(Queer Interventions) María Do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel - Hegemony and Heteronormativity - Revisiting The Political in Queer Politics (2011, Ashgate) PDF

Hegemony and Heteronormativity
Queer Interventions
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Hegemony and
Heteronormativity
Revisiting 'The Political' in Queer Politics
Edited by
María do Mar Castro Varela

Alice Salomon University Berlin, Germany
Nikita Dhawan
Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
Antke Engel
Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin, Germany
© María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel and the Contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan and Antke Engel have asserted their moral right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hegemony and heteronormativity: revisiting 'the political'
in queer politics. – (Queer interventions)
1. Heterosexism. 2. Hegemony. 3. Queer theory. 4. Power
(Social sciences) 5. Homosexuality – Public opinion.
I. Series II. Castro Varela, María do Mar, 1964–
III. Dhawan, Nikita. IV. Engel, Antke.
306.7'6'01-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hegemony and heteronormativity : revisiting 'the political' in queer politics / [edited] by María do
Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan and Antke Engel.
p. cm. – (Queer interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0320-3 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4094-0321-0
(ebook) 1. Heterosexism. 2. Hegemony. 3. Queer theory. I. Castro Varela, María do Mar, 1964-
II. Dhawan, Nikita. III. Engel, Antke.
HQ76.4.H44 2011
306.76--dc22
2010045318
ISBN 9781409403203 (hbk) IV

ISBN 9781409403210 (ebk)
Contents
List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors ix
Series Editor’s Preface
“X” xiii
Foreword by Lisa Duggan xxv
Introduction
Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’
in Queer Politics 1
María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan and Antke Engel
1 Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality 25

Randi Gressgård
2 From the ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ to a ‘Heteronormative

Hegemony’: Initiating a Dialogue between Judith Butler
and Antonio Gramsci about Queer Theory and Politics 43
Gundula Ludwig
3 Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming-Bird:

Queer Political Interventions into Neoliberal Hegemony 63
Antke Engel
4 Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-

Hegemony 91
María do Mar Castro Varela / Nikita Dhawan
5 How Sam Became a Father, Became a Citizen: Scripts of

Neoliberal Inclusion of Disability 121
Kateřina Kolářová
6 Signifying Theory_Politics/Queer? 143

Susanne Lummerding
7 The Pleasures of Compliance: Domination and Compromise

Within BDSM Practice 169
Volker Woltersdorff
Index 189
vi
List of Figures
3.1 Charming for the Revolution. Film by Pauline Boudry and

Renate Lorenz. Germany 2009. 11’. Performer: Werner Hirsch.
Still Photographs: Andrea Thal. Courtesy of the artists. 67
6.1 Illustrations (by Matt Dorfman) on the cover of The New York
Times International Weekly Supplement, 10/18 January 2010.
Photograph: Karl Pani. Copyright © Der Standard/The New
York Times Supplement 2010. Courtesy of Matt Dorfman. 148
6.2 Jest Magazine, Cover. Jest: Humor for the irreverent, Brooklyn,
November/December 2004. Copyright © Jest Magazine 2004. 159
6.3 1 of 4 iPDF Posters from the iRaq series by Forkscrew Graphics
2004. Copyright © Forkscrew Graphics. 161
6.4 1 of 4 iPDF Posters from the iRaq series by Forkscrew Graphics
2004. Copyright © Forkscrew Graphics. 162
This page has been left blank intentionally
Notes on Contributors
María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor for Gender and Queer Studies at the
Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, Berlin. In 2006/2007 she was
Maria-Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University
Oldenburg, Germany. She has written extensively on critical migration studies,
feminist postcolonial theory, queer diasporas and feminist utopias. She is the
author of ‘Unzeitgemäße Utopien: Migrantinnen zwischen Selbsterfindung
und gelehter Hoffnung’ (transcript 2007). The co-edited volume ‘Soziale
(Un)Gerechtigkeit: Kritische Perspektiven auf Diversity, Intersektionalität und
Antidiskriminierung’ is forthcoming (LIT).
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor for Political Science with a research focus
on Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt. In Spring
2008 she was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, New York. In 2006/2007
she was Maria- Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at the Carl von Ossietzky
University Oldenburg, Germany. She has written extensively on ethics of
non-violence, postcolonial feminism, queer diasporas and decolonization and
democratization. She is the author of ‘Impossible Speech: On the Politics of
Silence and Violence’ (Academia 2007) and ‘Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische
Einführung’ (transcript 2005) (jointly with María do Mar Castro Varela).
Lisa Duggan is Professor of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies
at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. In
her book ‘The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the
Attack on Democracy’ (Beacon Press 2003) she explicitly draws connections
between sexuality and economy. She is also author of ‘Sapphic Slashers: Sex,
Violence and American Modernity’, co-author with Nan Hunter of ‘Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Political Culture’, co-editor with Lauren Berlant of ‘Our
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest’. Her forthcoming
publication is: ‘The End of Marriage? The War Over the Future of State
Sponsored Love’ (University of California Press).
Antke Engel is Director of the Institute for Queer Theory situated in Hamburg
and Berlin. She received her PhD in Philosophy at Potsdam University (Germany)
in 2001, and held a visiting professorship for Queer Theory at Hamburg
University between 2003 and 2005. The focus of her work is on feminist and
poststructuralist theory, on conceptualizations of sexuality and desire, and
on the critique of representation. In ‘Wider die Eindeutigkeit: Sexualität und

Geschlecht im Fokus queerer Politik der Repräsentation’ (Campus 2002), she
proposes a strategy of equivocation as a means of queer cultural politics. In
2007–2009 she was a research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI)
in Berlin. Her project on images of sexuality and economy is published under
the title ‘Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie: Queere kulturelle Politiken im
Neoliberalismus’ (transcript 2009).
Randi Gressgård is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Women’s and Gender
Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen (UiB). She is also affiliated
with the research unit International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER)
in Bergen. Her research interests focus on minority research, gender studies
and philosophy of science. She has published a number of articles and books
within these issues. Her most recent book is ‘Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas,
Paradoxes, Conflicts’ (Berghahn Books 2010).
Kateřina Kolářová is Assistant Professor for Cultural Studies at the

Department of Gender Studies, Charles University, Prague. Her research and
teaching focus on queer, disability and gender theories, on representations of
AIDS/HIV and disabilities. Her post-doctoral project examines neoliberal
forms of governing disability. She is a co-editor of ‘Gender and Generation.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Intersections’ (Litteraria Pragensia 2007).
Her most recent essays examine gender and crip aspects of HIV/AIDS
preventive politics in contemporary Europe, metaphors of HIV/AIDS in the
communist Czechoslovakia, neoliberal challenges to disability politics and queer
reconceptualizations of pain.
Gundula Ludwig is Researcher at and Coordinator of the Centre for Gender

Studies at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. She received her PhD at the
Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna in 2010. In Fall
2009, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research is focused on political theory, queer-feminist state theory and
theories of subject constitution. Recent publications are: ‘Geschlecht regieren.
Zum Verhältnis von Staat, Subjekt und heteronormativer Hegemonie“
(Campus, forthcoming) and ‘Staat und Geschlecht: Grundlagen und aktuelle
Herausforderungen feministischer Staatstheorie’, ed. together with Birgit Sauer
and Stefanie Wöhl (Nomos, 2009).
Susanne Lummerding is visiting professor for media studies and gender

studies at the University of Vienna. She has a Venia legendi for art and media
studies and held visiting professorships at the University of Klagenfurt,
at the Universities of Music and Performing Arts and of Applied Arts in

Notes on Contributors
Vienna, at the University of Arts in Linz, at the University of Oldenburg and

at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her focuses of research include theories
of subject constitution, political/psychoanalytical theories and the critique
of representation/construction of reality. Her present projects include the
international research platform ’Visuelle Kultur im Feld des Politischen/The Visual
as Political‘. She is the author of ’agency@? Cyber-Diskurse, Subjektkonstituierung
und Handlungsfähigkeit im Feld des Politischen‘ (Boehlau 2005). For more
publications see: www.lummerding.at
Volker Woltersdorff is Research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature

at Freie Universität Berlin since 1999. He is member of the interdisciplinary
research group ‘Culture and Performativity’, where he is working on a research
project on sadomasochistic subcultures. In 2004, he earned a PhD with a study
on gay male coming out narratives. Some recent publications are: ‘Coming out
– Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung’
(Campus 2005); ‘Unbeschreiblich männlich. Heteronormativitätskritische
Perspektiven’, co-editor, (Männerschwarm Verlag 2007); ‘Symbolische Gewalt:
Herrschaftsanalyse nach Pierre Bourdieu’, co-editor (UVK 2008); and ‘Sexual
Politics in Neoliberalism: Managing Precarious Selves’. in Stefanie Ernst/
Andrea Bührmann: ‘Control or Care of the Self ? The Sociology of the Subject
in the 21st Century’. (Cambridge Scholar Publishing 2010).
xi
“X”
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have both been instrumental in defining
heteronormativity – a concept now so routinely deployed in queer studies
that its definition would appear inevitable or even static – and its multifaceted
institutions and operations. Despite this seeming hypostatization of the term,
Berlant and Warner have always meant to emphasize its very provisionality
and its refusal to cohere in much the same way that they coined the term
heteronormativity in the first instance to do the work of exposing the apparent
coherence in the functioning of heterosexuality as an institution or matrix, a
dense web of what Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet called “regimes of the
normal.” While queerness sets itself up in opposition to these normalizing
regimes, Berlant and Warner, in a later co-authored piece, “Sex in Public”, attest
to the diffuse nature of heteronormativity. They tell us that “it involves so many
practices that are not sex that a world in which this hegemonic cluster would not
be dominant is, at this point, unimaginable.” But queerness, for Berlant and
Warner, is equally diffuse, which makes it so very useful as a tool for resisting
the inflexibilities of heteronormativizing logics. In an early, and lamentably
not often read nowadays, essay entitled “What Does Queer Theory Teach us
About X?” they worried over why it is that “people feel the need to introduce,
anatomize, and theorize something that can barely be said yet to exist” and that
simply “cannot be assimilated to a single discourse, let alone a propositional
program”. Fifteen years ago, when queer theory was just five years old, they
suggested that the danger inherent to naming or labeling it (as queer theory)
was that this would imply “that it has a stable referential content and pragmatic
force” (344). Emphasizing instead what they called queer commentary’s
“wrenching sense of recontextualization” (345), or even decontextualization,
they then posed the question “What does queer theory teach us about x?” and
answered, not unsurprizingly, in the following way: “As difficult as it would be
Michael Warner, “Introduction” to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1993) xxvi.
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”, Critical Inquiry 24 (1998):
547-566, at 558, my emphasis.
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach us About
X?” PMLA 110.1/3 (1995): 343-349, at 343.
to spell out the programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still
has the power to wrench frames” (348).
María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan and Antke Engel’s collection
Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics poses some
similar questions and attends to like issues: heteronormativity, hegemony, queer,
politics. And the X of Berlant and Warner’s title takes on a particular function
in the essays collected here in several ways. Firstly, the X designates the ways in
which the authors refuse to settle on a stable “referential content” for queer,
for hegemony, for heteronormativity, for politics. The X stands in place of
the empty or floating signifiers that are put to work here. Typographically the
X allows for the kind of openness which the authors want for the four key
terms which might stand at the four extreme or outer points of the letter X:
hegemony, heteronormativity, ‘the political’, queer. Secondly, the X designates
the ways in which the authors attempt to intertwine and bind the various terms
that are set in motion here. At various nodal points the terms are productively
conjoined or imbricated but without stalling the movement that motors them
or permanently yoking them to each other. Thirdly, the X should remind us of
the way in which kisses are conventionally indicated in a letter or a text message
by a series of Xs: XXXX. And this should alert us to the place of desire or
Woltersdorff ’s libidinal in this book. As Engel writes in her chapter, desire is
a “consitutive moment of the political” but what the authors here desire is a
certain impossibility of closure of ‘the political’ (or what Engel usefully terms
the ‘sexual political’) and of ‘queer’. Finally, the X designates what we might
call the dissensual dialogues which are inititated in this book: between Laclau
and Queer Theory and between Gramsci and Queer Theory for example. It
does the same kind of work as Lummerding’s underscore between theory_
politics. So, the question “what does Queer Theory Teach us about X?” might
be met, after reading Hegemony and Heteronormativity, with the answer that “queer
theory is X”.
Hegemony X Heteronormativity
The rationale behind Hegemony and Heteronormativity is “to reflect on ‘the political’
in queer theory and assess queer politics by revisiting two of queer theory’s key
categories”: Hegemony (largely taken up from the work of Antonio Gramsci
and the Post-Marxist thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) and
Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008) raises concerns about Laclau’s Lacanian notion of
desire on which his theory of hegemony depends while recognizing the utility of his
deconstructive thinking of the political. See 191-205 especially.
xiv
Heteronormativity (which as we have seen is usually attributed to Berlant and

Warner or to Judith Butler’s work on the heterosexual matrix). The authors
wonder how these two terms – which are very rarely thought together by queer
theorists – can be “brought into productive interplay with each other”. The
aim is to provide the very first “comprehensive analysis” of both hegemony
and heteronormativity at one and the same time while simultaneously striving
to rethink conventional understandings of the words ‘queer’ and ‘political’.
In keeping with the rationale for the Queer Interventions series the introduction
argues that this reimagined queer politics – brought about through tessellating
hegemony and heteronormativity – also “seeks to analyze and to transform
institutions, socio-cultural processes, political structures as well as global
politics”. The editors take up a now familiar poststructuralist, post-Marxist
(even deconstructive) understanding of the differentiation between politics
(as traditionally conceived) and the ‘political’. On their understanding ‘the
political’ does not “denote the sphere of politics, but the processes, regimes or logics
of language, knowledge and power inherent in doing politics” or what Jacques
Rancière has called the distribution of the sensible. For Rancière, as well as the
contributors to this volume, “the essence of politics is dissensus” in the face of
political consensus, the production of which hegemony depends on. Rancière’s
recent book, Chronicles of Consensual Times “affirms that the visible, thinkable
and possible can be described in many ways. This other way has a name. It
is called politics. The following chronicles attempt in their way to reopen its
space”. In this book, hegemony, a term “widely used” but “rarely reflected
upon systematically in queer studies” describes how hegemony designates
“legitimacy through consensus”. Rancière makes a clear (although not totally
pure since hegemony and heteronormativity – the police orders – tend, as Lisa
Duggan in her foreword reminds us, to “remain dominant despite challenges
and transformations” and that “flexible normalizations” always exist “alongside
rigid normativities”) distinction between the police order (hegemony,
heteronormativity, consensus in our terms) and politics (queer, dissensus in our
terms). A police order is “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of
ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies
are assigned by name to a particular place and task: it is an order of the visible
and the sayable”. Politics, for Rancière, “stands in distinct opposition to the
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010)

38.
Jacques Rancière, Chronicles of Consensual Times (London: Continuum, 2010) x.
Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999) 29.
xv
police” and is therefore dissensus. This goes under the name ‘the political’ in
these pages.
In an interview a decade ago Chantal Mouffe passionately stated that “I
think it is very important for people to believe in some kind of future and
that there are alternatives to the current political situation ... in the field of the
political, it is very important that people think that their present condition could
be better” and in The Democratic Paradox Mouffe outlines what the ‘political’
means for her (for Mouffe ‘the political’ denotes the dimension of antagonism
constitutive of human societies) and says that:
coming to terms with the paradoxical nature of liberal democracy requires

breaking with the rationalist dominant perspective and calls for a theoretical
framework which acknowledges the impossibility of constituting a form of
social objectivity which would not be grounded on an originary exclusion. This is
why a continuous thread in my argumentation is to highlight the importance of
a non-essentialist approach informed by post-structuralism and deconstruction
for a proper understanding of democracy”10.
Laclau and Mouffe together offer important resources for a deconstructive,

feminist, and queer thinking or rethinking of the political and both remain
convinced that antagonism “can never be eliminated and [that] it consitutes
an ever-present possibility in politics.”11 Paul Bowman explains that for Laclau
and Mouffe “the fundamental characteristic of politics is articulation. Different
groups can articulate different demands ... they add to this that articulations
become hegemonic when those involved in one particular struggle tend to
identify with those involved in another struggle, and vice versa, such that
alliances are built, coalitions are formed through groups identifying with each
other and ‘relating’ to each other”12. Laclau puts this quite clearly in On Populist
Rancière, Dissensus, 36.

