To orient readers to this conversation, our introduction proceeds in two parts. The provocation offered by our title, then, is less a manifesto than an invitation to think queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset. On the contrary, we are motivated by the need to know more about the history, social practices, identities, discursive attachments, and political desires that have converged to make normativity queer theory’s axiomatic foe.

This special issue of differences unearths the question that lies dormant within this critical code: what might queer theory do if its allegiance to antinormativity was rendered less secure? In the pages that follow, contributors attend to this question by setting their analytic ambitions on the possibility evoked by the title: can queer theorizing proceed without a primary commitment to antinormativity? No one takes this charge to mean that the future of queer theory lies in a disengagement from the question of normativity. Indeed, as we read them, nearly every queer theoretical itinerary of analysis that now matters is informed by the prevailing supposition that a critique of normativity marks the spot where queer and theory meet. Heteronormativity, homonormativity, whiteness, family values, marriage, monogamy, Christmas: all have been objects of sustained critique, producing some of the most important work in the field in the nearly three decades of its formal existence. The tyrannies of sexual and gender normativity have been widely examined in queer theory.

Queer antinormativity, academic field formation, queer politics, normalization In the final section, the authors describe the specific contribution of each of the volume’s essays to this endeavor. This entails promoting scholarship that not only rethinks the meaning of norms, normalization, and the normal but that also imagines new ways to approach the politics of queer criticism altogether. The authors’ aim is not to dismiss the political agenda that antinormativity has come to represent for queer inquiry, but to channel some of the field’s energies toward analyzing the critical authority it now wields. By articulating the difference between a norm and the terms that often define it-domination, homogenization, exclusion, hegemony, identity, or more colloquially, the familiar, status quo, or routine-this section demonstrates the importance of renewing queer theoretical attention to the conceptual and political particularity of normativity as a distinct object of inquiry.

In part 2, the authors offer a more studied consideration of the character of norms. The first section of this introduction demonstrates how profoundly the history of queer theorizing has been shaped by an antinormative sensibility, one that has organized the multiple and at times discordant itineraries of analysis that comprise the queer theoretical archive into a field-forming synthesis. Can queer theory proceed without an allegiance to antinormativity? The introduction to this special issue establishes the value of this question by staging an encounter with the most widely held assumption in queer theory today: that the political value of the field lies in its antinormative commitments.

Elizabeth black butler full body