offline spaces in China” is a study which discusses the role of Internet in the LGBTQ+ counterpublic and the factors to which Chinese lesbians, or “lalas,” either find empowerment from or find themselves wanting to distance themselves from the online counterpublic. The definition Lo uses in the article is similar to the definition used by Felski. Lo says counterpublics are “discursive spaces that enable groups who are aware of their subordinate status to articulate and develop their identities, interests, and needs in opposition to the dominant group and norms” (Lo 140). In a place like China where homosexuality is still not widely accepted, Lo wanted to discover how online experiences of “lalas” impacted their family lives and romantic relationships as well as the constraints imposed on their exploration of their sexuality online (Lo 141). Lo claims this study differs from existing studies of the online LGBTQ+ counterpublic, which focus mainly on political engagement, by focusing on everyday life and notions of family and tradition (Lo 150). The study found that while online counterpublic presence helped some participants challenge heterosexual norms and come out to the public, some distanced themselves from these online spaces due to wanting to focus on themselves or their careers or due to participants feeling as if the familial and societal obstacles they were presented with in China prevented them from achieving the same successes (such as same-sex marriages) shown online (Lo 145-149). The study concluded that “any counterpublics facilitated by cyberspace continue to be subjected to the mainstream, still-heteronormative social environment” (Lo 150).
This study supplements my argument that the Internet is not always a place for those in the LGBTQ+ counterpublic to be shielded from the views of the public and the state. The dominant, heteronormative Christian values disseminated and normalized by the artifact are limiting to the LGBTQ+ counterpublic in a similar way that the prevailing Confucian values of traditional family structures in Chinese society limit Lo’s participants from partaking in the online counterpublic space (Lo 142). Lo’s study revealed that offline factors such as societal pressures dissuaded Chinese lesbians from taking part in the online counterpublic (Lo 142). If the pressure to conform to heterosexual norms offline is enough to discourage homosexual people from having a voice in the online counterpublic, then the exposure to strongly heteronormative views in online spaces as well, such as in the artifact I am examining, is sure to cause these marginalized people to stray away from being part of the counterpublic altogether. The rhetoric that the creator of the post on @christian_calligraphy_ uses builds onto the existing stigma around homosexuality and the LGBTQ+ counterpublic by normalizing and even romanticizing the preservation of heteronormativity and the isolation of homosexuality from the public sphere. In places where same-sex relationships and marriages are still frowned upon, whether that be in Confucian China or Christian America, this artifact would both contribute to the further isolation of the LGBTQ+ community from the public sphere and disassemble the safe space that they have created to challenge the ideas of the public sphere online.
Today, people are turning more and more to social media platforms to seek the information they need to form opinions and make decisions in their daily lives. People of all demographics and cultural backgrounds visit these platforms. Despite the rhetoric that the creator of this post uses to claim that the Christian public is loving of anyone regardless of their sexual orientation, the post remains an unproductive way of talking across the LGBTQ+ counterpublic due to the fact that its creator took advantage of their large following on a platform with a multitude of users to spread the idea that homosexuality should be viewed as wrong. The post’s central message of “love” does not promote acceptance and inclusivity towards homosexual people, it rather promotes guiding them towards the love of their God and attempting to conform them to Christian ideals. The comparison of homosexuality to other “sins” like gossip does not soften judgment toward homosexuality, it further reinforces that homosexuality is wrong. The tone of pity towards the “struggles” faced by homosexuals does not arouse sympathy for the oppression they face, it characterizes their sexual identities as a malformity or disease that homosexuals are victim to that needs to be cured. If the post were to truly promote the message of “love them anyways” during Pride Month, the “anyways” would be excluded to say that the LGBTQ+ community should be loved, recognized, and given the same resources without having to conform to the individual beliefs of others that are projected onto them.
Works Cited
Felski, Rita. “The Feminist Counter-Public Sphere .” Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, pp. 164–174.
Habermas, Jurgen, et al. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, no. 3, 1974, pp. 49–55., https://doi.org/http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-033X%28197423%290%3A3%3C49%3ATPSAEA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z.
Lo, Iris Po Yee. “(Dis)Engagement with Queer Counterpublics: Exploring Intimate and Family Lives in Online and Offline Spaces in China.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 73, no. 1, 22 Jan. 2022, pp. 139–153., https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12913.
Sam [christian_calligraphy_]. “Love Them Anyways.” Instagram, 5 Jun. 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CebM8AyryWU/?next=%2Fchristian_calligraphy_%2F&hl=en.
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