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, “Hope, Passion and the New World
Order: Mary Zournazi in Conversation with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau”,
contretemps 2 (May 2001) 39.
10 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2009) 11.
11 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 13.
12 Paul Bowman, Deconstructing Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008) 94.
See also his Post/Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007) on the exclusion of Laclau and Mouffe from cultural
studies. Samuel Chambers’ forthcoming book Ernesto Laclau and Queer Theory maintains
that “while the theory of hegemony and the model of radical democracy have both
failed to intersect in obviously recognisable ways with the burgeoning field of queer
theory, Laclau’s work has certainly not developed in isolation from queer theory and
queer politics”.
xvi
Reason – in which he expands various categories he has used elsewhere (logics

of difference and equivalence, empty signifiers, hegemony) to a wider range of
political phenomena – where he tells us that:
the unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands.
This articulation, however, does not correspond to a stable and positive
configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole: on the contrary, since
it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order,
it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it. As this
order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a coherent
totality.13
Hegemony and Heteronormativity further expands several terms – articulation,

chains of equivalence, empty signifiers, hegemony – from Laclau and Mouffe
to revisit the political dimension of queer politics and how hegemony is a queer
political theory but one which cannot be disarticulated from heteronormativity
if we are to “glimpse the future” and “sketch a possible agenda” for future
work in “social and political thought”14. For Laclau and Mouffe, as the editors
explain,“politicization takes place by rupturing such chains of equivalence and
by translating them into antagonisms, revealing how contradictory aims and
interests are covered up through a shared signifier”. They go on to say that “in
order to understand hegemony as an unstable state, a process of struggle, Laclau
and Mouffe unpack the conditions of structural undecidability as the defining
moment of doing politics”. They “unfold how a field that was previously seen as
being governed by structural determinism is now marked by contingencies”. Out
of this contested social field the project of queer Radical Democracy emerges
as the “unsurpassable horizon of democratic politics”15. Both queerness and
radical democracy are impossible and unachievable but “ongoing hegemonic
struggles are always only provisionally stable” and Laclau and Mouffe’s theory
of hegemony provides for a thoroughgoing “reconceptualization of the
political” where the political is “defined by contingency and the impossibility
of closure, and thus by the fundamental openness and the unpredictability of
shifts in historical power relations”. It is precisely in this gap between the
recognition that exclusion exists in the social domain (given the contingent,
precarious nature of the social) and the rupture it provokes that the program
of radical democracy unfolds. The figure of the X is again important
13 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005) ix-x.

14 Ernesto Laclau,”Glimpsing the Future” in Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart
(eds) Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004) 326.
15 Oliver Marchart “In the Name of the People: Populist Reason and the Subject
of the Political”, diacritics 35.3 (Fall 2005): 3-19, at 18.
xvii
here for it is in the mediation between the positions of hegemony and

heteronormativity (hence Ludwig sets up a dialogue between both terms
in her neologism “hegemonic heteronormativity”) that the potentiality
for radical democracy exists. In Emancipation(s) Laclau admits that “neither
of these extreme positions [the particular and the universal] is acceptable to me.
But what is important to determine is the logic of a possible mediation between
the two” an “operation... [which] modifies the identities of both”16. In Hegemony
and Heteronormativity neither of the two extreme positions – hegemony or
heteronormativity – is acceptable but what the chapters here try to determine is
a logic which would modify both. The X is, of course, also a multiplication sign
and Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony must be read, the editors insist,
as a theory of intersectionality (another X with multiple criss/crossing points).
Articulation they say “offers the possibility to unpack how social categories
are articulated through each other” and those linked categories are variously
gender, sexuality, race, dis/ability, religion, nation, empire (and the list is not
exhaustive, remains an open set).
For Engel, Dhawan and Castro Varela “dissent, resistance and counter-
hegemonic struggles” are constitutive moments of ‘the political’ so even if
heteronormativity becomes hegemonic and regimes of the normal prove difficult
to dislodge they can still be challenged through “counter-hegemonic” dissensual
struggles. While Lisa Duggan admits that it is often difficult to disarticulate
complicity with the norm from resistance to it the editors assert that this “does
not mean that counter-hegemonic queer politics is impossible. Rather, one may
be able to imagine forms of politics that overcome simple antagonisms and
that exert political power by virtue of being implicated in the very reactions
they seek to transform. If queer politics and hegemonic struggles are complex,
contradictory, permanently articulated and re-articulated processes that are
interconnected, then it is essential to develop an understanding of (queer)
resistance and political transformation as engagement with the irreducible
simultaneity of complicity and subversion. This entails acting from positions
that cannot be captured under a stable name or label or that are operating from
a defined position as hegemonic, marginalized or subaltern”. What we see
opening up here is what Jean-Luc Nancy has recently called a franchise, a “free
space [une zone franche]” an openness in which we can trace identity itself as an
identificatory movement. We must “enter into the interstice, into the dehiscence
that identity opens from itself into itself ” and find a point de chute (a temporary
abode) of this identificatory movement which we can “never reach”17. This
Nancean franchise has a specifically political valence and that is how to name
identity in such a way as not to deprive it of the multidirectional movement
16 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996) viii.

17 Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité: Fragments, Franchises (Galilée, Paris, 2010).
xviii
that characterizes its excess over origin or point de chute. The metastasis of
identity as static contravenes the very temporality through which identity
identifies itself. What Nancy and the editors here bring about is a thoughtful
consideration of “identity” as a political category but one which is far removed
from any “identity politics”. Similarly, the editors here argue that “instead of
looking for heteronormative closure, which is then subsequently challenged
by hegemonic struggles” they look to hegemony itself as a site consisting of
struggle. They go on to say that “with the help of articulation the critique
of heteronormativity is transformed into a queer politics that decidedly tries
to avoid identitarian closures”. Hegemony as a form of articulatory practices
involves both disarticulation and misarticulation and it is important “to
understand how hegemony is achieved through complex, simultaneous and
particularly contradictory processes”. There can be no politics which is without
hegemony and the openness and transformability of both “gender regimes and
heteronormativity” (with the interlinking of regimes of sex, gender, sexuality,
race, colonialism, neoliberalism, ableism, class) depends upon “maintaining the
instability, elasticity and limits of identity categories” so that both the political
actor and the politics of radical democracy can surface.
As the conclusion of the editor’s introduction reminds us: “the concept
of hegemony reveals how the production of identities and the critique
of heteronormativity are themselves effects of hegemonic processes and
therefore not per se subversive” but this “does not mean subversive potential
is forfeited”18. Gressgård also suggests that we “refrain from closing this
discussion but keep revisiting the conceptual repertoires pertaining to theories
of hegemony and heternormativity – fostering equivalence – albeit never
consensus – as well as struggle” and as Ludwig says “the outcome of these
interventions is unpredictable”, precisely because there is no non-hegemonic
position or discourse; we can never be outside hegemony. But we must hold
fast, as Adrian Johnston says about the rhythm of political change, to “a basic,
axiomatic refusal to accept that things must or should be as they are, a principle
held to in the teeth of the current difficulty, if not impossibility, of imagining
things being otherwise”19.
18 Samuel Chambers writes in the description for his book on Laclau and Queer
Theory that “From this theory of hegemony can be built the politics of radical democracy:
a politics committed to democracy as an open-ended and always unfinished project; a
politics that refuses to assume that all political actors are already accounted for. ‘Radical
democracy also means the radical impossibility of a fully achieved democracy’.
19 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformation: The Cadence of Change
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009) xxiv.
xix
Queer X the ‘Political’
Gressgård in her chapter intertwines – while retaining the various tensions –

both Laclau and Mouffe’s and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony to
suggest “how recent theories of hegemony and feminist/queer critiques of
heteronormativity can mutually enrich as well as subvert one another”. Samuel
A. Chambers and Terrell Carver in their introduction to Judith Butler’s Precarious
Politics: Critical Encounters discuss how Judith Butler can be taken up as a political
theorist and “how political theorists use her work to do things with her concepts,
her claims, her theories”20 and they argue that “her writings demand to be read
as texts of political theory, to be debated by political theorists, to be interpreted
as political interventions” (7). One problem which has emerged in criticisms of
Laclau and Butler arises again here, and that is the claim that both Butler and Laclau
focus too much on the ontological (philosophical research) at the expense of the
ontic (the messy stuff of actually existing arrangements in culture and politics).
Gressgård points out that the language of ontology comes to prominence in
the later Butler where the “universal is always filled with content” in response
to Laclau’s “notion of the universal as an empty place”. She contends that
“‘the political’ is contingent upon concrete political struggles, even as it logically
precedes such struggles” and that this “would allow for the politicization of
sexual difference not only as a social/ontic category but most importantly, also
as an ontological category”. Following Oliver Marchart in reaching her non-
conclusion, she avers that “differentiation between the political and politics
pertains to the question of grounding, signifying the impossibility of a final
ground – an ultimate foundation – for society. This very absence of a final
ground serves as a condition of possibility for continuous and contingent acts
of grounding” and this post-foundational political notion allows for a rethinking
of sexual difference which “when granted a status as politico-ontological,
may occur everywhere, not only in relation to social gender differentiations”.
Elsewhere, I have called this Butlerian position a “universality to-come”21 and
20 Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver (eds) Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics:
Critical Encounters (New York, Routledge, 2008) 2.
21 See my “Queer Theory’s Loss and the Work of Mourning Jacques Derrida”,
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (Spring 2005) where I wrote: “In ‘The
End of Sexual Difference?’ Butler comes as close as she has ever done to Derrida’s
idea of the democracy to-come with her discussion of undecidability and performative
contradiction, or what I will call her universality to-come. She writes: ‘What is permitted
within the term universal is understood to be dependent on a consensus [and] …
presumes that what will and will not be included in the language of the universal
entitlement is not settled once and for all, that its future shape cannot be fully anticipated
at this time’. She calls this undecidability of the universal the performative contradiction
xx
in an interview with William Connolly she herself explicitly addresses this link
between the performative contradiction and the universality to-come:
And it is, in a way, a risky moment in politics. What the new form of universality
brings will not be necessarily good or desirable, and the politics of judgment
will be brought to bear on what arrives. But it is equally true that nothing good
or desirable will arrive without the new. This distinction seems to me to be very
important.22
Gressgård concludes that the “politics of performative contradiction is

promising by virtue of constituting a moment of undecidability that calls into
question the very structuring principle of society” and Butler too is excited by
this risk. In the same interview she ends by suggesting that “the performative
contradiction is ‘in and of ’ the convention of universality at issue, but that it
is brought into the fore, even driven into crisis, by the acts which exploit the
vacillating ontological effects of the convention and build the ontology of the
excluded in the process”23.
For her own part Ludwig, following Chambers and Carver, demonstrates
“how heteronormative power operates and gains its stability” while being
constitutively unstable (like hegemony). Initiating a dialogue (another x or
crossing) between Butler and Gramsci she tries to dissociate “Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony from its limited understanding as solely pertaining to
class” and shows how this “offers us new ways of theorizing heteronormative
power”. At this point Ludwig introduces the crucial notion of “hegemonic
heteronormativity” which she prefers over heterosexual hegemony because it
“more accurately demonstrates that heterosexuality goes far beyond certain
social ‘intimate’ practices but rather serves as an imagined ‘normality’ and as
a norm”. She contrasts her concept with what she sees as the ahistoricity and
staticness of Butler’s “heterosexual matrix” and she asserts that “the notion
of hegemonic heteronormativity enables us to see how heteronormativity is
also shaped through social struggles”. If Butler’s heterosexual matrix is seen
to be too static then hegemonic heteronormativity is necessarily “open and
dynamic”, complicitous and challenging.
and this unanticipatability is, she argues, crucial to the future of radical democracy”.
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/orourke.htm>
22 Judith Butler and William Connolly, “Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion
Between Judith Butler and William Connolly”, Theory & Event 4.2 (2000) <http://muse.
jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.2butler.html>
23 Butler and Connolly, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/
v004/4.2butler.html>
xxi
Engel, like both Gressgård and Ludwig, recognizes how promising it

is for queer politics and ethics to “take up from theories of hegemony the
conviction that politics consists of ongoing contestations and that the political
can be characterized by its open future, which defines politics’ contingency as
potentiality”. Again, there is a link to be found here between Butler and Laclau
and “an example of this is the notion that all identities constitute themselves
by differentiation. However, differentiation immediately implies antagonism.
Identities exists because there are differences in strength, antagonism, and
finally, in hegemony. According to both Butler and Laclau, the social constitutes
itself as the space in which hegemonic relations unfold. Nevertheless, it is
the characteristic of any hegemonic situation to never gain stability”24. This
is because, for Laclau, hegemony is built upon an “empty signifier” a “nodal
point” that “momentarily disrupts the dynamics of the hegemonic struggle and
organizes a new, provisional state of hegemony”. Laclauian antagonism – the
impossibility of the social system being able to cohere fully – is absolutely crucial
for Laclau’s theory of democratic interaction insofar as the chain of equivalences
must remain open. Engel asks two key questions here: “Is it possible to avoid
producing closures and keep political contestations permanently open?” and
“Does this include being open to unexpected or unwanted participation?” For
Laclau the chain of equivalences must remain open and mobile since equivalence
ensures that no group will have any more right to the hegemonic position than
any other and the hegemonic instance will depend for its very identity upon the
other groups and therefore remain unstably positioned. Democratic interaction
hinges upon unstable hegemony (the split identity of the hegemonic instance
ensuring its failure to achieve transcendental status). So, if heteronormativity, as
police order and partitioning of the sensible, depends on “rendering unspeakable,
invisible or even unintelligible that which does not fit its norms” there is still a
constitutive instability at the heart of hegemony. Both Engel and Lummerding
exploit this paradox. For Engel paradox is “an alternative way of thinking about
tension, upholding it rather than overcoming it, in order to acknowledge it as
something that is permanently at the threshold of new possibilities” and she
calls this approach (“inciting new hegemonic struggles that undermine the
neoliberal consensus production”) a “neoliberal politics of paradox”. Laclau’s
theory of hegemony, as we have already noted, focuses primarily on the need
to destabilize the hegemonic instance in order to foster ‘democratic interaction’
by keeping the chain of significations ‘open’. One could critique this position
by arguing that opening and closing are integral operations of signification but
Engel persuades that “struggles do not tend towards provisional closures but
instead are kept open by the dynamic tension of a paradoxical constellation”.
24 Reinaldo Laddaga in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Reinaldo Laddaga,

“The Uses of Equality” diacritics 27.1 (Spring 1997): 3-12, at 3.
xxii
Engel’s imperceptible politics introduces two further concepts which are

structured like the X. The first, ‘projective integration’, is one she takes to act
“as a hinge between theories of hegemony and heteronormativity, providing
new insights into both fields while simultaneously explaining how they are
intertwined” just as Chambers and Carver argue that “political theory cannot
afford to ignore either the theory of heteronormativity or the politics of its
subversion”25 The second concept Engel introduces, “tender tensions”, describes
how her paradoxical constellations “do not stand in opposition to ‘antagonistic
struggles’”, rather, “they might even produce interesting modifications of
these struggles”. To “dehegemonize heteronormativity”, to find escape routes,
“terrorist assemblages”, and create spaces where counter-hegemonic struggles
can erupt is as Castro Varela and Dhawan caution “not a one-time event but
a recurrent process that engenders contradictory and incalculable effects”.
And as they (and Kolářová) remind us “the agenda of queer politics must be
broader than just claiming sexual rights and should contest other social forms
of violence, among them poverty, imperialism, international division of labor
and global capitalism” and “compulsory able-bodiedness”.
These intertwined “relationalities of power at work” are indications,
Lummerding tells us, of hegemony’s “processual relationalities”. She regrounds
queer in writing that “Queer as an analytical category addresses a constitutive
logic” which she interrelates with a “redefined notion of hegemony as relational
processuality of power both derived from a linguistically/psychoanalytically
informed analysis of signification” and “an analysis that understands signification
as contingent and interminable yet constitutive processes fundamentally
defined by excess”. In The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change Molly
Anne Rothenberg claims that social relations depend upon “retroversive
signification”, which is “one way of saying that the social dimension of
subjectivity is irremediably excessive.”26 She argues that “extimate causality” is the
name for the operation that generates subjects in their social dimension – that
is, “the operation that gives us social identities, properties, and relationships.
In producing the social subject, extimate causality also leaves a remainder or
indeterminacy, so that every subject bears some unspecifiable excess within the
social field”. Every subject, she claims, is “an excessive subject”. She refers to
this subject born of and bearing excess as the Mobius Subject because “the
topology of the Mobius Band (with its impossible configuration of two sides
that turn out to be the same) provides a convenient model for understanding
25 Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory (London:
Routledge, 2008) 13, my emphases.
26 Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 10. For her critique of Laclau’s radical democracy which she
argues is non-psychoanalytic see 116-152.
xxiii
how, at every point in the social field, an irreducible excess attends all social
relations.” (10). The topology of the X equally well describes this excessive
subject and this excess opens up and keeps open “(necessarily antagonistic)
spaces of negotiation/agonism” and renders impossible the closing or fixing of
meaning of ‘queer’, of the ‘political’, of ‘hegemony’. Lummerding, following
Laclau’s Lacanian framework, maintains that “the political must be assigned
to the dimension of the real (at the level of logic)” and that paradoxically
neither hegemony nor queer are attributable to a stable position (both being
necessarily antagonistic and hegemonic). This is what Chambers and Carver
dub a “troubling politics” or even a troubling of politics:
Troubling politics, we contend, names one of the many practices by which that
futurity [the futurity which is essential to democracy itself] can be kept alive.
This vision of radical democracy and the future-to-come leads Butler to a crucial
commitment – a commitment, we offer, that she makes as a political theorist.27
At this point they quote Butler from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, her
dialogue with Laclau and Slavoj Žižek:
The commitment to a conception of democracy which is futural, which remains

