The following chapter charts critical encounters with norms and normalization in feminist analysis and praxis. We pay particular attention to how anticapitalist, critical race, and decolonial feminist methodologies interrogate norm production and maintenance across a range of social, cultural, and economic heteropatriarchal formations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault, we consider norms and normativity in terms of both disciplinary subjection of individuals and their bodies and minds as well as biopolitical regulation of population dynamics. Feminist and queer critiques of same-sex marriage offers a case study of how critiques of norms and normalization have unfolded. Finally, we reflect on work of contemporary social movements, especially antiviolence and prison abolition, to see how critique of heteropatriarchal norms both animates such work and provides an opportunity for critical self-reflection of our own political formations.
This essay examines the case of Chelsea Manning in the larger context of both U.S. imperial war and the ways in which gender and sexuality are deployed in service of colonialism, racism, and militarism. Situating the Manning case alongside two contemporaneous events, the attempted prosecution of Julian Assange on rape charges and Hillary Clinton’s much-lauded “gay rights are human rights” speech, we argue that Manning’s trans identity has challenged both right and left commentators to absorb her into projects of pinkwashing and homonationalism. We conclude with a consideration about what anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-carceral LGBT politics and organizing around this case might look like.
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