"Homonormativity": belated anti-heteronormativity blog

I did not get around to blogging this weekend due the nefarious consequences of gratuitous conviviality. But what's queerer than not being on time, anyway?

I have been thinking /reading alot about Lisa Duggan's term "homonormativity," by which she means the ways in which the lesbian and gay movement has increasingly come to align itself with neoliberalism in the cultural sphere: promoting militarization through its campaigns against discrimination in the armed forces, promoting the privatisation of welfare and healthcare guarantees through its focus on marriage as a social cure-all, and promoting the excesses of capitalist overdevelopment through its general infatuation with the free market and consumer society as the best way to ensure gay 'visibility' and equal participation in American society.

Homonormativity is the homosexuality that heteronormativity has given us. Except that, as of now, the immense social rewards for conforming to heteronormativity are still not available to even the most assimilated queer. That does not mean, however, that homonormativity is not dangerous. It is an increasingly dominant ideological discourse that claims to speak for the silent majority of ' virtually normal' lesbians and gays, often by stigmatizing queers, bisexuals, trannies, the promiscous, druggies, and anyone else who deviates from the shiny, happy image promoted by our prominent right-wing and even mainstream liberal commentators, spokespersons, etc.

In promoting the fallacious notion that there is "no alternative" to the mainstream, single-issue, visibility and identity centered, legal rights-oriented, gay and lesbian politics, homonormativity participates in the general shrinking of the politics of the possible at a time when we are all starved for more possibilities and more hope.