unconstrained by teleology, and which is not commensurate with any of its
‘realizations’ requires a different demand, one which defers realization permanently.
Paradoxically ... democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realization.
.... Whatever goals are achieved ... democracy itself remains unachieved.”28
And Chambers and Carver conclude by saying that “The struggle for democracy
demands an openness to democracy’s future-to-come”and “the role of the
political theorist must therefore be to join this struggle to shape the political”29
And, “So, we end here, on the promise of the unrealizable?”30 with the promise
of the X.
Michael O’Rourke
January 2011
27 Chambers and Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory, 13.
28 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues On the Left (London: Verso, 2000) 268, my emphases.
29 Chambers and Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory, 13.
30 Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics,
Belonging (London: Seagull Books) 120.
xxiv
Foreword
Going into the second decade of the twenty-first century, queer theory and
politics confront a highly uneven political and intellectual map. In parts of
the globe, LGBT minoritarian politics have achieved unprecedented success.
Sexual practices have been decriminalized, partnership statuses have been
granted, changes of gender have been legalized, representations in commercial
media have proliferated. At the same time, discrimination, marginalization,
persecution and violence have persisted. These contradictory historical trends
travel in familiar neocolonial circuits of power and discourse. The United
States, in particular, exports both egalitarian rhetoric and violent exclusionary
practices; both sides of the debate over anti-gay legal initiatives in Uganda were
influenced by US agencies, legal and religious. In Europe, egalitarian discourses,
however imperfectly embedded in social practice, are put to work to discredit
and marginalize immigrant populations, represented as the repository for
misogyny and homophobia.
Any serious consideration of this wildly fluctuating landscape for LGBT
minoritarian equality politics illuminates a central fact that is at the centre
of this volume: the cultural and social organization of gender and sexuality
is embedded within the institutions and everyday practices of global political
economy, and is inextricably imbricated with the organization of race, dis/
ability, nation, empire and religion. The regulation of gender and sexuality
reaches into institutions of the global political economy: the state, civil society,
corporate organization, media and communications, etc., as well as into spaces
of subjectivity and intimacy.
Over the past decade, queer theory and scholarship has engaged this global
situation from a vantage point of critique of both persistent discrimination,
persecution and violence against non-heterosexual practices and populations
and of the limits and blind spots of LGBT equality politics. The best new work
in queer studies has begun to address the place of the politics of gender and
sexuality within a world riven by a colonial legacy and neocolonial and imperial
reality of deep inequalities and continuing injustices, violence and war, economic
crisis and political instability. At the same time, the queer utopian imagination
peeks out to dream of queer futures beyond the bleak neoliberal present.
See David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., What’s Queer
About Queer Studies Now?, special issue, Social Text 84–85 (2005); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2007); and José
This volume joins this expanding scholarship in queer studies with a focus
on two concepts central to thinking about global politics today: hegemony and
heteronormativity. The essays collected here trace the definition of hegemony from
Antonio Gramsci through Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The concept
of hegemony as the production of a contested, contingent array of allied
forces that come to dominate the political sphere, broadly conceived, allows
these writers to develop a poststructural analysis of a historically grounded
and specific mode of rule beyond the juridical. With a little help from Michel
Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, they
productively elaborate on the ways that ‘the state’ is generated through practices,
discourses and institutions of everyday life in civil society, and they trace the
processes through which consent combines with coercion in differing mixes to
shape and constrain social and political life. As a group, these authors then also
reach for the concept of heteronormativity, adapted from Michael Warner. This
concept takes them beyond Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’
to analyze the dominance of heterosexual assumptions within broadly based
norms embedded in a wide range of historical institutions and practices.
Writers in this volume introduce and develop the concept of heteronormative
hegemony to ask (1) How is political hegemony constructed in and through gender
and sexuality, as well as dis/ability, nation, race and religion? and (2) How does
heteronormativity remain dominant despite challenges and transformations? In
an era of flexible normalizations, which exist alongside more rigid normativities,
how do we understand both the successful alterations made through challenges to
heterosexual dominance and the simultaneous persistence of heteronormativity
itself ? How do we understand the fault lines along which change and persistence
travel and the social inequalities that determine whose lives might be valued and
improved and whose are denigrated and pushed to the margins?
The introduction to Hegemony and Heteronormativity and the essays by Randi
Gressgård, Gundula Ludwig and Susanne Lummerding elaborate the framework
for the volume as a whole on a theoretical plane, offering overlapping readings
of key theorists and concepts. In the essay ‘Tender Tensions – Antagonistic
Struggles – Becoming Bird: Queer-Political Interventions into Neoliberal
Hegemony’, Antke Engel expands the conceptual/theoretical frame to offer
a reading of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s video Charming for the
Revolution. Engel elaborates on her concept of projective integration to examine
how representations of non-normative genders and sexualities can function as
much to shore up dominant heteronormativity as to challenge it. She addresses
the current paradoxical neoliberal political situation that generates striving
for both individual freedom and social and intimate bonding. She argues that
Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New
York Univ. Press, 2009).
xxvi
Foreword
political subversion, illustrated through the video she reads, can be enacted
through alternative affective relationships to individualism, displacing rather
than directly countering the neoliberal version.
In ‘Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-Hegemony’, María
do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan extend the analysis of the hegemony
of heterosexuality through deployment of Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry.
They make their argument in a two-step examination of the politics of same-
sex marriage. First, they argue that, as in Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, same-sex
marriage imitates normative heterosexual marriage, but with a difference that it
attacks the norm it also reinforces. Second, through critiquing Bhabha’s focus
solely on elite native men as colonial mimics, the authors show how same-sex
marriage reinforces the exclusion and marginalization of those who do not
marry, recreating rather than undermining core social hierarchies.
Kateřina Kolářová introduces a new element to the discussions in this
volume by focusing on the ways that the differences of dis/ability intersect
with gender, sexuality and political economy. Drawing on the groundbreaking
work of Robert McRuer, Kolářová reads the popular US movie I Am Sam to
show how a neoliberal suburban, gendered family displaces a crip/queer family
context. This is accomplished via a defence of the cognitively disabled figure
of Sam, who mobilizes his desire to be a good father to his daughter Lucy
and complies with the requirements of parental citizenship. Heteronormative
hegemony is maintained as the disabled figure is integrated, and his difference’s
threatening implications for family, work and intimacy are abandoned.
Volker Woltersdorff raises another new question in the essay ‘The Pleasures
of Compliance: Domination and Compromise within BDSM Practice’.
Woltersdorff offers his interviews with BDSM groups as a window into the
question of how domination and submission, hegemony and compliance are
eroticized. He argues that BDSM practices provide a theatre for complex
strategies of resistance to political domination, at the same time as they
illuminate the libidinal economy of heteronormative hegemony.
All together, this volume offers a focused investigation of the broadest
questions entertained within queer theory and scholarship today. The extended
investigation of the two key concepts hegemony and heteronormativity
generates a wide-ranging consideration of the central problems: How does
heterosexuality maintain its dominance? And what is the place of gender and
sexual normativity within global political economies in our neoliberal era? While
these problems cannot be finally solved, opening them up in this new way is a
service to left and queer scholarship and to politics of the future.
Lisa Duggan
xxvii
Introduction
Hegemony and
Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The
Political’ in Queer Politics
María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan and Antke Engel
The aim of this book is to reflect on ‘the political’ in queer theory and to assess
queer politics by revisiting two of queer theory’s key categories: hegemony
and heteronormativity. The questions we seek to address are: What are the
specific insights offered by these categories that augment the analysis of
power and domination from a queer perspective? How can they be brought
into productive interplay with each other? And, in what ways does the thinking
together of hegemony and heteronormativity provide new possibilities for
political analysis and strategy building? We propose that juxtaposing the two
categories allows us to better understand the complex and contradictory nature
of the simultaneity of social power relations and domination. We also argue
that reflecting on the regimes of norms and normalization, as suggested by
the notion of heteronormativity, contributes to a better understanding of
hegemony as a theory that explains the modes of consensus production. Thus,
reflecting upon the interplay of hegemony and heteronormativity can facilitate
a reconceptualization of the political from a queer perspective.
In examining ‘the political’, we take up the poststructuralist distinction between
politics and ‘the political’, wherein ‘the political’ does not denote the sphere of
politics, but the processes, regimes or logics of language, knowledge and power
inherent in doing politics (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler, Laclau, and Žižek
2000; Lummerding 2005). Analyses of processes in which hegemony is produced
The editors would like to sincerely thank Jessica Dorrance, Rirhandu Mageza-
Barthel, Johanna Leinius and Corinna Genschel for their help and support.
Chantal Mouffe (2005: 9) puts forth the term ‘the political’ for ontological
considerations that concern ‘the very way in which society is instituted’. She explains
her position as follows: ‘By “the political” I mean the dimension of antagonism which I
take to be constitutive of human societies, while by “politics” I mean the set of practices
and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the
context of conflictuality provided by the political’ (2005: 9).
challenge deterministic understandings of ‘the political’ (Laclau and Mouffe

1985). Furthermore, investigating how heteronormativity is at work in hegemonic
processes enables the queer theoretical project of subverting hierarchies that are
built on regimes of normalization. In addressing these issues we also strive to
rethink the understanding of the term ‘queer’, so as to avoid narrowing queer
politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. We
propose that the deployment of ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘hegemony’ as analytical
categories for queer theory marks a departure from essentialist identity and
minority politics, as both categories help explain the constitution of subjectivities
rather than presupposing them. Such a focus on the constitutive processes of
subject-formation is particularly instructive if complex social power relations are
taken into consideration. For instance: How are sex/gender, desire and sexuality
relevant for the emergence and continuation of specific hegemonic socio-political
relations? How are they interconnected with other moments of identification and
differentiation, including race, class and religion as shaped through colonialism and
the implications of these interrelated modes of domination for the structuring of
contemporary global politics – in particular for a global politics that continues to
be confronted with the legacies of empire?
Theories of hegemony might be interesting here as they facilitate a rethinking
of power and domination. It is indeed Antonio Gramsci’s writings that make us
‘rethink the very notion of power itself – its project and its complex “conditions
of existence” in modern societies’ (Hall 1991: 9). Acknowledging the mutual
constitutions of various social differences and the diverse ways in which they
shape the contingent yet overdetermined constellation of socio-historical
relations implies that a number of perspectives must be taken to be integral and
indispensable for queer theory. These include postcolonial perspectives (Spivak
1999); occidentalism as a modernized form of racism in so-called pluralist Western
societies (Dietze, 2010); critical approaches in migrant studies (Haritaworn, Erdem,
and Tauqir 2008); and crip studies (McRuer 2006). As Cathy Cohen notes, ‘Such a
broadened understanding of queerness must … recognize how numerous systems
of oppression interact to regulate and police the lives of most people’ (2005:
25). In order to understand the role of sexuality, heteronormativity and sexual
politics in the organization of society in a postcolonial, late-capitalist world, it is
undoubtedly necessary to consider concepts that help to understand the mutual
articulation of various relations of power and domination. Thus queer politics
is not only interested in subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also
seeks to analyse and to transform institutions, socio-cultural processes, political
structures as well as global politics.
The term hegemony has been widely used but is rarely reflected upon
systematically in queer studies, even though connections between hegemony and
heteronormativity have occasionally been drawn. On the one hand, it is argued
that heteronormativity indicates a hegemonic order or regime; on the other

Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics
hand, hegemonic socio-economic and political relations are seen as organized

according to heteronormative standards. This volume aims to provide a more
comprehensive analysis of both heteronormativity and hegemony at once.
Besides employing the two terms as analytic categories to examine the workings
of concrete socio-historical relations, the seven contributions in this volume offer
different approaches to conceptually reflect on heteronormativity and hegemony
as categories for the investigation of relations of power and domination. They
also explore how queer theory and politics can transform these two terms.
The term heteronormativity emerges in the context of queer theorizing
in the early 1990s. Coined by Michael Warner (1993), it has been taken up by
many others and now serves as shorthand for normative heterosexuality. While
the terms ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1980), ‘heterosexism’ (Rubin 1990)
or ‘heteropatriarchy’ (Hart 1994; Alexander 1997) have been used in feminist
theory for decades, the term heteronormativity shifts our focus, following Michel
Foucault (1976), from repressive to productive forms of power, from coercion
to complicity with normative power and to the violence of ‘normality’. This shift
displays a certain affinity to the term hegemony as introduced by Gramsci in his
Quaderni dal Carcere (Prison Notebooks) (1926–1937) and as subsequently taken up by
Marxist, neo-Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers in the second half of the 20th
century. The term hegemony, here, refers to forms of rule and governance that
employ non-repressive forms of power and attain legitimacy through consensus.
These operations of power are, nonetheless, intrinsically connected to exertions
of violence and should be analysed as specific forms of domination.
Why Hegemony?
‘Per vent’anni dobbiamo impedire a questo cervello di funzionare.’

–Prosecutor Michele Isgrò, referring to Antonio Gramsci
Deriving from the Greek term hēgemonia , hegemony means the dominance of
one group or state over another. Subsequently, in the political vocabulary of
The new German translation of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, edited by

Peter Jehle, Klaus Bochmann and Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Gramsci 1991–2002), offers
an excellent translation of the complete work and includes many critical revisions of
previous translations.
Isgrò declared: ‘We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.’
See Marcus E. Green, ed. ‘Chronology of Gramsci’s life’, International Gramsci
Society, http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/about_gramsci/chronology.html
(accessed June 10, 2010).
Other related Greek terms are hegemon meaning ‘leader’ and the verb hegeisthai
meaning ‘to lead’.
Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. ‘Hegemony’.

Russian Social Democracy and the Third International, the term hegemony was
used to indicate the leadership of a class alliance (Anderson 1976: 15; Buci-
Glucksmann 1980: 174). In his pioneering work, Gramsci takes up this idea
of a leadership grounded in alliance building. For instance, in his essay ‘Some
Aspects of the Southern Question’, Gramsci proposes the idea of a political
alliance between Northern Italian workers and Southern Italian peasants to oust
the bourgeoisie from state power (2000: 172). He argues that the proletariat
can only become hegemonic – ‘the leading [dirigente] and dominant class’ – if it
can overcome its economic self-interest and build class alliances with the poor
peasantry and Southern intellectuals (2000: 173). In order to become capable
as a governing class, the proletariat must gain the consent and win the trust
of the majority of the working population (2000: 174). Yet to achieve this, the
urban proletariat needs to overcome their prejudice vis-à-vis the rural peasantry.
Thus even as hegemony is understood in economic terms, it is defined by an
‘expansion beyond economic class interest into the sphere of political direction
through a system of class alliances’ (Forgacs 2000: 423).
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony raises questions such as: How does the
understanding of leadership change if it is dependent on alliance building?
Moreover, if alliance building is an ongoing process, does this transform the idea
of leadership? It has been proposed that hegemonic rule does not only depend
on leading groups or political parties but also on socio-cultural concepts, shared
norms and habituated normalities. For example, heteronormativity can become
hegemonic without a specific group claiming leadership.
Different approaches that take up Gramsci’s thought have shown that it
is possible to talk about provisional, democratically-legitimized leadership
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985); radical democratic forms of rule that include civil
society (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Smith 1998); anarchistic forms that
try to overcome all kinds of leadership (Kastner 2004; Day 2005); and other
forms that allow a plurality of ruling centres (Jessop 1990; Smith 1998). All of
these discussions have inspired debates on hegemony. In any case, the mode
of leadership changes once hegemony is understood to depend on alliance
building, as alliances cannot be enforced violently but emerge instead through
consensus. It is important to bear in mind that in contrast to its everyday usage,
where the term hegemony is understood to be synonymous with domination
and is associated with words like oppression, coercion and subjugation, Gramsci
highlights forms of power that make use of cultural forms of consensus
production, popular practices and what he calls ‘common sense’ [senso commune].
Consensus and agreement are an enactment of common sense; they are not the
outcome of intentional decisions by those in leading or subjugated positions.
As Stuart Hall explains:

Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world [may] not directly prescribe the
mental content of … the heads of the dominated classes. But the circle of
dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or classify the
world for others; its classifications do acquire not only the constraining power
of dominance over other modes of thought but also the inertial authority of
habit and instinct. It becomes the horizon of the taken-for-granted: what the
world is and how it works, for all practical purposes. Ruling ideas may dominate
other conceptions of the social world by setting the limit to what will appear
as rational, reasonable, credible, indeed sayable or thinkable, within the given
vocabularies of motive and action available to us. (1988: 44)
The rethinking of the concept of hegemony in post-Gramscian theories has

led to a rethinking of structures of domination, such that there has been a shift
of focus from the primacy accorded to economic relations to an analysis of
heterogeneous interlocking power systems. Feminist theorizing has been vital for
this kind of reassessment (Lauretis 1987; Barrett 1991; Silverman 1992; Smith
1998; Butler 1993; Habermann 2008). Anne McClintock (1995) provides an
astute insight into what has subsequently been called a non-additive, articulatory
theory of intersectionality (see Femina Politica 2005). As she argues:
[R]ace, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid
isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively
like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation
to each other – if in contradictory and conflictual ways. In this sense, gender,
race and class can be called articulated categories.… Gender, here, is not simply
a question of sexuality but also a question of subdued labour and imperial
plunder; race is not simply a question of skin color but also a question of labor
power, cross-hatched by gender. Let me hasten to add that I do not mean to
imply that these domains are reducible to, or identical with, each other; they
exist in intimate, reciprocal and contradictory relation. (McClintock 1995: 5)
Post-Gramscian – including feminist – approaches follow Gramsci’s insight that

hegemony not only refers to bourgeois leadership but can also be applied to the
‘rule of other classes at other periods of history’ and can be identified through
the ‘formation of a new ideological terrain’ (Forgacs 2000: 423). This is seen
as an ongoing process, so that the focus ought to be on hegemonic struggles
and the transformations that result from these, rather than on understanding
rule as provisional stabilization that occurs once in a while. The inspiration for
this comes from Gramsci’s statement that hegemony is a ‘continuous process
of formation and superseding of compromised equilibrium’ (2000: 211). For
a critical analysis of hegemony, it is less interesting to examine which power
constellation of political forces is provisionally stabilized at a certain geo-

historical moment. Rather what is more important is to analyse the competitive

power dynamics of forces that permanently try to gain influence and as such
organize and reorganize socio-cultural relations. Here, Gramsci’s differentiation
between diverse forms of hegemony becomes relevant, whereby it would be
a mistake to collapse ‘bourgeois hegemony’ and ‘proletarian hegemony’. The
latter is described by Gramsci as ‘the expression of these subaltern classes who
want to educate themselves in the art of government’ (2000: 197). Such an
understanding of hegemony reveals it to be a dynamic principle that regulates
historically emerging social formations, rather than as a state of affair. In
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe introduce a discursive
theory of hegemony based on the concept of articulation to unfold the
heterogeneity and contingency of political struggles. For them, articulation
constitutes identities, thereby challenging the notion of representation as a
mere portrayal of pregiven identities or (class) interests. Articulation is seen as
productive and qua definition connected to transformation: ‘In the context of
this discussion we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among
elements such that their identity is modified as a result of articulatory practice’
(1985: 105). This irritates the linearity in which interests are first identified and
then represented; instead Laclau and Mouffe propose that political practice
constitutes the interests that it claims to represent (1985: 120). Grounding
hegemony in articulation means that alliances are made by discursively creating
similarities and effecting ‘chains of equivalence’ between heterogeneous
groups. Chains of equivalence emerge by virtue of the fact that certain signs,
concepts or discursive figures function as ‘empty signifiers’ (Laclau 2005) that
can be filled by diverse positions in order to signify their particular interests. For
example, the term ‘freedom and self-determination’ can be understood as an
empty signifier in neoliberal times. It connects discourses that on the one hand
conflate freedom with market liberalism, private property and consumer culture
and on the other hand employ freedom to claim ownership over one’s own body,
fight against the regulation of mobility through migration control, claim sexual
self-determination and to express one’s desires. Politicization takes place by
rupturing such chains of equivalence and by translating them into antagonisms,
revealing how contradictory aims and interests are covered up through a shared
signifier. Thus, from Laclau and Mouffe’s point of view, social antagonisms
are a positive sign of a society whose relations of domination are not fixed or
static but instead a matter of ongoing conflict and renegotiation (1985: 125).
In order to understand hegemony as an unstable state, as a process of struggle,
Laclau and Mouffe unpack the conditions of structural undecidability as the
defining moment of doing politics. Inspired by Derridian deconstruction,
they unfold how the field that was previously seen as being governed by
structural determinism is now marked by contingencies. Hegemony becomes
‘a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain’ (1985: xi). Meanwhile,

hegemonic articulations enable productive ways of negotiating contingency.

Ongoing hegemonic struggles are always only provisionally stable, and such
stabilizations need to be understood as historical conjunctures that articulate
the contingencies of a specific power constellation. Laclau and Mouffe’s theory
of hegemony provides for a reconceptualization of the political, transforming it
into something that is no longer defined by universal or structural laws. Rather,
the political is defined by contingency and the impossibility of closure, and thus
by the fundamental openness and the unpredictability of shifts in historical
power relations.
If, as suggested by Laclau and Mouffe, neither social relations nor subjects
exist prior to political practices, then theories of hegemony offer the potential
to irritate the dualisms between the essentialist subject positions of dominator
and dominated and of victim and perpetrator. This enables us to examine the
various social positions from where consent to and complicity in relations of
domination are issued. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe aim at overcoming merely
economistic concepts of hegemony and to provide space for the plurality of
different struggles enacted by the New Social Movements of Western societies
in the 1980s. They propose that different social actors occupy differential
positions thereby rejecting the notion of the ‘universal class’. ‘Hegemonic
relation’ is a relation where a particular group assumes the representation of
universality by universalizing a particularity (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: xiii).
Jessop pushes Laclau and Mouffe’s concept further by arguing that – at least in
late-modern societies – there might be more than one centre of power: ‘Indeed,
given that there is always a plurality of power centres which coexist in specific
relational and conjunctural contexts, any one is always limited in its effectivity
by other nodal points’ (1990: 291).
Likewise, in her book Laclau/Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (1998),
Anna Marie Smith acknowledges the heterogeneity and unpredictability of
politics and reinforces the idea that Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist
theory of hegemony can be read as a theory of intersectionality. Smith
emphasizes that the concept of articulation offers the possibility to unpack
how social categories are articulated through each other. Social categories are
mutually constitutive, contextually specific formations: ‘[M]ultiple forms of
exploitation and oppression intersect, overlap, combine together, shape one
another and contradict one another’ (Smith 1998: 40). What Smith points out
here is an understanding of pluralism that rests on an anti-essentialist discourse
(1998: 41). Writing from a feminist perspective, she provides entry points for
queer theorizing and in fact perpetually confronts Laclau and Mouffe’s theory
of hegemony with references to the social consensus on heterosexism and
homophobia, even though she never uses the term heteronormativity. In the
context of our previous discussion on leadership, it is worth mentioning Smith’s
differentiation between authoritarian and radical democratic leadership (1998: 181).

The latter implies a pluralist hegemonic project, wherein ‘the construction of

political leadership … offers itself as an apparently “neutral space” for the
inscription of a broad range of political demands – as nothing less than the
horizon that makes all political discourse possible’ (Smith 1998: 166).
Smith’s analysis, which sees authoritarian hegemony as characterized by
strict regulations of political contestation, offers interesting bridges to another
reading of how hegemony operates as put forth by Ranajit Guha in his seminal
work Domination without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1998). Guha,
the intellectual founder of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, argues that
the colonial state in South Asia was basically different from the metropolitan
bourgeois state that shaped it. In contrast to the metropolitan state – which,
with its claim to dominance functioning through persuasion, was hegemonic in
character – Guha suggests that the colonial state was non-hegemonic. Coercion
was at the core of its structure of dominance. This leads to the historical
irony wherein England, the self-proclaimed pioneer of democracy in the
West, instituted and sustained coercive colonial rule overseas. Guha concludes
that the non-hegemonic colonial state is a paradox – a dominance without
hegemony in the sense that its structure of dominance is ‘non-hegemonic with
persuasion outweighed by coercion’ (1998: xii). Furthermore, Guha’s analysis
of nationalist politics in India unfolds a structural rupture between native elite
and subaltern domains, which precluded ‘the people’ from participating in an
alternative hegemony. The native elites monopolized the task of representing
the voice of ‘the people’ of India by resorting to coercion, like the English
colonial master.
The term ‘subaltern’ is used by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks to denote
unorganized peasantry with no political consciousness as a group or self-
organized groups fighting hegemonic rule in the form of revolt or insurrection
but without overall, comprehensive political aims or desire to gain hegemonic
leadership, that is, to become the State (Gramsci 1991–2002, vol. 9: 2194–6).
The subaltern differs from orthodox Marxist perceptions of the organized
industrial working class in so far as the political practices of the rural peasantry
were not systematic and coherent in their opposition to the state. It carries some
similarities to the Marxist Lumpenproletariat in its lack of class consciousness.
Yet, Gramsci does not dismiss subalterns as counter-revolutionary. Rather, he
fosters the pedagogical engagement of the party and its organic intellectuals
with the subaltern classes, whom he sees as potential partners for alliances. The
South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective found similarities between Gramsci’s
account of subalterns in Southern Italy and the continued oppression of the
rural peasantry and ‘the untouchable’ castes in post-independence India: both
Smith (1998: 166) would argue that this is not domination without hegemony
but another form of hegemony, namely authoritarian hegemony.

were excluded from taking part in hegemonic struggles, or at least from being
recognized as part of the hegemonic constellation. As a politically-motivated
project, the Subaltern Studies Group combined Foucault and Gramsci to write
a ‘counter-history from below’.
The insights presented by Guha and other historians of the South Asian
Subaltern Studies Group have been invaluable in problematizing the question
of counter-hegemony in anti-colonial politics. However, while Guha and
others primarily focus on categories of class and caste, they do not address the
complexity of the construction of ‘the people’ with regard to gender relations.
Here, the postcolonial feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents an astute
reading that thoroughly challenges the common understanding of counter-
hegemony. In her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ (first published in
1988), Spivak takes up the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group even
as she offers a feminist critique of their project. Spivak’s focus is on processes
that impede the recognition of subalterns as political subjects; that hinder the
emergence of political consciousness; and that cut off subalterns from lines
of mobility. These processes are, as she points out, thoroughly gendered and
intertwined with the devaluation of female reproductive labour (Castro Varela
and Dhawan 2009a). In her more recent work on the ‘new subaltern’, Spivak
(2002) explains that when a citizen is unable to claim the public sphere, itself
a creation of colonial history, a certain kind of subalternity is produced. This
specific subalternity is a condition of not being able to represent oneself, or to
use Marxist vocabulary, to make one’s interests count (das eigene Interesse geltend zu
machen) in the face of the lack of institutional validation. The most important
task of decolonization is therefore to bring subalternity into crisis by inserting it
into hegemony. Following Gramsci, who argues that the problems of subaltern
groups will not be solved by a proletarian dictatorship, Spivak points out that
she is interested in struggles for justice but that this struggle cannot be reduced
to organizing material goods for the suffering classes. Simply having rights is
not enough if there is no possibility of governance; otherwise political power
remains an empty promise. Thus Spivak’s project is one of enabling the subaltern
to ‘enter’ hegemony and not one of valorizing the margins. At the same time, she
resists reinstating the bourgeois humanist model of agency where the subaltern
would take on the part of a subject of resistance. Thus Spivak warns against any
simple romantic model of agency and resistance that overlooks the complicities
of counter-hegemonic discourses in hegemony’s sustenance.
In an increasingly transnational world, the role of international civil society
in the production and legitimization of neo-colonial hegemony is crucial.
Postcolonial interventions are important for queer theoretical perspectives as
they unfold how theories of hegemony explain how relations of domination
emerge, develop and are stabilized. Moreover, they introduce dissent, resistance
and counter-hegemonic struggles as constitutive moments of ‘the political’ in a

postcolonial world. Processes of decolonization of the global South as well as

the global North are incomplete unless subaltern voices, which have traditionally
been understood to be pre-political or even unintelligible, are inserted into the
field of political struggle. According to Gramsci, the insertion into hegemony is
possible through education initiated by organic intellectuals (1991–2002, vol. 6).
Given that international civil society actors monopolize the transnational public
sphere, the biggest challenge is to imagine how a subaltern counter-hegemony
is to emerge that could simultaneously contest capitalist, racist, heterosexist
structures and discourses globally.
In this context, an interesting debate has unfolded over the issue of who
qualifies as subaltern and how to avoid the inflationary use of this political
term (Spivak 1999; Castro Varela and Dhawan 2005a, 2007; Dhawan 2007). If
one defines subalternity as a condition of not being able to represent oneself
(Castro Varela and Dhawan 2007), it seems compelling to include certain non-
normative forms of sex/gendered and sexualized existence in this term (Engel
2007a). The postcolonial legal theorist Ratna Kapur (2005) uses the term
‘sexual subaltern’ as broad theoretical category that brings together a range of
sexual minorities, even as she warns that it is neither a homogenized nor a stable
category. Furthermore, she cautions that the location of the sexual subaltern
in postcolonial contexts is complex and at times contradictory and that sexual
subalternity is not invoked exclusively as an identity of resistance to dominant
sexual categories.
Another important aspect with regard to the relevance of theories of
hegemony for queer politics is the question whether queer politics aspires to
gain hegemonic rule or leadership. This becomes particularly interesting if one
follows the strand of argumentation that insists on the heterogeneity of centres
of power that do not necessarily come together into a singular hegemonic
constellation (Jessop 1990; Smith 1998; Wullweber 2010) or if one refers to
Laclau’s recent writings (2005: 139–56), both of which specify heterogeneity
as precondition of hegemony. Against the background of queer critique of
normativity and universalism, the question that needs to be addressed is whether
queer politics aims to gain recognition from ‘official’ politics and hegemonic
Recent feminist, anti-racist, queer and crip theory propose focusing on self-
organization of so-called unintelligible or unperceivable groups, thereby implicitly
problematizing the directive mode of pedagogy in Gramscian thought (Engel 2007a;
Butler 2004; McRuer 2006; Papadopoulus, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008).
In ‘Challenging the Heteronormativity of Tolerance Pluralism’ (2007a), Engel
does not use the term ‘subaltern’. Yet, in asking about the possibilities of articulating
non-normative sexualities, she explicitly traces the limits of self-representation in
symbolic registers organized by binary logic and tolerance pluralism, thus problematizing
conditions of ‘not being able to represent oneself ’.
10
media, thereby gaining hegemony by generalizing its own politics. This would
engender the emergence of an alternative hegemony through the canonization
of queer definitions of gender and desire. Or are there other possible politics that
are anti-hegemonic and/or subversive and/or anarchist, and that simultaneously
resist hegemony as well as becoming hegemonic? While Gramsci was clear in
his aim of gaining leadership (even if this remains a permanently contested
state), it seems necessary to rethink the concept of leadership within queer
politics. Claiming political agency without being recognized as a political subject
(Engel 2007a) or acting ‘as if ’ one were a political subject (Butler 2004) is as
much of a challenge as radicalizing pluralism or struggling for heterogeneous
spaces and conditions of political agency. As Smith puts it, ‘[R]adical democratic
pluralist hegemony multiplies the points of contestation and seeks to broaden
the terrain of politicization or reactivation’ (1998: 181).
If diverse relations of domination are mutually co-constitutive, then this
complicates our understanding of counter-hegemony. Queer politics may
very well be complicit in reproducing classical hegemonic structures (Duggan
2003; Engel 2007b; Woltersdorff 2009), yet this does not mean that counter-
hegemonic queer politics is impossible. Rather, one may be able to imagine
forms of politics that overcome simple antagonisms and that exert political
power by virtue of being implicated in the very relations they seek to transform.
If queer politics and hegemonic structures are complex, contradictory,
permanently articulated and re-articulated processes that are interconnected,
then it is essential to develop an understanding of (queer) resistance and
political transformation as engagement with the irreducible simultaneity of
complicity and subversion. This entails acting from positions that cannot be
captured under a stable name or label or that are operating from a defined
position as hegemonic, marginalized or subaltern. Accordingly, these positions
should be read as relative, shifting and not mutually exclusive. Queer theory
allows for conceptualizing this kind of non-identitarian positionality. But the
question remains: how does this transform theories of hegemony?
Why Heteronormativity?
Heteronormativity designates a regime that organizes sex, gender and sexuality

in order to match heterosexual norms. It denotes a rigid sexual binary of
bodily morphology that is supported by gender and sexual identities. As such,
heteronormativity is criticized as a naturalizing force that is based on the seductive,
coercive or violent character of social norms (Butler 1993; Chambers and
Carver 2008). It demands a coherence of idealized morphologies, presumptive
heterosexual desire and a thoroughly constructed gender binary. As a category
of critical social analysis, heteronormativity also draws attention to the ways
11
sexuality – in complex interplay with other categories of social differentiation

