https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-anti-normative-society?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1248321&post_id=116087757&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
The most potent line of attack from radical Queer Theory is the discipline’s assault on so-called sexual “normativity.” This is the basic pattern throughout the academic literature and the various subfields that have been inspired by the general thrust of this ideology.
First, you have Queer Theory itself, which provides a ruthless criticism of what it calls the “cis-normative” society, the “heteronormative” society, and the male-female gender binary that underpins it. Then you have a number of derivative subfields, such as fat studies, which provide a ruthless criticism of healthy human proportions, and disability studies, which provides a criticism of well-adjusted, psychologically integrated people. The general idea is that these are norms, promoted by society and reinforced by the economic system of capitalism, that appear to be oriented toward health, reproduction, and psychological integration, but, in fact, are used as a mechanism of oppression against non-normative groups—for example, people who don’t fit into the gender binary or the heterosexual social ideal.
If we break it down further, we see that Queer Theory makes an implicit two-part argument. On the surface, you have a relativistic argument, which says that normative ideals are arbitrary social constructs, and, contrary to the traditional view, society can prioritize either the normative or non-normative at will. In other words, there is no inevitable human hierarchy. On the contrary, these structures are all reproduced through oppressive systems and should be ruthlessly interrogated and deconstructed because, ultimately, none of them have a monopoly on human value.
