The rise of the gay warrior: Rhetorical archetypes and the transformation of identity categories

Abstract

This essay investigates the representation of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people during the debate over whether they should serve openly in the United States military. Many studies on this topic have focused on the question of whether this debate ‘militarized’ LGB people. This study takes a broader view, tracking five rhetorical archetypes (the Gay Warrior, the Gay Spoiler, the Gay Victim, the Gay Family Member and the Gay Activist) through two US Congressional Hearings. I identify and track these archetypes using a coding procedure that draws on concepts from Membership Categorization Analysis, rhetorical theory, discourse analysis and elsewhere. The result is a holistic picture of how LGB people were represented across the hearings. While they were increasingly associated with military values in the later hearing, they were also less often represented as victims, spoilers or activists in a negative sense. These findings offer additional insights into how the meanings-in-use of identity categories are changed in discourse.