– functions as a social institution. It influences and becomes effective in all
kinds of socio-structural and macro-political processes (Namaste 1996; Patton
and Sanchez-Eppler 2000; Ingraham 2002; Cooper 2002). In the introduction
to the Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Richardson and Seidman 2002),
the notion of heteronormativity only comes up cursorily. However, even as
it is not systematically reflected upon as a concept, it still appears in the book
prominently as an adjective in the phrase ‘heteronormative assumptions’ (2002: 7).
It is understood at the level of norms, values and beliefs and most importantly
presented under the label ‘institutions’. Here, a shift of focus takes place. Rather
than asking how institutions regulate sexuality, the main question is: ‘How do
assumptions about sexuality inform and constitute social institutions and our
notions of the “social world”?’ (2002: 7). Chris Ingraham (2002) takes up this
understanding of heteronormativity as a category for institutional analysis even
more explicitly in the same volume.
Heteronormativity can be reflected upon as a socio-historical constellation
of sexed and gendered power relations (Genschel 1996) or as an organizing
principle (Cooper 2004). In both cases it is taken up as an object of inquiry
(Genschel 1996: 528; our translation), whereas in other cases it functions as
an analytical category in queer theory and research (Genschel 1996; Klesse 2007).
Both perspectives inspire the critique of and resistance to heteronormative
relations. Exploring the systematic function of the term heteronormativity,
Christian Klesse (2007) offers a methodological reflection. He states that
different conceptualizations of heteronormativity share the feature that they
understand heteronormativity as a concept for analyzing social power relations.
This focus on power relations invites different approaches to participate in
the study of heteronormativity, principally feminist gender theory, lesbian
and gay sexuality studies, psychoanalytic notions of identity, poststructuralist
theories of the subject and power as well as materialist social critique (Klesse
2007: 35). What is notable about Klesse’s approach is that he underlines the
productivity – if not the necessity – of combining poststructuralist thinking
and qualitative empirical research (2007: 39). Klesse proposes epistemological
relativism, situated knowledge and reflexive research practices as preconditions
for conceptualizing the sometimes contradictory complexity and simultaneity of
power relations.10 This introduces a promising challenge for heteronormativity
10 In this argument, Klesse draws the practical conclusion of what has been
programmatically proclaimed in post-Marxist feminist theory for a long time. Along
similar lines Michèle Barrett explains, ‘Yet, if we take seriously the criticism that
supposedly universal discourses of emancipation must, de facto, be spoken from a
certain historical and social position and always in practice encode the experience of
12
as an analytical category that is unavoidably entangled and complicit with the

power relations it aims to criticize.
On the one hand, the category is critiqued for merely explaining the
constitution of heteronormative subjectivity and socio-political orders without
offering strategies for social change. On the other hand, heteronormativity as
an organizing principle can elucidate the procedures of its functioning and
the possibilities of dissidence and subversion. Furthermore, the concept of
performativity, brought into play by Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and widely
discussed thereafter (Sedgwick 1993; Lorey 1996; Lloyd 2005; Chambers and
Carver 2008; Engel 2009) explains how normative orders may be transformed
even if social actors are not seen as autonomous and intentional subjects but
instead as subjects constituted by the power relations under scrutiny. Yet,
the heteronormative order remains an inescapable term of reference. This is
where queer cultural politics comes into play by insisting that signification,
imagination, fantasy (imagination fuelled by desire) and the unpredictability of
queer embodiments may open up spaces beyond heteronormative restrictions
(Halberstam 2005, Muñoz 2009, Lorenz forthcoming).
Theories of hegemony become most relevant if one wishes to claim political
agency while acknowledging that such agency can only be developed from
positions that are socio-discursive effects of governing regimes. Not only can
they help explain how heteronormativity becomes hegemonic but they can
also illuminate how it may be challenged through counter-hegemonic struggles.
Investigating this is an important aspect of this book, and is taken up particularly
by Volker Woltersdorff, Kateřina Kolářová, María do Mar Castro Varela and
Nikita Dhawan as well as by Gundula Ludwig. Each of these chapters focuses
on the specific way in which heteronormative norms, institutions, practices and
discourses consolidate the hegemony of heterosexuality, even as the authors
explore moments of crisis in hegemonic heteronormativity. Yet, this volume
also strives to unpack how queer politics does not fit previous patterns of
hegemonic struggles and to explore the possibility of different forms of politics.
For instance, Antke Engel attempts to connect theories of hegemony with her
concept of the ‘politics of paradox’ (2010) and becoming-imperceptible.11
Under the label queer theory and politics, ‘systematic reflections of
practices of resistance against the hegemonic order of sexuality and gender’
(Wagenknecht 2007: 18; our translation) are considered. Here, Warner’s
introduction of the term heteronormativity in his now famous collection
Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) remains an important point of reference. This
their creators, this must lead us to a different and more positive understanding of what
used to be castigated as relativism’ (1991: 162).
11 The latter is a concept that is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004)
and has recently been reworked from queer perspectives (Nigianni and Storr 2009).
13
is true particularly since it indicates a conceptual shift from minoritarian and

identity politics aimed at social inclusion to challenging the dominant sexual
order and questioning the rule of heterosexuality. This is a conceptual shift
that is at the heart of queer theory and politics. Heteronormativity, for Warner,
offers a possibility to understand sexuality as a category of social critique not
restricted to subjectivity and intimacy, as ‘the logic of the sexual order is so
deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions,
and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world’ (1993: xiii).
Thus, the critique of heteronormativity does not lead to political demands for
inclusion or tolerance pluralism but to ‘a more thorough resistance to regimes
of the normal’ (Warner 1993: xxvi). The focus on normality and normalization
suggests taking into account the interplay of different orders of oppression and
social hierarchization, which though interdependent do not necessarily follow
the same logic (Warner 1993: xix).12 This is where connections and potential
alliances but also actual conflicts emerge between queer, postcolonial and crip
theory (critical disability studies) (Patton and Sanchez-Eppler 2002; Cohen 2005;
Luibhéid and Cantu 2005; Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; McRuer 2006;
Haritaworn, Erdem, and Tauqir 2008; Shildrick 2009; Castro Varela and Dhawan
2009b). In her analysis of the politics of decolonization, M. Jacqui Alexander
combines the twin processes of heterosexualization and patriarchy in order to
unpack the colonial continuities in the ‘[h]eteropatriarchal recolonization [that]
operates through the consolidation of certain psychic economies and racialized
hierarchies, and within various material and ideological processes initiated
by the state, both inside and beyond the law’ (1997: 67). For Alexander, the
hegemonic understanding of race, class, gender, sexuality and religion intersect
globally to produce specific forms of ‘normative violence’ against those who
deviate from the norm. In addition to terms like ‘heteropatriarchy’, ‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ and ‘heterosexual matrix’, which have been crucial for queer
studies, the term ‘heteronormativity’ with its focus on the ‘normative violence’
of heterosexuality is particularly important for queer theory and politics, as the
contributions in this volume demonstrate.
Why Hegemony and Heteronormativity?
As mentioned previously, a critical perspective is gained through explicitly linking

theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Corinna Genschel (1996) takes up
Warner’s understanding of heteronormativity as heterosexual culture’s privilege
to generalize itself as representing ‘society’. Such a presumptuous generalization
12 Warner, while insisting on the recognition of complex social differences, avoids

analyzing the dimensions of power and domination that organize these differences.
14
that calls itself ‘normality’ rests upon understanding heterosexual reproduction

as the basis of all community and heterosexual coupling as the most elemental
form of human association (Genschel 1996: 529). What is distinctive about
Genschel’s approach is that she explicitly links this to the social critique of
relations of domination (Herrschaftskritik) and defines heteronormativity as
‘domination grounding and founding heterosexuality’ (‘heterosexuell begründete und
Heterosexualität begründende Herrschaft’; our translation) (1996: 525). Combining
Warner’s approach, which focuses on sexuality, with the concept of the
‘heterosexual matrix’ as suggested by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), Genschel
draws particular attention to the mutual constitution of normative heterosexuality
and the rigid binary gender order. The term heteronormativity is understood to
convey this mutual constitution, and therefore explicitly supports transgender
and intersex theories (Hale 1998; Kessler 1998; Genschel 2001; Halberstam
2005). However the concept of heteronormativity is nonetheless persistently
confronted with other social power relations (Butler 1993; Anzaldúa 2000;
Engel 2002; Giffney 2004; Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Cohen 2005).
Genschel draws on theories of hegemony in order to explain queer politics
as struggles against heteronormative hegemony (1996: 526). For Genschel,
hegemony implies first of all that regimes of heteronormative sexuality and
binary gender have structuring effects on (the imagined coherence of) society,
and secondly that dominance is embedded in everyday beliefs and habits. Thus it
is accepted without being reflected upon. She differentiates three modalities of
hegemonic domination: domination through cultural intelligibility, domination
through privileging heterosexual desire and domination through regulating
practices that make use of coercion and naturalization (1996: 531). All three of
these moments are also captured by Renate Lorenz’s approach (2009) in which
she employs Kaja Silverman’s notion of ‘dominant fictions’ (1992) in order to
explain how hegemony works. For Lorenz, too, the focus is on unconscious and
embodied dimensions or, to put it differently, on the subjective basis and psychic
reality of social consensus (2009: 73). ‘Dominant fictions’ consist of both images
and narrations of socially acknowledged and culturally intelligible subjectivities.
When Lorenz introduces the term ‘sexual labour’, her point is that becoming
an intelligible subject – which is always subjectivity that is both gendered and
articulated through various social differences – implies an ‘effort’ of ‘crossing’
various social sites that are overdetermined by sexual imagery and practices. The
term ‘crossings’ is central here and marks Lorenz’s specific understanding of
hegemony: She argues that hegemonic consensus production does not depend
on the (provisional) stabilization of the hegemonic constellation but can rather
be defined by how movements within – and crossings of – contradictory
social positions are promoted and organized (2009: 74). Instead of looking for
heteronormative closure, which is then subsequently challenged by hegemonic
struggles, hegemony itself consists of struggle; that is, it consists of ongoing
15
movements between categories and social positions, of the ‘strategic polyvalence

of discourses’ (a term Lorenz takes up from Foucault) and of the bridging
of gaps between self-representations, cultural representations and dominant
fictions. Thus, dominant fictions are hegemonic – not because they produce
coherent realities but because they incite subjective activities of people who
create social consensus through their singular movements.
Taking into account heterogeneous modes of subjectivity and ideals of
individualism is a decisive moment of understanding late-modern forms of
hegemony and of developing adequate forms of critique. The collection simply
titled Heteronormativität (2007), edited by Jutta Hartmann et al., takes up the task
of understanding heteronormativity as a category of Herrschaftskritik (social and
political critique of relations of domination). The collection explores the relevance
of the notion of heteronormativity for empirical research. It also takes seriously
the proposition that queer theory cannot isolate research on heteronormativity
from its entanglements with other social regimes of power and domination
and should, in fact, criticize every regime of hierarchization – be it through
oppression, exploitation, consensus and/or normalization. Peter Wagenknecht,
in this collection, explicitly examines the notion of heteronormativity from the
perspective of post-Gramscian theories of hegemony. He introduces the term
as part of queer resistances against the hegemonic order of gender and sexuality
(2007: 18) by focusing on strategies of destabilizing heteronormativity (2007: 29).
Here, he distinguishes queer politics of representation from queer politics of
citizenship, which as he suggests engage ‘in struggles over hegemony, where
meaning and evaluation of sexual practices and struggles over resources are
regulated by the same forces’ (2007: 29). Accordingly, hegemony is defined as
depending simultaneously on symbolic and material power. This semiotic-material
perspective is similarly employed by Wagenknecht to unpack how heteronormativity
can be activated as a category that allows for a new historiography of sexuality not
as a social, but as a political category.
The examples discussed above demonstrate why it is fruitful to think
hegemony and heteronormativity together and show how the categories benefit
from one another. This volume is an effort in continuing this dialogue between
theories of hegemony and heteronormativity.
Why ‘the political’ in Queer Politics? Or, how to Rethink

the Queer in Queer Politics?
If as Butler, Laclau and Žižek remark (2000: 11), ‘democratic politics are
constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the politics predicated upon
their absence’, and ‘[t]hat haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so
far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the
16
basic premises of democracy itself ’, what does this mean for queer politics?
Within queer theory, there has been an ongoing engagement with the question
of heteronormativity’s relevance for analysing complex relations of power and
domination that have largely remained on a programmatic level. An exception
would be Smith, whose feminist interpretation of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory
of hegemony provides an example of how complex, contradictory overlapping
and mutually-constitutive systems of power can be theoretically acknowledged.
Yet, even though she frequently refers to sexuality, she does not provide a
systematic understanding of heteronormativity. She does not even use the term,
but rather refers to ‘homophobia’ and ‘heterosexism’ in order to designate
specific forms of oppression. In doing so, she misses the chance of employing
‘heteronormativity’ as an analytical tool. As argued by Ludwig in this volume,
heteronormativity allows us to complicate our analysis of power as an effect
of hegemonic struggles through incorporating heterogeneous social relations.
She proceeds to suggest the term ‘heteronormative hegemony’ to capture the
productive combination of the two concepts.
Other feminist and queer thinkers have proposed the use of the term
‘articulation’ in order to circumvent additive models of thinking the complexity
and simultaneity of power and relations of domination (Butler 1990; McClintock
1995; Femina Politica 2005; Cohen 2005). If ‘articulation’ constitutes complex,
unstable identities and (following Laclau and Mouffe) is connected to
transformation, then it provides a possibility of not only analysing processes
that illustrate the creation of hegemony but also of challenging hegemony.
This is the moment in which – with the help of articulation – the critique of
heteronormativity is transformed into a queer politics that decidedly tries to
avoid identitarian closures. Here we propose to explicitly include practices of
disarticulation and misarticulation into the concept of articulation, in order
to understand how hegemony is achieved through complex, simultaneous and
particularly contradictory processes.
Moreover, it is important to examine how articulation is linked to the question
of political agency. This includes the pivotal debate about how articulation is
connected to speech, silence or different modes of speaking. As discussed
earlier, Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 109) explain articulation as a process by
which something enters discourse or, as they say, when an ‘element’ turns into
a ‘moment’. This raises the question whether an element might already develop
political relevance before turning into a moment. For queer and postcolonial
debates, it is interesting to consider whether one understands articulation as the
appropriation of the hegemonic discourse or whether it indicates how various
discourses (hegemonic as well as marginalized) deploy each other. From a queer
perspective, it is also interesting to point out that heteronormativity is grounded
in processes of articulation in so far as the heteronormative regime demands
that sex, gender and desire coherently articulate each other. Articulation
17
may support this impression of coherence but it may also provide counter-
hegemonic articulations of incoherence regarding sex, genders and desire.
Two approaches presented in this volume that thoroughly rely on the
concept of articulation and explain its relevance for understanding ‘the political’
are those by Susanne Lummerding and Randi Gressgård. Both authors reflect
on sexuality, sexual difference and heteronormativity as political categories.
They ask how these are embedded in concrete socio-historical situations
while they simultaneously examine their potential for challenging – and indeed
reconceptualizing – ‘the political’. Both authors understand ‘the political’ as
constitutive of concrete historical politics, and argue for identifying sex or
sexual difference’s decisive role in these constitutive processes. Yet, sexual
difference for them is by no means an essentialist category. Rather, it is a
structural function. For Gressgård, sexual difference, because it is the product
of hegemonic struggles, can stand in for ‘radical difference’ that can never be
fixed as a specific particularity. Instead, it promotes the impossibility of a final
ground. Lummerding comes to a similar conclusion of understanding sex as
indicating the logical impossibility of signification.
In contrast to Gressgård, Lummerding opts for a strict distinction between
the structural dimension and the concrete socio-symbolic forms of organizing
sex, gender and sexuality and the normative distinctions that go along with it.
Only if such a distinction is upheld, Lummerding argues, is there conceptual
space for principle openness and transformability of gender regimes and
heteronormativity. From this point of view, queer escapes the fate of functioning
as the opposite of the norm and turns into an analytical category that addresses
a ‘constitutive logic’, exactly because it does not carry meaning itself. As part of
‘the political’, it secures the ongoing contestability of any ‘relational processuality
of power’ that calls itself hegemonic in a specific historical moment. While for
Lummerding this is a one-way street, where ‘politics’ depends on ‘the political’
for transformation, for Gressgård ‘the political’ is also constituted by ‘politics’,
because it is impossible to draw a clear-cut distinction between ‘politics’ and
‘the political’. Thus the undecidability that is characteristic of ‘the political’ may
come into play as the concrete hegemonic struggle over sex, gender, sexuality
and sexual difference. For both authors ‘the political’ is inherently sexed, and this
means sexed without referring to a binary logic or allowing heteronormativity
to monopolize the field. Contradictory as they are, both approaches contribute
to what Engel envisions at the end of her article, namely the ‘sexual political’.
While these are considerations that refer to an abstract, philosophical
understanding of ‘the political’, one could also accentuate the concrete historical
– and signifying – practices that are implicated in such an understanding of ‘the
political’. One could argue that there is no political apart from these socio-
discursive practices. Returning to the ambivalent role of articulations in the
context of the heteronormative imperative of coherence of sex, gender,
18
sexuality and desire, this is where a concrete socio-historical analysis of power

sets in. In this volume, there are examples of this kind of analysis. Ludwig,
for example, unpacks the operation of heteronormative power, Woltersdorff
explores the libidinal investment in domination, Castro Varela and Dhawan
analyse how counter-hegemonic strategies simultaneously reproduce and
depart from hegemonic discourses and Engel and Kolářová in their chapters
examine how difference becomes appropriated rather than excluded in order
to form wider hegemonic alliances. By analyzing the concrete ways in which
heteronormative power operates, it becomes obvious that heteronormativity
does not refer exclusively to regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; racist,
(neo)colonial, neoliberal, ableist and classist regimes are inextricably entangled.
On issues related to but beyond the purview of this volume, Lisa Duggan
(2003) introduces the term ‘homonormativity’ in order to indicate how certain
forms of gay and lesbian politics become part of hegemonic alliances, thus
gaining individualized freedom at the cost of giving up on redistributive justice
and struggles against other kinds of domination and violence. Jasbir Puar
(2007) radicalizes this analysis by focusing on complicities with racist violence,
militarism and war that she names ‘homonationalism’.
Undoubtedly, queer politics is not as such progressive. Even though queer
politics contests violence, exclusion and rigid identity categories, new challenges
have arisen for the late-modern analysis of power, for instance: What about
flexible normalizations and multiple, contradictory differentiations (Engel 2002)?
What about the hegemonic embrace of difference in the mode of ‘diversity
politics’? In late-modern, so-called pluralist societies, it seems to be necessary that
queer politics self-critically acknowledges that gendered and sexual norms may
have already been transformed (Engel 2007b). Consequently, what happens when
sexual individualism, self-definition and flexibility become the norm? How far is
hegemony from proposing a version of heteronormativity that no longer relates
to rigid binary gender norms and compulsory heterosexual desire but embraces
transgender, intersexuality and a broad variety of desires? And how is queer
politics in the global North complicit in stabilizing structures of domination and
exploitation in the global South (Castro Varela and Dhawan 2005b)?
While maintaining the instability, elasticity and limits of identity categories,
the concept of hegemony reveals how the production of identities and the
critique of heteronormativity are themselves effects of hegemonic processes
– and therefore not per se subversive. Nonetheless, if we accept that queer
politics is complicit in hegemonic discourses, for example in the context of
neoliberal individualism, this does not mean that the subversive potential of
queer theory and politics is forfeited. Rather, hegemony as an ongoing struggle
makes us ask anew: what does it mean today to undermine and subvert systems
of compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity while acknowledging the
differences of concrete geo-political, socio-material and symbolic conditions?
19
In this volume, María do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan analyse the
normative dilemmas of queer theory, whereby queer politics risks reproducing
‘normative violence’ in the moment it takes an unequivocal pro or contra stance
on ethico-political issues. Dilemmas, ambivalences and double-binds are at the
heart of postcolonial queer politics. Any claim to being uncontaminated by
hegemony is a disavowal of postcolonial, queer complicities in the sustenance
of hegemonic orders. Queer politics can enable an articulation of struggles
against present hegemonic formations and offer possibilities for making visible
the fissures in the formation, while at the same time enabling open-ended and
experimental alliance politics.
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24
Chapter 1
Revisiting Contingency,
Hegemony and Universality
Randi Gressgård
Heteronormativity is most often associated with queer theory, which in turn

