Queer Theory And The Destruction Of Normality

The term queer was originally a pejorative synonym for homosexual or gay. However, it was reclaimed by militants in the early ’90s as an expression of pride and power for the purpose of activism.

The change of terminology reflects the attempt to broaden the definition and include other types of non-normative sexuality such as bisexuality, before encompassing anything disruptive of normativity.  Queer rejects both the normal and norms, and is not entirely limited to matters of sex, gender, and sexuality.

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In the ’90s also emerged queer theory, the study, and determination of gender and sexual practices challenging the dominant heteronormative structures, which is often attributed to the thinkers of the French theory and the concept of deconstruction at the core of their ideology. 

As such, in the late ’60s, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida criticized the fundamental binary categories (man/woman, body/spirit, nature/culture….) as sustaining an unequal duality in our way of thinking.

His poststructuralist work strived to forgo and deconstruct such binaries considered inherently hierarchical e.g. an actor and an actress are doing the same job but adjusting the term to women clearly present men as the norm and women as deviation.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her feminist essay “The Second Sex” epitomized this idea that the differences between male and female are cultural rather than driven by essential factors with her famous existentialist expression “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.

This belief that being a woman (or a man) is not a “natural state” defined by biological attributes but the result of history and culture was shared by the American psychologist and sexologist John Money.  In the late ’60s, after one of their twin children, David, had his penis accidentally cut off during surgery, the Reimer couple contacted Money who saw an opportunity to prove his theory.

Money asked for David to be raised as a girl. However, as a teenager, David rejected his female identity, and after finding out about his story, he began to suffer from severe emotional health issues. David decided to revert to being a boy but continued to endure psychological difficulties over adulthood and ultimately committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 2004.

As well as striving to transgress gender boundaries, post-structuralist thinkers intended to transgress sexual boundaries. For instance, Michel Foucault's analysis of the interrelationship of knowledge, power, and sexuality in his four-volume study “The History of Sexuality” published in the ’80s, examines the authoritative dynamics and social constructions around homosexuality. 

According to him, sexual behaviors, sexual identities, and sexual categories deemed normative or deviants are social constructs.  Thereby, Foucault rejects the idea that sexuality is an essentialism, something determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of morality and truth. He defined it as a complex array of social codes and forces, individual activities, and institutional power, which interact to shape what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment.

Accordingly, sexuality is regulated and normalized by various institutions such as law, education, and religion. For Foucault, it is not a natural or fixed identity but a mode of action, an expression that was carved by moral codes.

As sexual identities, as well as behavior, are supposedly hierarchically organized through a system of sexual classification, Foucault criticizes heteronormativity, the notion that heterosexuality is normal sex, the standard, and anything else is deviant.

Before him in the ’50s, the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey also affirmed that heterosexuality and monogamy were enforced by cultural norms (namely religion). Kinsey published a couple of reports on sexuality after conducting more than 17,000 face-to-face interviews in which he strived to break the taboos of his time, and challenge the sexual norms, arguing that deviant practices were widely observed among the American population.

Kinsey’s attempt to redefine our sexual identities via his work has influenced social and cultural values across the world. However, commentators claimed that he mostly surveyed homosexuals in gay bars, prostitutes, and prison inmates in a proportion that had no anchoring in American statistical reality, thus biasing the results of his research.

Correspondingly queer theory encompasses a broad spectrum of non-normative sexual and gender identities. The binary terms – woman/man, gay/straight, feminine/masculine – are understood as generating oppression within the discourses and supposedly encourage us to conform to hegemonic modes of masculinity or femininity. 

Queer is therefore a political identity that strives to subvert the traditional hierarchy to create an anti-normative society in which individuals would transcend the limitation of gender binary but also transcend the basic structure of reality.  Queer theory does not predicate sex, gender, and sexuality on biological truth but as arbitrary social constructions, and norms promoted by society, reinforced by the establishment, and used as a mechanism of oppression against non-normative groups.

Thus, normativity is perceived as a polarizing authority. On one side, “them” the “normal ones” hold the cultural power and exclude the abnormal (queer) by deciding what is the norm. On the other side, “us”, the oppressed queers, will rise to emancipate and create the perfect society by deconstructing normalcy (becoming agents of the revolution similar to the proletariat in traditional Marxism). The hegemony of the non-normative would take the form of the transgression of the given norms.

Horrendously, this war against the norms served pedophiles who strived to harness the freedom LGBT people earned over the past decades. They used the civil rights movements as a Trojan horse to advance the idea that pedophilia was just a sexual orientation like any other.

Already Kinsey hypothesized that infants are orgasmic from birth and suggested that incest relationships and pedophilia benefited children therefore, there was no reason to forbid them.  Money forced the Reimer twins to rehearse erotic acts, claiming it was important for healthy childhood sexual exploration. He defended pedophilia as just another part of human sexuality.

Foucault signed a petition in 1977 to the French parliament campaigning for the abolition of all legislation regarding the age of consent. He also reframed child sexual abuse as a transgression of boundaries challenging power and helping to liberate individuals. He branded the prosecution of a child molester as collective intolerance, arguing that the discourse constructs an offender and victim allowing the sanctioning of state authority on an individual. He left Tunisia in the late ’60s after allegedly sexually abusing Arab children.

As per Simone de Beauvoir, she was in the habit to seduce young and often underage girls, usually her pupils, before passing them on to her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the key figures of the existentialism movement, the philosophy that influenced critical theory.

Nowadays, under the guise of tolerance, equality, and striving to make the abnormal, normality, drag queen shows i.e. spectacles that question the binary conception of gender, have made their way to our school. With sexuality promoted as a choice, pedophiles have aligned their agenda with the LGBT community, attempting to normalize pedophilia with the normalization of transgenderism. Moreover, the idea that children can consent is carried by queer theory in the concept of the transgender child.

And so, ultimately, objecting to pedophilia would be branded as homophobia and child safeguarding policies as transphobia. Besides, the simple fact that most people and the legislatures view the sexual abuse of children as abnormal and deviant means that useful idiots and queer theorists might end up supporting it on the ground of being a transgression to the repressive social norms and the liberation from the perceived oppressive heteronormative conventions.