K - Queer Desire - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

K---Queer Desire---CFMLP
Notes
Notes
may have more supplements coming out based on how productive i feel. the file is set up so your strategy drastically changes based on the alt you go for.
have fun!
-seiji
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The heterosexual matrix predetermines economic society through hegemonic norms that naturalize the exclusion and social death of queer life as ‘unintelligible.’ Political institutions weaponize fiscal redistribution as a coercive tool that manufactures and sustains hegemonic power disjunctions.
María do Mar Castro Varela et al. 16 is Professor of General Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. She is, among other things, founder and member of bildungsLab* and chair of the Berlin Institute for Contrapuntal Social Analysis. Nikita Dhawan is Professor of Political Science at the Leopold-Franzen University Innsbruck and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica (2013); Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne, Australia (2013); Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA (2012); University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (2011); Pusan National University, South Korea (2011); Columbia University, New York, USA (2008). Her publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007), Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (editor, 2014); Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (with Maria do Mar Castro Varela, 2014). (“Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-Hegemony” | DOA: 7/9/2023 | SAoki)
(De)hegemonizing Heteronormativity Let us begin with the term ‘heterosexual matrix’, which is employed by Butler to designate ‘the grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’ (1999: 194n6). The matrix can be described as an assemblage of norms that operates to produce ‘intelligible’ subjects whose sex, gender, sexual practice and desire all cohere (Butler 1999: 23). Normative ideals of sex and gender determine who can be conceived of as a legitimate subject by constituting certain bodies, desires and actions as legible or natural. Not always enforced coercively, norms are most visible in the effects they produce (Butler 2004: 41–2). These regulatory practices manufacture and constrain ‘gender intelligibility’ by structuring the social, political and cultural worlds not just through influencing ideas, values and beliefs but also materially through institutions (Chambers and Carver 2008: 147). From insurance to taxes, from adoption to immigration, one can trace how heteronormativity secures privileges for those who consent to hegemonic norms, while non-normative behaviours, relationships and practices are stigmatized, illegitimated and rendered illegible (Chambers and Carver 2008: 147). First coined in 1993 in the now canonical book Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner employs the term heteronormativity to describe how heterosexuality is taken to be normative. It is interesting to note that as early as 1975, a Dutch feminist group called ‘The Purple September Staff ’ published an article titled ‘The normative status of heterosexuality’. Here, they argued that heterosexuality is a ‘normalized power arrangement that limits options and privileges men over women and reinforces and naturalizes male dominance’ (qtd. in Ingraham 2002: 74). The term heteronormativity is useful in understanding how heterosexuality achieves hegemony. But before we engage with ‘hegemonic heteronormativity’, it is necessary to first clarify our understanding of hegemony. Introduced in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, hegemony is a key term in understanding operations of power. Given that Gramsci was making notes to himself and did not provide a systematic, precise definition, the term hegemony remains controversially discussed. The most commonly accepted understanding of hegemony is that instead of direct domination, it is the ‘spontaneous consent’ given by the masses to bourgeois ideas, values, norms, perceptions, beliefs, sentiments and prejudices, which are all historically produced as ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1971: 12). A consensus emerges in which the working class identify their own interests with the interests of the bourgeoisie, thereby accepting the status quo rather than challenging it. Raymond Williams elucidates that ‘common sense’ is the sphere where dominant ideology is naturalized and exercised so that the values of the hegemonic group become values applicable to all (1977: 100). Consent to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant class is historically manufactured. According to Gramsci, subordinated groups agree to hegemonic norms partly because of the prestige and moral authority that the dominant group enjoys. ‘Through their presence and participation in various institutions, cultural activities, and many other forms of social interaction, the dominant classes “lead” the society in certain directions’ (Buttigieg 2005: 44). Thus, for Gramsci, hegemony is a combination of economic domination plus intellectual and moral leadership. Rule by hegemony is maintained through moral authority in conjunction with the ‘free’ consent of dominated masses to the existing social order (Lears 1985: 568). This functions through the successful legitimizing strategies of dominant discourses and institutions accompanied by the delegitimization of alternative visions. Consent, for Gramsci, involves a ‘“contradictory consciousness” mixing approbation and apathy, resistance and resignation’ (Lears 1985: 570). It is important to point out here that within liberal political theory, consent is a fundamental ground for the legitimacy of political authority (Mehta 1999: 59). Those marked as unable to exercise reason either permanently (for example ‘the mad’) or temporarily (for example children) can be excluded from the political constituency (Mehta 1999: 59). In other words, those unable to exercise consent by virtue of lacking the qualified capacity to reason may be governed without their consent. Gramsci elucidates how the State, comprising political and civil society, functions to advance the interests of the ruling class in the name of promoting the greater common good (1971: 12). Political society includes the armed forces, police, courts of law and prisons, together with the governmental administration including taxation, finance, trade, industry and social security. These all function