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Draft for Post on Homonormativity

Homonormativity (the theory) is, as Gavin Brown points out in his piece, Homonormativity: A Metropolitan Concept that Denigrates "Ordinary" Gay Lives, understood as a “homogenous, global external entity that exists outside of all of us and exerts its terrifying, normative power on gay lives everywhere.” (1066), and thus detaches the individual who reinforces these “normative powers” from their own accountability. Thus it is the fault, not of the individual practicing homonormative behavior, but the system which is (at its heart) hetero and homonormative, that is. As a theory, this disallows individuals to realize their own roles in upholding heteronormative standards and allows them to reinforce them without ever receiving or understanding its backlash. Brown points out that it is because of this that the “new homonormativity,” is more an expression of “sexual politics of neoliberalism,” than anything else. Neoliberalism and homonormativity go hand in hand because “neoliberalism is…a form of governmentality that ‘produces and validates subjects with marketized understandings of the relations between public and private, promoting personal responsibility and individual autonomy through supposed free choice.’” (1065). Neoliberalism has privatized gay life in the same way that heterosexual lives have always been privatized—in that gay life is now seen as “domesticated,” and thus capable of having “stable, long-term romantic couples with the resources to take care of each other’s welfare.” In other words, because heterosexual couples and gay and lesbian ones are now seen as capable of achieving a semblance of normalcy akin to that of heterosexual normalcy, their relationships exist as a means of profit for the neoliberal capitalist structure that upholds heteronormative standards.

Homonormativity, then, functions as a way to uphold hetero norms, not just so that they make homosexuality and queerness “normal,” but so that they gain further control over who and what can be considered normal and enforce certain criteria for that normality over all those who desire it. Homonormativity allows normative structures to oppress those who are marginalized and stigmatized because of it, without ever questioning the problem with setting a universal standard in the first place. Homonormativity assumes a certain likeness between those it puts down while at the same time ensuring that those individuals will continue to desire their own subjection. This is the only way homonormativity can go on because it relies so much on those individuals which it ignores to uphold it.

Even more, Brown asserts, because homosexuality has now been designated as mostly normal and accepted as a “normal” sexual identity (which excludes all other sexual and gender identities not seen as within this “normal”) homosexual individuals themselves have been associated with “normal,” and are thus part of the neoliberalist rhetoric that allows homonormativity to take place. Neoliberalist rhetoric has so absorbed homosexual/gay culture as normal that it has become integral to the very framework that neoliberalist rhetoric uses to describe and identify U.S. nationalism, as in what it means to be American. This concept, as Brown points out, is called homonationalism and has been previously discussed by Puar (2007). It is essentially the mode through which homonormative rhetoric and culture now function and thrive. Homonationalism has had a “neocolonial effect on the global political stage,” which has succeeded “in fostering new forms of surveillance and marginalization of those (principally Muslim) others deemed to be opposed to liberal social values within the national borders.” (1065-6). And this process has only further allowed homonormativity to prevail.

Gavin Brown (2012) Homonormativity: A Metropolitan Concept that Denigrates “Ordinary” Gay Lives, Journal of Homosexuality, 59:7, 1065-1072, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2012.699851.