Homoterrorism: Definition, Application, Subversion

Abstract

On Friday, September 21, 2018, news reports on Greek corporate media announced the death of a man who had allegedly attempted to rob a jewellery store. The media announcement was accompanied by video footage in which two civilians were shown violently attacking the alleged thief while the latter was attempting to escape the jewellery store. A little later, the alleged thief was announced dead. This is the case of Zak Kostopoulos who was lynched in his attempt to escape a jewellery shop where he had found shelter from a threat that, to this day, remains unknown. Zak was lynched literally and figuratively by the jewellery shop owner and his associate, by the bystanders, and by all corporate media. In this paper, homoterrorism is proposed as a construct that can describe hegemonic attempts to portray certain domestic non-heterosexual identities, practices, and cultures as abject in an attempt to (re)define a society’s national sociodicy. The argument is that homoterrorism provides an understanding of extreme acts of violence against the non-heterosexual Other, such as in the case of Zak Kostopoulos’s murder, especially when such acts are framed as essential to the precipitation of national cohesion. Further to this, the paper draws on theories about social media and their potential for political and social change, and it argues that Twitter activism can become a way to challenge homoterrorism.