is strongly associated with Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book Gender Trouble
(1999). In this book, she draws attention to the normative conditions under
which the categories of sex and gender are formed and tries to rethink sex and
gender beyond the binary frame. People who inhabit these categories differently
are considered to be disruptive to the heterosexual imperative and as such, they
testify to the contingency of sex and gender. In her book Bodies that Matter,
Butler focuses attention on the materializing effect of regulatory power, arguing
that there is no reference to a pure body that is not at the same time a further
formation of that body (1993: 10). There is no easy way to distinguish between
what is ‘materially’ true and what is ‘culturally’ true about a sexed body, Butler
contends (2004a: 87), since it would be impossible to perceive sex outside of
the cultural matrix of power relations (94–5). Queer theory, like theories of
hegemony, opposes all claims to stable or natural identity, including gay and
other non-heterosexual identities. The production of identities, including
gender identities, is contingent and comes at a cost, as all identities involve
exclusions. Butler is particularly preoccupied with the exclusionary effects of
heterosexual or heterosexist normativity.
Although she does not deploy the term herself, it is evident that the normative
force of heterosexuality can be encapsulated by the concept of heteronormativity.
As Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver remark, ‘Butler reworks gender
within the context of her queer critique of heteronormativity’ (2008: 81), that
is, a normativity that ‘produces and maintains the naturalisation of gender’
(83). Needless to say, naturalization of gender is tantamount to depoliticizing
those norms and practices that form intelligible gendered subjects, and hence
these norms are rendered universal, beyond the purview of contingency and
political struggle. In accordance with Butler’s queer perspective, we could
regard heteronormativity as the hegemony of heterosexuality. In order to
address this relationship between heteronormativity and hegemony, I shall start
by elucidating how Butler relates to the concepts of contingency, hegemony
and universality. I round off the discussion with a note on how recent theories
of hegemony and feminist/queer critiques of heteronormativity can mutually

enrich as well as subvert one another.
When I say recent theories of hegemony, I allude to the post-Gramscian
theorizing of hegemony that was first articulated in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe’s influential book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001). In this book, the
concept of hegemony becomes a name for the general logic of society as a
political institution. They conceive of the political as primary and constitutive
of the social and not derivable from any other instance (Critchley and Marchart
2004: 3). Every order is a result of a political struggle for hegemony – a political
decision taken on a terrain of differences. Hence, we will never be in a situation
where society has found its ultimate ground or achieved totality (Critchley and
Marchart 2004: 4). Laclau and Mouffe have subsequently developed this line
of reasoning in their separate works. Several other scholars of the left, notably
political theorists and feminists, have also taken up their ideas. In their now
famous dialogue in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left (2000), Butler, Laclau and Žižek discuss the notion of hegemony,
alongside the question of how universality can be reformulated now that its
spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized. They discuss hegemony
in relation to universality and contingency, which in turn relates to notions of
the political and politics. I therefore believe that it might prove fruitful to take
the discussion about universality as a point of departure for addressing the
relationships between hegemony and heteronormativity.
The Universal and the Particular
On a discursive level, we could conceive of any conceptualization or

categorization as a form of universalization pertaining to determinative power.
On a sociocultural level, universalization is normally associated with norms that
form the basis for (intelligible and recognizable) claims. In this sense, the act of
making claims might be regarded as an act of universalization, even when we
claim to be particular (for example sexually distinct). In the wake of the so-called
‘political turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s,
it has become somewhat commonplace to assert that a claim, in order to be a
meaningful utterance, can be neither purely universal nor absolutely particular,
since the universal and the particular mutually constitute one another. While
the purely universal would be undifferentiated and thus devoid of content,
the absolutely particular would be radically singular. Both would be impossible
positions outside the social order of meaning and thus unintelligible.
As for meaningful speech, Butler raises the following question: ‘Do we
always know whether a claim is particular or universal?’ (2000a: 33). She suggests
that sometimes there is an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal.
26
Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality
This argument makes perfect sense as long as we take it to be a reiteration of

the aforementioned assumption: a claim is always concrete and thus cannot be
purely universal (undifferentiated) and yet neither can it be absolutely particular
(singular). However, when we juxtapose Butler’s question, ‘Do we always know
whether a claim is universal or particular?’ with her claim that ‘there is sometimes
an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal’, then the meaning of
her overall argument becomes slightly more blurred. While the question (‘Do
we always …’) explicitly refers to universals as concrete claims, the subsequent
statement (‘there is sometimes …’) is more general and needs not be limited to
concrete claims. The latter might also include non-concrete particularities and
non-concrete universals beyond more or less universalized claims.
Butler uses an example from Joan Scott’s book Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996)
to clarify her point about the undecidable coincidence of particular and universal
(although, as we shall see, she thereby also risks increasing the confusion). Scott
illuminates how post-revolutionary French feminists had to make their claims
to equal rights on the basis of their difference, while at the same time they
were compelled to argue that their claims were a logical extension of universal
enfranchisement. In this respect, sexual difference served as a basis for a claim
for universal equality. Writes Butler, ‘To argue in favour of sexual difference
could mean arguing in favour of particularism, but it could also be – if one
accepts the foundational status of sexual difference to all humanity – appealing
directly to the universal’ (2000a: 33). The way in which Butler deploys the
term ‘particularism’ points, in this context, to a concrete differentiation in
terms of a distinct identity. The term ‘universal’ is less obvious, perhaps even
counterintuitive, in so far as it too seems to refer to a difference (rather than to
equality, as we might expect). In Butler’s statement, by being a constitutive feature
of social human life, universality seems to denote an ontological difference
which is granted a universal (foundational) status by virtue of being necessary.
As she proceeds, however, it becomes clear that sexual difference does not
necessarily refer to an ontologically constitutive difference but could just as well
refer to identitarian particularity. Writes Butler, ‘[T]he very same term, “sexual
difference”, can denote the particular in one political context and the universal
in another’ (2000a: 33). This convergence of terms makes it difficult to decide
whether by making such a statement about the undecidable coincidence of the
particular and universal she means: (1) that a claim for recognition as culturally
particular (distinctive) could simultaneously be a claim for universal rights
pertaining to equality in accordance with the logic of multiculturalism (see
Gressgård 2010) or (2) that there is a constant oscillation between non-concrete
(ontological) and concrete (ontic) difference within so-called ‘philosophies of
difference’ that distinguish between ontological/constitutive and ontic/social
27
difference, making it virtually impossible to discern between the two meanings.

In other words, Butler’s assertion that there is sometimes an undecidable
coincidence of particular and universal has by now acquired a double meaning:
(1) a claim can be simultaneously particular and universal and (2) particular and
universal can be used interchangeably with various meanings. As for the latter,
Butler is of course right when she suggests that it is often difficult to judge by
the way it is employed whether sexual difference denotes a constitutive outside
of the symbolic order or an internal ontic differentiation in terms of a particular
gender identity. However, to Butler, this is not an argument in favour of a
clearer distinction between ontological and ontic difference alongside a greater
lucidity and clarification in the way in which we deploy these concepts. On the
contrary, she seems to cite this general confusion in support of a repudiation
of the notion of ontological difference, at least when ontological difference
denotes a (radical) constitutive outside of the social. Hence, we should look
into the rationale of Butler’s disavowal of such a constitutive outside.
No (to) Ontology?
Butler’s argument for relinquishing the category of ontological difference

pertains to her refusal of the transcendental notion of the pre-social or pre-
political. One of her main ‘targets’ is Laclau (1996), who in Emancipation(s)
depicts the concept of hegemony as the relation between the universal and
the particular. According to him, a relation is hegemonic when a particular
demand, group or identity attempts to incarnate the universal. He posits that
any particular claim is implicated in a universal, inasmuch as the universal is the
(common structural) condition by which any kind of particular content fails
to constitute an identity. This peculiar fracture between the particular and the
universal is closely related to what Laclau takes to be an irreducible gap between
the ontological and the ontic levels, which amounts to antagonism. To explain
this antagonistic relationship in more detail, I find it appropriate to draw on
Oliver Marchart’s elucidative account in Laclau: A Critical Reader (2004: 59).
The distinction between ontic and ontological dates back to Heidegger’s distinction
between das Seiende (that which is, beings) and das Sein (that by virtue of which beings are
made beings, Being). While the ontic level refers to beings (plants, people), the ontological
refers to their very existence as beings (Chambers 2003: 69). As for the assertion that it is
virtually impossible to discern between the two meanings, Susanne Lummerding (2005),
referring to Joan Copjec, makes a similar argument. See for example Copjec (1994) for a
conceptualization of sexual difference as neither natural nor constructed – as produced
by the symbolic order and yet exceeding symbolic meaning.
28
When Marchart sets out to clarify the radical difference between the
ontological and the ontic, his point of departure is Laclau’s general logic of
signification. Within this logic, the ontological pertains to the limit of the
system of differences – the social system of classifications – within which
meaning evolves. By virtue of being the limits of the system, these boundaries
cannot belong to – or be representable within – the system itself but must be
external to it. The boundaries must be radically different from the system’s
internal (ontic) differences, because otherwise they would not really be external
but internal to the system and there would be no boundaries and hence no
system of signification. In short, the relationship between the inside and the
outside of the system must be exclusionary for meaning to emerge. However,
the radical outside is not only the necessary condition of possibility for
systematicity (equivalence) and meaning – it is simultaneously the condition
of impossibility of total systematicity and full meaning. As Marchart remarks
(2004: 59), the function of the exclusionary boundary consists in introducing
an essential ambivalence into the system of differences constituted by the very
same boundary. In this sense, the constitutive outside (antagonism) of the
system of signification comes into play inside the system as its dislocation or
subversion. The antagonistic relationship between the ontological and ontic
levels constitutes a mutual subversion of necessity and contingency. Notes
Marchart, ‘[N]ecessity can only partially limit the field of contingency, which
in turn subverts necessity from inside’ (2004: 60). As a result, Marchart goes
on to explain, the demarcation line between the contingent and the necessary is
blurred. I think this is a crucial point with respect to Butler’s critical intervention,
in so far as it points to a major source of confusion in Laclau’s theory.
The blurring of the boundary or the demarcation line between the contingent
and the necessary could be taken to mean that it is not always easy to discern
between ontological and ontic difference. It is virtually impossible to decide
what is inside and what is outside the system; there is sometimes an undecidable
coincidence of particular and universal, and so on. Apparently, Laclau conceives
of the inside and the outside as overlapping. Otherwise, as Marchart notes
(2004: 61), the system would be either totally open or totally closed. There is
a tension – an ‘intertwining’ – which amounts to a hybrid play between inside
and outside. The line between inside and outside might well be blurred then,
but it is nevertheless necessary inasmuch as it is the very existence of the radical
difference between inside and outside that renders such intertwining – such
mutual subversion – possible. Needless to say, this also goes for the mutual
subversion of necessity and contingency, universal and particular and – as will
be highlighted below – ontological and ontic sexual difference.
Butler and other critics, who point to the blurred boundaries in Laclau’s
argument as if they constitute a conceptual deficiency, seem to miss this
point. However, I think Marchart would agree with Butler’s critique of Laclau
29
in a more restricted sense. A conceptual ambiguity clearly emerges in Laclau’s

vocabulary when we pose, as Marchart does (2004: 66), the following question:
where do we encounter the radical line between the ontological and the ontic?
He responds by stating that the line is obviously not to be drawn between more
or less universalized particularities, since even ‘relatively’ universalized content
would still remain on the ontic level. Rather, the line runs between those more
or less universalized contents on the one hand and the dimension of universality/
particularity as such on the other. By virtue of being a dimension, the universal
constitutes the impossible but necessary horizon of the possible and always
gradual ontic universals. The universal qua limit point is therefore an absolute, an
empty place, which signifies a condition of failure. The same holds true for the
particular qua dimension: by virtue of being a limit point, it is an empty singularity
and hence equally impossible. However, as Marchart emphasizes (2004: 67), the
singular and the absolute are intrinsic aspects of the play between particular and
universal, and in some cases they can even be said to be identical with the latter.
He notes, ‘[T]he singular and the absolute – as impossible limit cases – cannot
be easily separated from the aspect of the particular and the universal: this might
be the reason why Laclau does not see the need to develop separate concepts’
(Marchart 2004: 66). I want to add to Marchart’s remark that this lack of separate
concepts might also be the reason why Butler objects that there is sometimes an
undecidable coincidence of particular and universal (2000a), which may be why
she in turn perpetuates this confusion in her own account of the matter.
In this context, it is important to emphasize that Butler does not do away
with ontology as such. As Chambers and Carver note (2008: 170n8), it is the
assumption of a prior ontology that Butler wishes to resist, not the actual work
of ontology itself. In fact, the language of ontology has come into prominence
in her later works, where she alternately insists on the primacy of relationality
(vulnerability to others), the precariousness of life and the normative conditions
for the production of the subject (see for example Butler 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2009).
In Frames of War she argues that these normative conditions produce a historically
contingent ontology, ‘such that our capacity to discern and name the “being” of
the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition’ (Butler 2009: 4).
Accordingly, she defies ontology as a set of fundamental structures of being that
are distinct from any and all social and political organizations, arguing instead that
the ‘being’ of life is constituted through selective means, which implies that we
cannot refer to this ‘being’ outside of the operation of power and politics.
Sexual Difference as an Effect of Politics
Clearly, Butler subscribes to the general assumption that claims are neither
exclusively universal nor exclusively particular, but at the same time she cautions
30
against locating the universal dimension in the structural features of any and all
languages. She regards the separation of the formal analysis of language from
its cultural and social syntax, as well as from its semantics, as highly problematic
(see Butler 2000a: 34). According to her, far from being an empty place that
awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event, the universal is always
already filled with content. She seems to be of the opinion that the universal,
instead of being ‘located’ in the ontology of language, constitutes a dimension
of a particular sociopolitical, normative claim – a claim for universality. And by
virtue of being a claim, the universal must be articulated through a certain set
of cultural conventions in a recognizable venue (Butler 2000a: 35). In response
to Laclau’s notion of the universal as an empty place, she maintains that it is
empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from
which it emerges (Butler 2000a: 34). As she sees it, the emptiness is an effect
of politics, not grounded in ontology. With this move, Butler turns Laclau’s
‘philosophy of difference’ on its head, as it were. The presupposition that any
claim is constituted in and through a suppression of the ontological difference
is repudiated in favour of an argument that highlights the social and political
– indeed the hegemonic – character of exclusion. Consequently, she calls into
question the very defining feature of ‘philosophies of difference’: namely, the
assumption that difference constitutes an irreducible heterogeneity on the
ontological level that occasions the system of differentiations within the social
system of signification on the one hand and – qua ontic difference – constitutes
particular differentiations on the other. In her response to this conflation of
meanings of difference, Butler poses the following rhetorical question: are the
two meanings always distinct? (2000b: 143).
This question is especially directed at Slavoj Žižek (1992), who deploys
the concept of sexual difference in accordance with a psychoanalytic scheme.
According to Butler, he ‘posits a transcultural structure to social reality that
presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that
presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all
humans’ (2000b: 141–2). The symbolic order is thus rendered transculturally
(hetero)normative and is secured by an extra-political, universal structure.
The problem, as Butler sees it, arises from the quasi-transcendental status
that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. ‘If he is right,’ notes Butler, ‘then
sexual difference, in its most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for
hegemony’ (2000b: 143). Sexual difference is then distinguished from other
struggles within hegemony such as class struggles, because other struggles do
not ‘simultaneously name a fundamental … difference and a concrete, contingent
historical identity’ (Butler 2000b: 143). While class appears (solely) within the
symbolic horizon, sexual difference denotes simultaneously a radical exteriority
to the symbolic order and a concrete struggle by virtue of being just another
social differentiation.
31
The pressing question is: how are we to regard the oscillation between these
two meanings? Butler’s rhetorical question as to whether they are always distinct
is posed in this context; that is, it is posed in response to the way in which Žižek
institutes sexual difference as the ground, occasioning a sustaining condition
for what is called the historical. So, how contingent are the struggles of sexual
difference? How truly hegemonic is hegemonic heteronormativity? In Butler’s
view it is difficult, even on the conceptual level, to keep what she calls the
‘transcendental’ and the ‘social’ apart (2000b: 146). Given its status as ‘regulatory
and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object’ (a radically
incontestable principle that establishes intelligibility through foreclosure), it is
unclear, according to Butler, what place sexual difference ‘can fruitfully have
for an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radical
democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference’ (2000b: 147). That is, the
so-called radical gap between the two meanings of ‘foreclosure’ (understood
as originary exclusion on the one hand and social pathologization or political
disenfranchisement on the other) might not be all that radical or clear-cut. Butler
wonders whether sexual difference can ever be without semantic content: ‘And
what if we have indeed done nothing more than abstracted the social meaning
of sexual difference and exalted it as a … presocial structure?’ (2004a: 212). I
will leave this discussion of sexual difference for the moment. My point is that
Butler not only casts fundamental doubt upon the status of sexual difference
– and the putatively ingrained heteronormativity – in Žižek’s (and presumably
others’) psychoanalytic line of reasoning. As already mentioned, she profoundly
questions the radical gap between ontological and ontic difference.
In keeping with Butler’s critique, two questions arise. First, does contingency
presuppose ontological difference? Second, does ontological difference have to
be pre- or extra-political? Provided that the answer to the second question is
yes, as Butler seems to presume, the first question suggests that we can speak
of contingency – and of hegemonic political struggle – without alluding to an
ontological difference by way of constitutive structural necessity. As I will make
clear in the following, Butler appears to be arguing in favour of contingency
independent of ontological difference. But as I will also attempt to demonstrate,
her repudiation of extra-political categories risks throwing the baby out with
the bathwater by concomitantly disavowing the conceptual distinction between
‘the political’ and ‘politics’. Bearing in mind the two aforementioned questions,
I argue in the following that we do not need to subscribe to the notion of
a transcendental or metaphysical ground in order to deploy the concept of
ontological difference and the attendant concept of ‘the political’. In other
words, we do not need to grant (sexual difference qua) ontological difference
a status as extra-political. On the contrary, and this is a decisive point, the
See Butler (2000b: 147) for an elaboration of the concept of transcendental.

