The Trouble with Antinormativity

Abstract

© 2015 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies annamarie jagoseThe Trouble with Antinormativity It seems everyone knows-or no one much cares-what queer means these days. If, across the last twenty-five years, queer has acquired an appearance of semantic transparency such that its contemporary academic use routinely presumes a self-evident meaningfulness to the term, it wasn't always so.1 In the early years of the 1990s, queer's extraordinary discursive emergence was almost always in the register of the definitional, its rapid ascendency as a critical term-its coming to meaning-largely secured through iterative and often manifesto-like statements about what queer meant. These days it almost goes without saying that queer is conventionally understood to mean "antinormative," as can be seen in thumbnail definitions that manage to insist, despite being whittled down to epistemological minimalism, on the primacy of queer's opposition to normativity. Thus David L. Eng highlights as key to the queer project "the critique of the normative, which we might describe as queer studies' most important epistemic as well as political promise" (193).2 As Eng's definition makes clear, to rethink the conditions of the political for queer theory today necessitates a re-evaluation of the presumed centrality of antinormativity to the queer theoretic project.

Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk

“…Recently, queer theory has come under sustained critique by scholars in the field of cultural studies who accuse it of violating its own anti-essentialist principles and its distrust of any form of identity consolidation (e.g. Wiegman 2012; Jagose 2015; Wiegman & Wilson 2015; see also Hall 2013). For example, Penney argues thatqueer wants to subvert identity and have it too.…”

Language, normativity, and sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD): A corpus-assisted discourse analysis

“…Normativity has been an important concept for critical inquiry in queer studies—a field that has tended to conduct research from an antinormative position, finding fault with the negative effects that norms have for nonconforming people (see Jagose 2015; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). In language and sexuality studies more specifically, the concept has been used as a central, though under-theorised, explanatory tool as well.…”

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.…”