Her example was the heteronormative family and all the cultural and social
assumptions that take it for granted as a sort of universal background in
conversation, ideology, law, and common practice.
We had in effect another example from Kim Cooney about the sorts of things
'neurologically typical' people take for granted and build into the
arrangements of the social world in such a way that those we call austistic
find it nearly impossible to operate socially.
In both cases not simply deviance, but the characteristic behaviors of the
Others, and the limitations they experience and which the dominant group
labels as their disability or pathology are products of the biased
affordances of our ecosocial arrangements. We literally add insult to injury.
How to do better? Some shifts in viewpoint might help (though only shifts
in power are likely to guarantee). Can we really say that the
'neurologically typical' or the 'sexually normative' are in fact a
numerical majority? or is this only true when contrasted with any one
particular deviant category (autistics, dykes), but is not true if we add
together all the significant deviations? What percentage of the population
is 'depressive'? 'testosterone poisoned'? 'compulsive'? not necessarily at
the level of clinical diagnosis, but enough to make their behavior or felt
experiencing of life distinctly different and disadvantaged by supposedly
normative social expectations? What percentage of the population engages
in, or desires, forms of sexual activity that are 'deviant'? I believe that
for both neurological-neurochemical difference and sexual-sexuality-gender
difference, that what is put forth as normative is in fact characteristic
of a small numerical minority. We are quite accustomed to this ideological
sleight-of-hand in the definition of who is Mainstream or Middle-American;
somehow it is only the upper-middle class, middle-aged, north
European-American Protestant Christian heterosexual (and preferably married
and having-bred) males who are _always_ included in the majority, while any
other group _can_ be excluded as 'atypical' or 'abnormal' as suits the
hegemonic political purpose of the moment. But that group is a tiny (but
disproportionately powerful) minority. It is senseless to regard them as
normative or central and others as to some degree deviant or peripheral. I
think the same trick is played with regard to other forms of 'normality'.
(I have taken the U.S. as my reference point, of course, itself a kind of
normativity, but I think most of the argument would be found to generalize;
it characterizes a modernist strategy of mystification.)
In this case, then, the vast majority of us are in one way or another
'queer'. Some of us suffer more for being typically deviant than others,
but almost all of suffer more than we need to in order that others have the
privilege of forgetting that they're 'normal'. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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