Gay persecution and biopolitics: a comparative analysis in nazi Germany and Chechnya

Abstract

This thesis examines why the LGBTIQ+ community has been persecuted and compares two big cases of "anti-LGBTIQ+ witch hunts" conducted by the power of modernity. As a result of Michel Foucault's interpretation of the biomedical discourse that leads to homosexual persecution, this study explores the source of homosexual persecution through biomedical discourse. This course examines how sexuality is constructed and viewed from the perspective of psychiatry, sexology, and other disciplines. Moreover, it also discusses how Nazi Germany and Chechnya persecuted homosexual desires and how biomedical science played a role in developing these homophobic policies. As well as highlighting how sexuality and sex/gender operate alongside an apparatus of biopower, it emphasizes how biomedical discourses create the norm of sexuality by fabricating it. Lastly, it argues that these two specific cases represent a crucial point in the history of persecution and repression of homosexuality. As part of this dissertation, I intend to examine how gender, sex, and sexuality developed historically and how that has affected our understanding of these topics today. Try to explore how notions of male-female, heterosexual-homosexual, healthy and sick, normal and abnormal are dualistic concepts shaped by biomedical science to define the normal and the pathological and operate as a technology of power to control the body, populations and life itself.