So, here's a start. I hope some of this is intelligible. It's just notes on the fly.
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I’m going to use the term “queer theory” to name a broad category of perspectives on numerous academic and scientific disciplines that are generally linked by a common interest in critiquing and undermining the cultural and political status quo, in which LGBTQ folks are, in the main, excluded. That’s pretty rough, but I don’t care.
Queer theorists often deploy the term heteronormativity to
call out and problematize what they regard as the exclusionary and oppressive
status quo with regard to sexual orientations, identities, practices, social
and political expectations, etc. Implicit in the use of the term is a concept
of normal, which is a central target of queer theory critique. To me, this
requires a careful determination not only of a definition of normal, but also
of to what ontological domain we assign a particular definition of normal. That
is, what is normal in a cultural sense could be defined in terms of limits of
social acceptability of traits, behaviors, etc. On this level,
heteronormativity is losing a lot of ground in many areas of US culture and
society: even to raise the question of same-sex marriage and have it seriously
considered and debated shows this. This sense of normal is grounded in
institutions that are at least somewhat dynamic.
What Sara Ahmed seems to do in Queer Phenomenology, in part,
is to let this concept of normal into the domain of phenomenology of
experience. Does it belong there? What is the phenomenological concept of
normal? I believe it will turn out that there are several layers to it, and
that there will be no causal relation, and at times only a resemblance, between
the phenomenological and cultural concepts. Drawing from Husserl, I would say
that the most basic phenomenological encounter with normality is perceptual,
and that further investigation of perceptual experience will discover a
pre-perceptual level of normality that, at least Husserl says, cannot really be
investigated further.
One chief difference: heteronormativity has to be defended
as a political and cultural practice, and is being defended today with
vehemence and violence, because it is increasingly clear that it’s only based
on an accrual of practices. Normal cultural interpretation of the practices in
question has shifted rapidly, such that it is harder and harder to define what
normal sexual orientation or identity is. Phenomenologically, I believe, we
would have to say that it is normal that in our perception of the world we
become attuned more toward some objects than others. In short, I don’t believe
the so-called normal experience of sexual attraction could ever mean
“heterosexual attraction” from the phenomenological standpoint. It would simply
suggest that the normal experience of sexual attraction is to perceive certain
others and objects as appealing to a person as a sexual subject.
The cultural concept of normal relates to a social and
political determination of something or other as within bounds, of being
included or accepted. The phenomenological concept of normal relates to an
attempt to understand how it is that we experience anything at all as being
something of a certain “kind” or having a certain meaning or value.
The two have something to do with one another. Merleau-Ponty
discusses the history of human visual perception obliquely as he discusses art
history, for instance: cultural norms make a difference in how we perceive. But
that’s consistent with the phenomenological idea of perception as being a
transcendence into the world. Our perception is of the world in two senses: it
is a perception that takes in the world, and is a perception that is founded
upon and needs the world to support its transcendence.
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