32
distinction between the ontological concept of ‘the political’ on the one hand
and ontic ‘politics’ on the other may allow us to reject extra-political assumptions
about necessity. It is my contention that ‘the political’, far from invoking an
extra-political ground, is contingent upon concrete political struggles, even
as it logically precedes such struggles. And this contention would allow for a
politicization of sexual difference not only as a social, ontic category but most
importantly, also as an ontological category.
The Political and Politics
Whereas ‘the political’ (le politique, das Politische) alludes to ontological difference,
‘politics’ (la politique, die Politik) signifies concrete political events in compliance
with more conventional view of politics. Borrowing the vocabulary of
Heidegger, Chantal Mouffe points out that ‘politics’ refers to the ontic level,
while ‘the political’ as separated from conventional politics has to do with
the ontological level concerning the very way in which society is instituted
(2005: 8–9). As she also emphasizes, however, this still leaves the possibility
of considerable disagreement about what constitutes ‘the political’ (2005: 9).
From the vantage point of Mouffe’s political theory, ‘the political’ denotes a
dimension of antagonism that she, in line with Laclau, takes to be constitutive
of human societies. Whereas by ‘politics’ she means ‘the set of practices and
institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence
in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’ (Mouffe 2005: 9).
Antagonism is hence not in itself a concrete political conflict; rather, it is
constitutive of political conflicts and the pluralistic nature of the social world.
Next to antagonism, Mouffe notes, the concept of hegemony is the key
notion for addressing the question of ‘the political’ (2005: 17). If we differentiate
the social (politics) from the political, we could link the latter to the acts of
hegemonic institution. Mouffe elaborates, ‘To take account of “the political”
as the ever-present possibility of antagonism requires coming to terms with
the lack of a final ground and acknowledging the dimension of undecidability
which pervades every order’ (2005: 17). It means recognizing that ‘every society
is the product of a series of practices attempting to establish order in a context
of contingency’ (2005: 17). Citing Laclau (1996), she argues that there are two
central dimensions of hegemonic intervention: ‘[T]he “contingent” character
of the hegemonic articulations and their “constitutive” character, in the sense
that they institute social relations in a primary sense, not depending on any a
priori social rationality’ (Mouffe 2005: 17). Due to hegemonic institution, she
contends, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent
practices (2005: 18). Remarks Mouffe, ‘Things could always be otherwise and
therefore every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities.
33
It is in that sense that it can be called “political” since it is the expression of a

particular structure of power relations’ (2005: 18).
The observant reader who is familiar with Butler’s work may well nod
in recognition. As indicated above, Butler’s critique of the hegemony of
heterosexuality – heteronormativity – highlights the political dimension of
norms and the contingent nature of our classifications. And in her latest works,
she is particularly preoccupied with the precarious nature of the social. However,
as I have also pointed out, Butler reaches a similar conclusion to that of Mouffe
without assuming an ontological concept of the political as prior to politics. At
this juncture I want to suggest, paraphrasing Mouffe, that this not only leaves
the possibility of considerable disagreement about what constitutes the political
but also concomitantly what constitutes politics and contingency. This in turn
leads us back to the two questions I posed above. First, does contingency
presuppose ontological difference? Second, does ontological difference have to
be pre- or extra-political? We can now pose the latter question with a different
spin: Provided that the political is constitutive of politics, could it simultaneously
be constituted by politics? Or does its ontological status preclude the political
from being contingent upon concrete struggles in the social sphere of politics?
The above discussion suggests that radical difference must be an ontological
difference but ontological difference does not have to be extra-political. We
could rather regard ontological difference as an effect of political struggle. I will
elaborate on this argument in the following.
Politico-Ontological Difference
In Post-Foundational Political Thought (2007), Marchart argues in favour of an

ontological concept of ‘the political’ that is contingent on politics. In accordance
with Laclau and Mouffe, he contends that the differentiation between the political
and politics pertains to the question of grounding, signifying the impossibility
of a final ground – an ultimate foundation – for society. This very absence of a
final ground serves as a condition of possibility for continuous and contingent
acts of grounding. What is at stake in political post-foundationalism, Marchart
asserts (2007: 155), is not the impossibility of any ground but the impossibility
of a final ground. Even though the politico-ontological difference renders
impossible any guarantees with regard to a particular political outcome, the
political difference is not untainted by any particular ‘beings’ or ontic regions
(see Marchart 2007: 170). In the last section of his book, Marchart (2007)
Rather than clinging to a hypostatized notion of ‘dif-ference’ as such, Marchart

(2007: 170–71) suggests we should take into account that difference will have to work
itself out on a particular ontic terrain and therefore will always be less than a ‘pure’
34
elaborates on this politicization of ontological difference by taking issue with

what he calls ‘philosophism’, which cuts the links between differential ontology
as a ‘first philosophy’ and all other philosophies. A philosophy that seeks to
capture being and ‘dif-ference’ as such, he argues, will always tend to denigrate
the realm of the ontic, of history and of politics (2007: 170). The decisive point
is that the political difference is not to be regarded as merely a derivation of
the ontological difference, because post-foundational political thought would
then remain subordinated to philosophy – to what Heidegger calls thinking
(Marchart 2007: 171). Opposed to such a bent towards transcendental thinking,
Marchart maintains that the ontological difference must be understood in light
of political difference, and subsequently the difference (or differencing) between
the political and politics is in itself political (2007: 172). The irreducible gap
– the radical difference, the antagonism – between the ontological and the ontic
is based on a political decision that unites the two sides in a never-ending play.
On account of this, the interplay between the ontological and the ontic that
points to the absent ground of society is of a non-natural, non-universal and
contingent nature.
Does this mean that Butler is right, then, in claiming that it is difficult –
even on the conceptual level – to keep ontological sexual difference (universal
condition for the social) apart from ontic sexual difference (particular social
category)? As we have seen, Butler’s rhetorical question as to whether they are
always distinct was posed in response to Žižek’s institution of sexual difference
as an allegedly quasi-transcendental ground. In her insistence on the contingent
status of sexual difference, she refutes sexual difference as a universal ground
for the social and maintains instead that sexual difference – and the hegemony
of heterosexuality to which it may contribute – is the outcome of a political
decision, indeed of a political struggle within hegemony (see Butler 2000b: 143).
In line with Butler, we might at this stage simply return to the general postulate
that the universal is always particular and that it is not always easy to discern
between the two. But what exactly is meant by ‘universal’ in this context? Once
again, we might ask how universal the ‘universal ground’ actually is. I think
the key to this question can be found in the concept of politico-ontological
difference, which is why I wish to linger on this subject awhile. Following
Marchart, I will proceed by asking what the term ‘political’ means when used to
designate a political difference between the ontological and the ontic.
dif-ference. ‘Every ontology, which necessarily will be less than a pure ontology, has to
be grounded in an “ontic”, which necessarily will be more than a mere ontic’ (Marchart
2007: 171). This argument implies a reversal of priority; the political ontology precedes
the traditional ontology of a metaphysica generalis. Clearly, by virtue of being based
on a contingent decision, a general ontology has a precarious status but the political
difference nevertheless mirrors ontological difference.
35
Para-Political (Sexual) Difference
Is the qualifier ‘political’ borrowed from the side of ‘the political’ (the ontological
side) or from ‘politics’ (the ontic side)? How exactly is the political difference
between the ontological and ontic levels to be envisaged as political? Interestingly,
Marchart turns to Žižek in addressing this issue. Marchart’s approval of Žižek’s
conceptualization of political difference might therefore give us a clue as to
how we could understand the so-called quasi-transcendental character of
Žižek’s notion of sexual difference. I will argue that ‘quasi-transcendental’
in Marchart’s interpretation translates into what we could call ‘para-political’,
which is neither politics pure and simple (a positively determined sub-system
of social relations), nor is it extra-political (untainted by any particular ‘beings’
or ontic regions). Without anticipating the whole argument, I suggest that this
conceptual distinction between para-political and extra-political allows us to
understand ‘the political’ as a political category even as it precedes ‘politics’.
And if this holds true of the term ‘sexual difference’ as well, Butler might be
criticized for disavowing the possibility of a para-political constitutive outside
of politics (as distinct from an extra-political, transcendental outside). We do
not have to assume that everything that is not politics must be extra-political, I
argue, since it could be neither of the two.
In accordance with what I have outlined above, Žižek (1991) conceives of
the political as the moment of undecidability – the moment at which the very
structuring principle of society is called into question – and politics as a sub-
system of the social or a particular form of action. What is peculiar about
Žižek’s account, Marchart writes (2007: 173), is his ‘symptomatological’ reading
of politics as a sub-system, by which he grants politics a metaphorical status.
‘Politics’ as a sub-system becomes a metaphor for the political; it becomes
the element that holds the place of the political as negativity, suspending it
and founding it anew. Politics as a sub-system represents the political for all
other social sub-systems (Žižek 1991: 193–4). In this sense, politics serves as a
symbolic reminder of the ungroundable nature – the impossibility – of society.
In her essay ‘Indefinite Detention’, published in Precarious Life (2004b), Butler
seems to use ‘para-legal’ and ‘extra-legal’ interchangeably, thereby disavowing the
possibility of a distinction between the two terms (the one being internal to the system,
the other external). In a similar vein, she seems to disavow the possibility of a para-political
dimension as distinct from an extra-political dimension. Instead of denoting an extra-
political foundation that pre-exists and justifies social norms, the para-political fracture
between ontological ‘being’ and ontic ‘beings’ could be regarded as an originary void that
is internal to society (politics) (see note 1). As will be highlighted below, the ontological
could then be regarded as a constitutive operation of society that is indeed a political
operation – an operation that furnishes society with its (contingent) foundations.
36
By virtue of being a metaphor, politics serves as a stand-in for the political.

Still arguing in line with Žižek, Marchart maintains that politics assumes its full
potential only in moments of ‘antagonization’ – moments of undecidability
(2007: 173–4). But once the social bond or a new hegemonic order is re-
established, it is reduced to one social sub-system of several. This observation,
he argues, has the merit of reminding us that there is no political difference
without politics on one side of the difference. That is to say, politics is of as
much importance as the political on the other side of the difference. And it
reminds us that politics is not necessarily reducible to other social spheres or
forms of action. However, as Marchart also argues – against Žižek this time
– the above observation has the disadvantage of ignoring that antagonization
may occur in any social sub-system, not only in the system of politics
(2007: 174). Any form of action may be turned into political action – a fact that
Žižek, according to Marchart (2007: 177n4), knows very well but is unwilling to
accept the implications of.
This gives rise to the following question: what are the implications of
these observations for sexual difference? I think that there are two possible
answers. The first is that sexual difference, when granted a status as a (radical)
constitutive outside of the social system of signification, is akin to the political.
Sexual difference is hence not independent of social power and politics. On the
contrary, concrete sexual difference (as a gender system) serves as the symbolic
reminder of the ungroundable nature of the social system of classifications. And
conversely, no sexual difference can exist without concrete sexual differences. In
a certain sense, then, Butler might be right about the blurred boundary between
the two concepts of sexual difference. As I suggested above however, she might
be wrong to depict this intertwining as a conflation (which recalls a similar point
I made with regard to Butler’s understanding of Laclau). I also wish to suggest
another possible answer to the question posed above based on the observation
that antagonization may occur in any social sub-system (not only in the system
of politics). Alluding to Marchart, I suggest that an alternative answer would
be that Žižek fails to recognize – or rather fails to accept the consequences of
– the fact that sexual difference, when granted a status as politico-ontological,
may occur everywhere, not only in relation to social gender differentiations.
Regarding this point, Butler’s critique of Žižek seems pertinent, because as long
as the term ‘sexual difference’ denotes an instituting ontological difference, it
is inevitably taken to be the source of sex as an organizing principle of society.
Thus, it could easily serve as a legitimizing ground for heteronormativity and not
be subject to the discursive re-articulations proper to hegemony (see Butler 1993:
196). As Butler puts it, ‘[I]f difference is not a code for heterosexual normativity,
then surely it needs to be articulated so that difference is understood as that which
disrupts the coherence of any postulation of identity’ (2004a: 202–3).
37
Following up on this latter issue, we may now return to Marchart’s approach