as an apparatus of the State’s coercive power that legitimately enforce discipline. However, coercion is only employed if efforts to manufacture consent are unsuccessful. Civil society is the sphere within which the State creates and consolidates hegemony. This includes organizations such as the church, schools and the media, which are all typically thought of as benevolent and non-political. Social institutions of civil society secure certain norms and practices consistent with the hegemonic social order through complex and constantly changing processes and mechanisms (Buttigieg 1995: 7). Herein the traditional intellectuals are ‘deputies’ and ‘functionaries’ of the dominant group, and thus invaluable in the production of consent. Gramsci argues that occasionally civil society is even more influential than the State in sustaining hegemony (1971: 238). It is important to note that the production of consent is not a one-time event but a recurrent process that engenders contradictory and incalculable effects. It is exactly here that space for counter-hegemony emerges. Thus, the notion of hegemony problematizes a straightforward topdown model of social control and transformation; it also explicates how actions and perceptions of a group of people are shaped by exercising power over them without explicit compulsion. Since it functions subtly, hegemony can be even more violently coercive in its effects to shape and regulate thought and action than more explicit forms of domination. The production of hegemony in civil society involves regulating everyday activities and interactions sustained over time so that it is no longer perceived as an operation of power. Through repetition, it becomes so deeply inscribed in the everyday that it is invisible as a form of control. ‘Hegemony … represents itself everywhere in its saturating silences or ritual repetitions’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 30). Undeclared and unspoken, hegemony only becomes a site for contestation when its invisible power is made transparent. And because hegemony must constantly be made, by the same token, it may be unmade. Intrinsically unstable and shifting over time and space, hegemonic orders are vulnerable. This brings us back to our initial question, namely, how does heterosexuality become hegemonic? It is important to clarify that heteronormativity is not a simple account of the fact that the majority of the population is ‘heterosexual’; rather it is a critical term that unfolds how heterosexuality operates ‘within social practices as the implicit standard of normalization’ (Butler 2004: 41) inciting each of us to conform to heterosexual standards. Another important aspect of heteronormativity is the mutual constitution of normative heterosexuality and the rigid binary gender order, whereby there are only two genders and one can only belong to one category at a time. As an intrinsic aspect of ‘normalizing society’, heterosexuality may be coercively implemented through an edict or law but generally operates much more subtly as a ‘disciplinary norm’ affecting every aspect of daily life, informing social relations and influencing public policy (Foucault 2003: 39). Heteronormativity as a concept is not simply the detection of discrimination against non-normative sexualities and bodies; rather it unpacks the extent to which everyone, straight or queer, is expected to consent to the heterosexual norm, so that ‘heterosexual desire and identity are not merely assumed, they are ... rewarded and privileged’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 145). Here it is instructive to bear in mind Foucault’s insightful analysis on processes of production of consent. He argues that we should not ask why and how subjects agree to being subjugated but rather should focus on how hegemony manufactures subjects (Foucault 2003: 45). How are certain bodies, gestures, desires and pleasures identified and constituted as heterosexual and thereby as normative? How do diverse operations of hegemony support and reinforce one another, thereby guaranteeing that they function (2003: 45–6)? Here, subjects are not ‘inert or consenting targets of power’; rather, as Foucault argues, ‘power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them’ (2003: 29). This unfolds how politics governs social and sexual relations; it also determines the mechanisms of regulation of that which is to be regulated. Any attempt to denaturalize gender through the critique of heteronormativity is deeply linked to uncovering the ‘normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality’ (Butler 1999: xx). Normative violence is the violence of particular norms that determine not only who ultimately counts as human, but also regulates what is legible and intelligible within a specific framework. Those vulnerable to not being recognized as legitimate subjects risk ‘social death’ (Mills 2007: 137). In our everyday understanding, violence is seen to be exerted on an autonomous subject, whereby it is condemned precisely because it violates the subject’s sovereignty. In contrast, normative violence is not exerted on preformed subjects but exercised in the formation of subjectivity. Gender norms exert violence on those bodies that violate such norms (Chambers and Carver 2008: 76), whereas those who conform to the norms profit. The body does not exist prior to violence; instead it is constituted through it, thereby being an effect rather than simply a recipient of violence. Furthermore, Butler’s notion of normative violence does not attribute the agency of violence to erring homophobes but to the norms themselves, so that normative violence both enables typical physical violence, while simultaneously erasing the trace of the violence (2008: 76). Thus the capacity of norms to exert violence is twofold: On the one hand there is the occasional and incidental violence that relates to the particular manifestation of the norm. On the other hand is the violence internal to norms by virtue of their constitutive ‘worldmaking’ and ‘reality-conferring capacity’ (Mills 2007: 140). One of the biggest challenges lies in the difficulty of making normative violence visible – unfolding how ‘norms of recognition function to produce and to deproduce the notion of the human’ (Butler 2004: 32), thereby making some lives ‘impossible’ and ‘unlivable’ (1999: viii). Certain forms of violence are deemed as legitimate and permissible, since those at the receiving end fall outside the hegemonic norms of recognition. The threat of violence in the face of