This chapter discusses the concept of homology and how it can be used for critical analysis. A homology is a formal parallel between different objects or experiences. The chapter provides examples of homologies identified in everyday life and analyzed by various scholars. It then analyzes the concept of "secret" as a rhetorical homology, noting how secrets are discursive, socially powerful, and often used as instruments of social control. The chapter also analyzes GEICO caveman commercials and how they queer gender and racial categories in both their portrayal of the caveman and an attempted television series based on the character.

1. CHAPTER 10- TWO
HOMOLOGICAL CRITIQUES
By, Nicole Cayer

2. • Many technologies like an IPod and now Iphone and other
portable media players have a media logic that is formally
parallel to a linguistic function: the secret.
• A secret is not found in nature
• A secret is instead a dramatistic/narrative device
• It is something we “tell” or don’t tell

3. • A homology is a formal parallel across different
objects, actions, modes of experience and so
forth, depending on the sort of homology one is
explaining.
• Mathematicians (Atiyah 2000), literary scholars
(Goldmann 1973/1974), anthropologists (Leach
1973, Levi-Strauss 1969), and scientists (Lorenz 1974) all
use the idea of homology as a speculative instrument.

4. • People identify homologies, although likely not by that
name, in their everyday lives.
• The book talks about your supervisor at work asking like a
queen, that suggests a formal parallel between what your
supervisor does and what a queen does.
• You might have family members who act like queens, note
that these homologies are formal: they are patterns rather
than assertions of literal equivalencies.
• A pattern of behavior connects how he or she acts at work
to what we think of as patterns of undergirding queenly
behavior.

5. • Questions that where asked in this chapter about the
formal parallel when it comes to homology
were, So, widely different cultures share patterns similar
to their myths: Why? What creates that homology?
• Of course everyone will answer the questions differently
depending on the their disciplines and the conceptual
tools they are using.
• Different scholars of homology identify different engines of
similarity to create those forms

6. • When studying a rhetorical homology, the mechanism
creating the formal parallels is the nature of discourse.
• Characteristics of discourse itself create a form that
generates similarity across the variable content of
different experiences and texts.
• Enough formal similarities among members of a
homologous set must be established to persuade an
audience of reasonable readers that a form, rather than a
mere chance, underlies the similarities.

7. • Once a homology is established, the critic can then dig
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down into some members of the homologous set to see
whether new characteristics that are discovered may also
be found in other members.
Homological criticism may be a way of understanding
wide ranges of texts and experiences.
Rhetorical homologies resonate to discursive
characteristics and structures.
One widely occurring discursive form with which we are
all familiar with is the secret.
The secret is fundamentally discursive; it is a function of
language.

8. • People do what they do- whether there is a secret about
what they do is a matter of how people talk about it or do
not.
• Secrets are powerful. To have one about someone or
something is to be empowered
• One might be empowered with a secret through
blackmail, by the ability to shame another through
revealing secrets, by knowledge of another’s past.
• There is more meaning and impact stuffed into the words
of a secret than into many other sentences.

9. • Secrets are often instruments of social control.
• A secret is managed by a person or a group of people.
• If possession of the secret is empowering, then by its very
nature a secret will empower those who hold it. It will be
kept under control and neither easily revealed nor
revealed to all.
• Part of the allure of some societies, is their possession of
secret rituals and signs.

10. • If a secret is controlled, then one must go to those who
control it to obtain the secret.
• This is often not easy-one is unlikely to be told all about
the Vatican’s most secret treasures by just asking politely.
• Often a process of ritual, consecration, or training is
required for one to be given possession of a secret.

11. • Certain things we receive by ordering are packed like they
are secrets.
• The material wrapping the object and how one gets to the
actual item are homologous with the discursive workings
of a secret and its discovery.
• The way that technology is used in social and personal
contexts, once unwrapped, is homologous with the secret
as well.
• A technology is never composed of merely the electronic
or mechanical but is also made up of the social uses of
the electronic or mechanical.

12. • When it comes to unpacking an Ipod nano you have no
indication of what you are going to be opening.
• Once you get through the first package you can start to
see that you have an apple product.
• By digging deeper you unwrap what you bought, then
comes the challenge of figuring out how to use it.
• This could take a lot longer if there wasn’t a booklet
underneath explaining how to use it.

13. • A secret is antisocial in many ways
• A secret is passed from one to another but nor broad cast
en masse, thus secrets are far from democratic.
• Even within large groups, such as civic organizations or
religions, that mange secrets do so through some amount
of exclusivity.
• We have often heard that listening to a portably media
device reduces sociability.
• If several technologies work like secrets- if several
technologies need to be opened like secrets to be
physically accessed- and if we use these technologies on
a regular basis, then might we be getting a culture-wide
coaching to be lone wolves.

14. • The second part of this chapter looks at the ongoing
theme on the GEICO commercials is “caveman”.
• With evidence it shoes that the form or pattern underlying
popular stereotypes about femme gay men may be found
in the portrayals cavemen in these commercials.
• These insights based on homological criticism's
identification of form or pattern, enables a critique based
on queer theory that will discuss how these different
manifestations of caveman both confound and reinscribe
established categories in popular culture.

16. • In 2007 ABC tried to make a television show based off of
the caveman from the GEICO commercials.
• But after a few episodes the show was cancelled.
• Viewers, critics and bloggers alike agreed that it was
simply awful, unfunny, and not entertaining.
• Many critics of the television series also agreed that it
reinscribed racial stereotypes, particularly concerning
tensions between whites and African Americans and most
particularly stereotypes having to do with African
American males dating white females.

17. • In the show, cavemen and Homo sapiens are cast as two
separate racial groups.
• The groups have racial epithets for each other; caveman
would refer to us as “sapes”
• The show portrayed a metaphor for race relations in the
United States.

18. • The depictions of the caveman are certainly within the
register of metrosexual, which, while not necessarily gay
certainly tilts away from the hardened masculinity that is
the heterosexual masculine ideal.
• The interesting appellation “metrosexual” teaches us how
we sexualize such aesthetic preoccupations away from a
heteronormative baseline in a direction that is called by a
kind of sexuality.

19. • You may recall that queer theory is useful for
understanding ways in which texts disturb widespread,
established, categories.
• Queerness is not only about sexual orientation- although
if you agree that the advertisement caveman were
following patterns of femme gay men, then sexual
orientation is indeed involved in queerness.
• If the homological analysis is correct, the queer category
of caveman is further queered by making them, at formal
levels, gay one moment and African American the next.
• Note that the two real minorities of gay men and African
Americans become embedded in the unreal-minority of
cavemen.

20. • Queer theory developed as a way to question hegemony,
to disturb categories that prop up power.
• Consider the effects that the queered categories of
humanity and what effects may result without the
conscious intention to anyone.
• When discourse has the potential to create harmful social
and political effects, we must be creative in our ways of
identifying the effects of queering our categories of
understanding.