The Laramie Project

     I found our discussion of the Laramie Project in class the other day very interesting. The incident at Ole Miss happened at a very coincidental moment for me, because I actually saw the play when I was in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago. The crowd in the theater there, I would expect, could not have been more different than what seems to have happened at Ole Miss. The play is an amazing look at how structural oppressions and social expectations help cause violence such as the violence done against Matthew Shepard in 1998. Personally, I find the actions of the people in the Ole Miss theater to be atrocious for many reasons. I will try to categorize why they did something wrong through a Kantian perspective.
     Firstly, and least interestingly, the fact that they felt they had the right to disrupt a theater at all seems to be very wrong. They definitely broke the rules of typical social behavior in the setting of the theater. I'm curious to know if anyone responded to them or told them to shut up as they yelled out slurs. It would seem to me that a person could feel compelled to tell them to be quiet because of the location or their perceived duty against what was being said. Had I been there, I believe I would have felt it to be my own personal duty to try to get them to stop heckling.
     We discussed in class that the people in the incident could possibly see it as their 'duty' to call out the 'immoral' things they saw being portrayed on stage. I disagree with this possibility. I think if someone were actually opposed to a play discussing LGBT activities, he or she would do something like protest the play occurring, talk to administration about it, etc. Heckling seems to just be an immature thing the people chose to do because they are immature about queer issues.
     I think what bothers me most about this incident is that we still live in a world in which some people think it's a joke to call someone a 'faggot'. Nobody could possibly will the universal maxim of homophobic slurs being acceptable in daily life. I believe we are at a point where it isn't easily socially acceptable to be openly homophobic, however what Ole Miss taught us was that that isn't always true. Until we really educate our society on the ways their actions affect oppression, I expect these sorts of things to continue. I just find it sadly ironic and horrible that the play in which this is a quote:

"[Y]ou think violence is what they did to Matthew – they did do violence to Matthew – but, you know, every time that you are called a fag, or you are called a, you know, a lez or whatever…

LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI: Or a dyke.

FATHER ROGER SCHMIT: Dyke, yeah dyke. Do you realize that is violence? That is the seed of violence. And I would resent it immensely if you use anything I said, uh, you know, to – to somehow cultivate that kind of violence, even in its smallest form – I would resent it immensely. You need to know that."

 

Is the play in which those people chose to yell out homophobic slurs. The play itself discusses the fact that language is violence, and a society in which we allow people to do violence to others is a society that allows that violence to continue.