non-compliance with hegemonic norms is a constant reminder that to defy norms is to court death (2004: 34). The very possibility of a ‘lived life’ depends on being recognized as a legitimate and legible subject. Normative intelligibility is deeply linked to survival, as ‘we continue to live in a world in which one can risk serious disenfranchisement and physical violence for the pleasure one seeks, the fantasy one embodies, the gender one performs’ (2004: 214). Norms not only normalize but also valorize by rewarding compliance and punishing deviance. Thus norms are inextricably linked with incentives and consent that are produced and legitimized in the social, religious, economic and cultural spheres. Butler’s approach shifts the focus on the question of the relationship between sanctions and norms on two important points. Firstly, power in Butler’s thinking is not understood only negatively as something that prohibits or represses. She moves away from a juridical understanding of power where one subject harms another. Instead, she sees the power of norms as productive; they produce certain pleasures and desires while delegitimizing others. Secondly, Butler’s argument marks a shift away from the liberal conceptions of the subject as a rational being who makes informed choices about which norms to conform to. Rather, norms produce subjects and bodies even as they regulate them, á la Foucault. Liberal readings, which understand normativity only in terms of deliberate choices made by autonomous subjects over which norms to comply to, ignore the issue of survivability of non-normative bodies. Challenging the fiction of the sovereign subject, Butler foregrounds instead the vulnerable subject because of its dependency on norms (Mills 2007: 134). Moving away from a voluntarist notion of resistance, she unpacks how norms are a site of political agency, even as the vulnerability of the subject is closely related to normative regulations. Political attempts to dehegemonize heteronormativity usher in a conceptual shift from minoritarian identity politics aimed at social inclusion to challenging the ‘normative violence’ of heterosexuality. Within liberal theory, the problem of sexual orientation has been resolved by making discrimination against queers illegal (Chambers and Carver 2008: 145). The promise being that this will guarantee equality and freedom. But critique of heteronormativity is not only about individual acts of discrimination or overcoming the prejudice of the heterosexual majority. Heteronormativity sustains itself through constant iteration, so that subversion becomes possible precisely because regulatory practices have to be endlessly repeated to sustain themselves. As the iteration of norms is crucial for their sustenance, there is the possibility that norms can be ‘deterritorialized through ... citation’ (Butler 2004: 52). By virtue of being vulnerable to disruption, normative orders can be resignified through subversive iteration (2004: 223). However, deviation from the norm does not automatically entail subversion, because norms depend on deviations for their continued existence (Butler 2004: 149). Challenging the norm is still being defined in relation to the norm. Following Foucault, Butler argues that norms both limit and enable what humans can be (2004: 42). Foucault for his part learns an important lesson from Kant’s analytic of finitude – that we are indebted to limits for they are not only constraints but also conditions of possibility, namely, ‘enabling limitations’ (Simons 1995: 14). Norms are not frozen in time, nor can they be challenged in the same way at all times. The analysis of the historical conditions in which norms emerge and in which they regulate is crucial for a counter-hegemonic politics. Thus, the line between subversion and a mere imitation of norms is not easy to draw. Subversion does not happen automatically and its effects cannot be predicted in advance. Counter-hegemonic practices do not lie in the mere empirical chance that numerous individuals undermine gender norms by participating in the mimicry of heterosexual norms. Thus, there is no guaranteed way to contest heteronormativity, whereby subversion is an incalculable effect. Butler resists offering criteria to judge if a practice is subversive, instead arguing that an act may prove to be more subversive through its capacity to irritate hegemonic norms of recognition; that is, because of its illegibility (1994: 38). Heteronormativity makes sexuality legible through the coding of everyone as heterosexual. Those who do not comply with heterosexuality are expected to declare their deviance from the norm clearly and explicitly through ‘coming out’. Accordingly, to subvert heteronormativity would therefore be to render sexuality less legible and to undermine the practices of reading sexuality produced by heteronormativity (Chambers and Carver 2008: 155). Butler notes that ‘the affirmation of homosexuality is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse’ (1993: 308), so that ‘I come out only to produce a new and different closet’ (309). This is not a straightforward disclaiming of queer identities but rather a question of developing strategies for subverting the heteronormative norm without stabilizing homonormativity, even as ‘judgements on what distinguishes the subversive from the unsubversive … cannot be made out of context [and] cannot be made in ways that endure through time’ (Butler 1999: xxi). The ability to critique existing norms is linked to the capacity to articulate ‘alternative, minority versions of sustaining norms’ (Butler 2004: 3). Survivability depends both on being recognized by others as a legible subject and also on the ability to render one’s speech intelligible to others (Mills 2007: 142). Normative violence does not mean that norms are non-negotiable – though the negotiability of norms does not imply that norms cannot be violent and/or coercively implemented. The contingency of norms makes room for creative political agency. Even as subjects are dependent upon and emerge from within normative orders, they are not fully determined by them, so that ‘norms do not exercise a final or fatalistic control’ (Butler 2004: 15). Thus norms at once enable and hinder the subject’s legibility and intelligibility. This reveals the normative dilemmas we face, namely, that ‘although we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us, and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose’ (Butler 200

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