Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions

Abstract

Can queer theory proceed without an allegiance to antinormativity? The introduction to this special issue establishes the value of this question by staging an encounter with the most widely held assumption in queer theory today: that the political value of the field lies in its antinormative commitments. The first section of this introduction demonstrates how profoundly the history of queer theorizing has been shaped by an antinormative sensibility, one that has organized the multiple and at times discordant itineraries of analysis that comprise the queer theoretical archive into a field-forming synthesis. In part 2, the authors offer a more studied consideration of the character of norms. By articulating the difference between a norm and the terms that often define it—domination, homogenization, exclusion, hegemony, identity, or more colloquially, the familiar, status quo, or routine—this section demonstrates the importance of renewing queer theoretical attention to the conceptual and political particularity of normativity as a distinct object of inquiry. The authors’ aim is not to dismiss the political agenda that antinormativity has come to represent for queer inquiry, but to channel some of the field’s energies toward analyzing the critical authority it now wields. This entails promoting scholarship that not only rethinks the meaning of norms, normalization, and the normal but that also imagines new ways to approach the politics of queer criticism altogether. In the final section, the authors describe the specific contribution of each of the volume’s essays to this endeavor.

Transgender and gender expansive education research, policy and practice: reflecting on epistemological and ontological possibilities of bodily becoming

“…However, a sustained engagement with transgender studies also requires some critical consideration of the antinormative limits of queer theory (Wiegman and Wilson 2015) in its capacity to attend to the complexities of embodied understandings and experiences of gender in ontological and phenomenological terms that speak to the realities of gender democratization as it pertains to the politics of recognition, with all of its implications for the livability of trans personhood. As Rubin (1998) points out, the lived experiences of transgender peoplewhat they know about 'becoming legibly gendered subjects' (265)need to be centered in generating trans informed knowledge and understandings, and in this regard, analysis must not just concern itself with 'cultural inscription' in terms of the norms governing the surgical demands involving bodily transformation, but attend to the 'productive, creative work of the subject struggling to articulate itself within received categories' (266) (see Connell 2012).…”

Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema

“…See Wiegman (2015) on the way that antinormativity has, so far, constituted queer theory. The question of just what the norm is becomes determinative, then, for any antinormative analysis.…”

Normality and disability: intersections among norms, law, and culture

“…Normality is such a central, obvious yet unmarked, highly wrought, much researched and debated concept. As a heated recent debate in queer studies reveals, normality remains at the heart of things (see, for instance, Wiegman and Wilson 2015, Jagose 2015and response from Halberstam 2015.…”