on the political and politics. In his response to Žižek, he argues that the political
is everywhere – although here ‘everywhere’ is not a particular place but instead
denotes the constant ‘ontological’ moment of society’s institution prior to (but
not privileged in relation to) politics (Marchart 2007: 174). Marchart infers
from this that politics may serve as the ontic name for the political in the
mode of an enactment; an enactment that is conditioned by the political but is
nevertheless separated from the political by an unbridgeable chasm. As much as
one enacts politics, Marchart argues, one is enacted by the political; one brings
about the ‘event’ of the political whenever one acts, which is why nobody has
ever seen politics pure and simple. This is also why displacement of politics,
when implying the foreclosure of society’s ungroundable nature, is a political
move in and of itself – a move that is often associated with foundationalism.
However, we might likewise direct our attention to anti-foundationalism where
such foreclosure is concerned, in so far as the dismissal of any ground involves
disavowal of the political, as in envisaging the social (politics) pure and simple.
Against this backdrop, we could argue that a concept of ontological difference
serves to politicize (theories of) the social. The politico-ontological difference
may indeed serve as a check on totalizing politics and knowledge. I will attempt
to substantiate this argument in the concluding section by returning to the issue
of subversion.
Reaching a Non-Conclusion
If, like Laclau, we assume that the constitutive outside of the social system of
signification comes into play inside it as its dislocation or subversion, we might
also argue that sexual difference on the ontological level can only partially limit
sexual difference on the ontic level, which in turn effects a change in ontological
sexual difference. The demarcation line between ontic sexual difference and
ontological sexual difference – inside and outside – is then blurred, but their
radical difference is nevertheless necessary for this mutual subversion to take
place. At this juncture, it might prove prudent to turn our attention to Butler’s
conceptualization of subversion. The subtitle of Gender Trouble is ‘feminism and
the subversion of identity’, and although Butler does not offer a precise definition
of the term, subversion clearly targets heteronormativity. This is because, as
Chambers and Carver argue (2008: 140), subversion denotes ‘internal erosion’.
It is a critical theoretical and political practice of working on norms from within
the cultural matrix of power relations (see Chambers and Carver 2008: 142). To
subvert heterosexual norms is, more precisely, to repeat the regulatory practices
that maintain the heterosexual matrix (heteronormativity) in a way that alters its
terms. However, as Chambers and Carver also suggest (2008: 154), the meaning
38
of the terms ‘gender’, ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ can never be overthrown within
heteronormativity. This tension between challenging heteronormativity from
within its terms on the one hand and toppling the entire heterosexual matrix
on the other seems to be at the core of the concept of subversion in Gender
Trouble. Butler continues to be concerned with this antinomy, which she depicts
in Frames of War as a tension between ‘(a) expanding the existing normative
concepts … to accommodate and overcome contemporary impasses, and (b)
the call for alternative vocabularies’ (2009: 146).
We have seen that women – conjuring up notions of particularity and sexual
difference – might ‘seize the language of enfranchisement … claiming to be
covered of previous conventional formulations of the universal’ (Butler 1997:
89; see also Rancière 2006: 59–62). However, this double-speak does not involve
a simple assimilation to an existing norm (Butler 1997: 91). Subjects who are not
entitled to the universal but nevertheless enact universality put the gap between
the exercise of the universal and its realization into public discourse. The point
being that this gap between the particular articulation and the universal ideal
has the potential to politically mobilize and contest the hegemony of dominant
norms or conventions (see Butler 1997: 91; Butler and Spivak 2007: 68–9). To
be excluded from the universal and yet to make a claim within its terms, Butler
argues (2004a: 191), is to utter a performative contradiction of a certain kind.
The universal then emerges as a postulated and open-ended ideal that can be
articulated only in response to a challenge from its own outside (Butler 1997:
90). To Butler, the failure of the norm to effect the universal reach for which it
stands constitutes ‘the promising ambivalence of the norm’ (1997: 91).
I wish to suggest here that the politics of performative contradiction
is promising not simply because of the blurring of the boundary between
the particular and the universal on the ontic level. As I see it, the politics of
performative contradiction is also promising by virtue of constituting a moment
of undecidability that calls into question the very structuring principle of society.
The performative contradiction serves to highlight the ambivalence in the social
system constituted by the boundary between inside and outside. ‘Erosion from
within’ could then be regarded as a subversion from an outside that is always
already an inside, or to be more precise, as a mutual subversion between the
inside and the constitutive outside. Another way of putting this would be that
the tension between inside and outside is no longer perceived as an antinomy on
the ontic level of politics but rather as a para-political intertwining that amounts
to a hybrid play between inside (sexual politics/categorization within the social
system) and outside (the political qua ontological sexual difference). In this
way, queer critique of heterosexual hegemony, notably of the naturalization of
sexual difference indicative of heteronormativity, might be enriched by theories
of hegemony. In turn, these theories could also benefit from engaging more
substantively with queer theories of subversion. It thus seems that we have
39
finally come full circle. However, we have not reached a definitive conclusion,
and my suggestion is that we refrain from closing this discussion but keep
revisiting the conceptual repertoires pertaining to theories of hegemony and
heteronormativity. I firmly believe that the two fields of research will continue
to mutually fortify as well as subvert one another, fostering equivalence – albeit
never consensus – as well as struggle.
References
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. London:
Routledge.
–––. 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. 10th ed. London:
Routledge.
–––. 2000a. Restaging the universal: hegemony and the limits of formalism.
In Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left, eds. Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 11–43. London: Verso.
–––. 2000b. Competing universalities. In Contingency, hegemony, universality:
Contemporary dialogues on the left, eds. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj
Žižek, 136–81. London: Verso.
–––. 2004a. Undoing gender. London: Routledge.
–––. 2004b. Precarious life. London: Verso.
–––. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham Univ. Press.
–––. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso.
Butler, Judith, and Gayatri C. Spivak. 2007. Who sings the nation-state? Language,
politics, belonging. London: Seagull Books.
Chambers, Samuel A. 2003. Untimely politics. Edinburgh and New York:
Edinburgh Univ. Press and New York Univ. Press.
Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver. 2008. Judith Butler and political theory:
Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Critchley, Simon, and Oliver Marchart. 2004. Introduction. In Laclau: A critical
reader, eds. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart, 1–13. London: Routledge.
Gressgård, Randi. 2010. Multicultural dialogue: Dilemmas, paradoxes, conflicts. Oxford:
Berghahn Books.
Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso.
a radical democratic politics. 2nd ed. London: Verso.
40

Handlungsfähigkeit im Feld des Politischen. Vienna: Böhlau.
Marchart, Oliver. 2004. Politics and the ontological difference. In Laclau: A critical
–––. 2007. Post-foundational political thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the political. London: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of democracy. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London:
Verso.
Scott, Joan W. 1996. Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor.
London: Verso.
–––. 1992. Enjoy your symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. London:
Routledge.
41
Chapter 2
From the ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ to
a ‘Heteronormative Hegemony’:
Initiating a Dialogue between
Judith Butler and Antonio Gramsci
about Queer Theory and Politics
Gundula Ludwig
With Gender Trouble (1990) Judith Butler laid a cornerstone for understanding
heterosexuality as a powerful force that constitutes bodies and subjects, instead
of merely as an intimate practice. In this ground-breaking volume, Butler
radically rethinks the categories of gender and power by arguing that power
cannot be reduced to a force that is acted upon already existing sexed bodies
or subjects. Rather, gender, sexed bodies and female/male subjects are effects
of a power formation called the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990: 151). The
flipside of Butler’s argument is that ‘identities’ – not only ‘women’ and ‘men’
but ‘lesbians’ and ‘gays’ too – are an effect of a heterosexual power formation,
which by referring to identities as a basis for politics reiterates what it is
supposed to undermine. Butler’s proposal to understand heterosexuality as a
‘grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are
naturalized’ (1990: 151) has therefore also incited new forms of politics beyond
identities. Butler’s theoretical intervention was embedded in a critique of the
phantasm of a universalized ‘women’s movement’ that was also articulated by
women of colour and lesbians. They pointed out that referring to a shared
identity eliminates the differences and heterogeneity between ‘women’ along
the lines of ‘race’, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The genealogy of what later
became known as queer theory and queer politics is intricately linked to these
theoretical and political interventions. Queer theory and politics attempt to
reveal and ‘equivocate’ (Engel 2002) the conditions that constitute intelligible
forms of identities, rather than referring to identities themselves.
Since Gender Trouble was first published two decades ago, queer theory has
continuously grown. While there may not be a single queer theorist who does
not draw on Butler’s work on the heterosexual matrix in one way or another, the
term is slowly being replaced by the term ‘heteronormativity’. Not only does the
latter indicate more accurately that heterosexuality is not just a social practice – as
Michael Warner (1991) who introduced the term points out – it also structures
gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech,
consumption and desire, nature and culture, masturbation, reproductive politics,
racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate
life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms
about the bearing of the body. (Warner 1991: xiii)
Surprisingly, the theorization of the heteronormative power formation still

remains a relatively underexplored area within queer theory. Brilliant and
challenging writing has been published on heteronormativity and the legal
system, citizenship, migration regimes, kinship, economy, politics, media,
sciences and much more (see Drushel and German 2009; Fineman, Jackson,
and Romero 2009; see also the introduction of this volume). However,
systematic theoretical reflections on how heteronormative power operates, how
it gains its stability and how it can be challenged are still rare (an exception
is Chambers and Carver 2008). This theoretical gap is the starting point for
this chapter. Because I still consider Butler’s heterosexual matrix as the most
thorough theorization of heterosexuality as a power formation, I will begin by
re-examining her work on gender and the constitution of gendered subjects.
My argument here is that although the term heterosexual matrix undoubtedly
clarifies the role of heterosexuality as a structuring social force and although
this has brought forth compelling contributions for rethinking radical politics,
its underlying conceptualization of power remains limited. In turn, this lack
also places constraints on queer politics. After diagnosing the ‘trouble’ with the
heterosexual matrix, I will revisit this concept based on an understanding of
power as hegemony, drawing on Antonio Gramsci. At first glance, it may seem
odd to initiate a dialogue between Butler and Gramsci to better understand
heteronormativity. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is indebted to his search for
more applicable tools for analysing class power in order to find strategies with
which to overcome capitalist society. What could be the benefit of looking
at his Prison Notebooks from a queer-theoretical standpoint? This question
becomes more relevant if we consider that the Prison Notebooks not only present
an analysis of hegemony as a form of power that governs class relations, but
that they were also written many decades before the term ‘queer’ entered the
social sciences. I propose that disassociating Gramsci’s notion of hegemony
from its limited understanding as solely pertaining to class offers us new ways
of theorizing heteronormative power. I refer to hegemony as a specific power
formation that operates beyond juridical power and that cannot be reduced
to class relations. Against this background, I will introduce the notion of
44
From the ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ to a ‘Heteronormative Hegemony’
‘heteronormative hegemony’ and argue how conceptualizing power in terms

of hegemony provides a more precise understanding of heteronormativity in
central European societies today than Butler’s heterosexual matrix.
The Heterosexual Matrix
Gender as a Norm within the Heterosexual Matrix
Butler introduces the heterosexual matrix in order to reject the assumption that
gender and gendered subjects are the effects of a pregiven sex. Instead, gender
is a construction constituted within the discursive realm of the heterosexual
matrix. According to Butler, this construction operates as a norm. Here it is
crucial to note the difference between gender norms and gender as norm, which
Butler (2004: 42) points out in Undoing Gender: ‘To claim that gender is a norm
is not quite the same as saying that there are normative views of femininity
and masculinity, even though there clearly are such normative views’. Here
Butler shifts the focus, as her primary concern is not to examine the norms
‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’. Rather, she views gender itself as a discursive binary
heterosexual construction, which she renders a norm. The materialization of
this norm not only constitutes a sexed body but also an intelligible form of
subjectivity (Butler 1990: 5 ff.; Butler 1993: 2; Butler 2004: 41). The constitution
of the sexed body thus coincides with the constitution of an intelligible subject.
There is no already existing subject prior to its gendering.
According to the norm, gender is supposed to be complementary and
coherent: gender is only thinkable, perceivable and liveable in a binary form.
There ‘are’ only two genders, which are related ‘through an oppositional relation
to that other gender it desires’ (Butler 1990: 22). Thus, gendered subjects – ‘being’
female or male – rely on the disavowal of the counterpart of the dichotomy.
‘[O]ne is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation
that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair’,
Butler argues (1990: 22). Gender is not only a binary construction but this binary
is also hierarchal; this is an aspect Butler tackles but does not systematically
incorporate into her theory. The Western, modern binary construction of
gender is based on a construction that associates masculinity with the universal
and femininity with the deviant other. For this reason, the binary construction
of gender is deeply interwoven with the hierarchy of gender. Furthermore,
the relation between sex, gender and desire follows a heterosexual logic: sex
is perceived as bringing about gender and desire. For example, a female body
brings about a female gender and female desire that is assumed to be directed at
a male subject. Notes Butler, ‘The institution of a compulsory and naturalized
heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as binary relation in which the
45
masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation

is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire’ (1990: 22–3).
Gender as a norm is built upon both coherence and complementarity that
constitute it as a heterosexual construct.
Butler reveals that the heterosexual matrix relies on disavowals that are, at
the same time, constituted within the matrix itself. According to Butler, these
disavowals are the effect of a heterosexual law. She describes these disavowals
with the psychoanalytical term ‘abject’ in order to grasp the simultaneity of the
‘production’ and disavowals of the intelligible. The abject is a necessary element
in understanding how the ‘natural’ is also constituted within the heterosexual
matrix (Butler 1993: 3). The disavowal of homosexuality is the precondition
for the naturalization of heterosexuality. Thus, when Butler proposes that we
understand sexed bodies and gendered subjects as constructed, she also argues:
[C]onstructivism needs to take account of the domain of constraints without

which a certain living and desiring cannot make its way. And every such being is
constrained by not only what is difficult to imagine, but what remains radically
unthinkable: in the domain of sexuality these constraints include the radical
unthinkability of desiring otherwise, the radical unendurability of desiring
otherwise, the absence of certain desires, the repetitive compulsion of others.
(1993: 94)
In this vein, the constitution of subjects relies on disavowal as well. Butler

theorizes these disavowals as a form of violence – as normative violence that
lies within the gender norm itself (see also Chamber and Carver 2008: 128).
Through the naturalization of heterosexuality and the dichotomy of gender
as naturally given, distinct and unchangeable, this normative violence remains
disarticulated (Butler 1999: xix; Butler 2004: 8).
Performing the Heterosexual Matrix
To describe the mode of power through which gender as a norm is materialized

in a sexed and gendered body and subject, Butler refers to the concept of
performativity, which she uses to argue that gender as a norm is reiterated in
performative acts. Performativity is not a single act but an ongoing repetition. It
is through these reiterations of performative acts that power becomes material
– in a female or male body as subject – and that ‘sexual difference’ becomes
naturalized (Butler 1990: 2). Moreover, performative acts also constitute a
‘metaphysics of substance’ (1990: 25), an inner core, an internal coherence or a
‘genuine or authentic sexual identity’ (1990: viii; 136).
The flipside of Butler’s understanding of performativity as the modus
operandi of power (and respectively of the heterosexual matrix) is that not
46
only are gendered subjects constituted through performative acts, but power
is also enacted performatively. The relationship between the gendered subject
and the heterosexual matrix is co-constitutive. The subject is constituted as
intelligible and subordinated through and within the heterosexual matrix. At
the same time, the heterosexual matrix can only become powerful through
its reiteration within performative acts. Michel Foucault (1978) undoubtedly
influenced Butler’s understanding of power. Like Foucault, she does not grasp
power as a substance that reproduces itself autopoetically. Instead, power is
grounded in social practices. Although Butler theorizes the relation between
the heterosexual matrix and gendered subjects as co-constitutive, she claims
it is nevertheless not determining. Butler references Derrida’s concept of
‘différance’ (1999) to indicate that the reiteration within performative acts does
not ever fully reproduce the norm performed but there is always a residue
that remains – something that differs from the norm. Here, Butler relies on a
linguistic argument to leave open an indeterminate space within performative
acts. ‘The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures,’ she
notes, ‘a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed
and defy the injunction by which they are generated’ (Butler 1990: 145). It is this
linguistic argument that also lays the groundwork for Butler’s understanding
of resistance. She locates the possibility for subversion or resistance in the gap
that necessarily remains between the heterosexual matrix and the gender norm,
as well as in their repetition in performative acts. Because a repetition is never
a copy, it always already entails the possibility to subvert what is repeated. For
Butler, the ‘variation on that repetition’ is the source of queer resistance to the
heterosexual matrix (1990: 145).
Power Trouble?
Without a doubt, Butler has shifted our understanding of heterosexuality by

providing a tool with which heterosexuality is viewed as a power formation that
renders bodies and subjects intelligible. Nevertheless, there are three aspects
of her argument that I consider problematic and which I will outline here.
Firstly, Butler does not theorize how the heterosexual matrix gains its power.
Interestingly, Butler criticizes Louis Althusser in his essay Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses (1971) for assuming that power operates like a ‘religious
authority’, addressing subjects as a ‘divine voice’ (Butler 1997: 110). In her
critique, she points out that this precludes any theoretical engagement with the
question of why power ‘possesses’ authority. However, her conceptualization
of the heterosexual matrix is also unable to address this question. Although
Butler states that the heterosexual matrix requires performative acts to become
powerful, she does not take up the issue of how the heterosexual matrix gains
its authority at all. I argue that it is possible for Butler to avoid addressing this
47
question since she grasps the law as the ‘dominant framework within which social
relations take place’ (Butler 1990: 76; emphasis mine). Since the matrix relies on
the law, Butler draws on a juridical frame when it comes to the question how
the heterosexual matrix gains its stability. Consequently, the heterosexual matrix
remains a sovereign grid; once in place, it remains there and has power – leaving
out the question of how it attains power.
Secondly, Butler’s notion of the heterosexual matrix remains abstract. She
does not theorize the relation of social actions, social relations and relations
of social forces to the heterosexual matrix. Consequently, what is missing here
is the question of how the heterosexual matrix and gender as a (binary) norm
can possibly be challenged and transformed through social struggles. Do social
struggles not also lead to changes and contradictions in the heterosexual matrix?
And would the heterosexual matrix and the norm ‘gender’ then not be as rigid
and immune to social and historical transformations as Butler implies? These
ambivalences characterize current neoliberal societies in ‘Western Europe’.
Demands from the gay and lesbian movement for juridical recognition and
equality have been co-opted. Over the last decades, criminalization of and legal
discrimination against gays and lesbians in ‘Western European’ societies have
decreased. The rise of registered partnerships, openly gay and lesbian politicians,
as well as the increasing importance of the ‘pink economy’ and the inclusion
of gay or lesbian characters in mainstream soap operas, are all examples of
this. They all attest to the fact that the border between heterosexuality and
homosexuality has become more open and that the continuum of ‘normality’
has expanded. This is one side of the coin. However, while some aspects of
neoliberal societies are characterized by an increase of visibility and juridical
equality of gay and lesbian ways of living, this by no means points to a general
decrease in the importance of heteronormativity for the constitution of
intelligible subjects and the social order. While an increase in tolerance and
diversity within politics as well as within political and social discourses can
be considered an achievement of new forms of freedom, these gains are still
only a transformation of heteronormativity. Moreover, the hegemony of the
worldview that declares the existence of a ‘naturally given’ dichotomy between
sexes has not undergone a radical transformation. Referring to Butler’s notion
of a heterosexual matrix here does not allow for an analysis of these double-
edged phenomena. This is not only a theoretical void but also leads to political
consequences. Given that in ‘Western European’ societies heteronormativity
is currently governed through these ambivalences, they must be taken into
account as they are a crucial starting point for queer politics. The genealogy of
neoliberal heteronormativity cannot be separated from queer, gay and lesbian
struggles throughout the last decades, as some of their demands have been
incorporated into neoliberal ways of regulating heteronormativity. At the same
time, these demands have been transformed and tamed – and it is dressed in
48
these tamed and transformed clothes that these demands have also helped
sustain heteronormativity. I think it is crucial to build theoretical and political
tools to reveal these ambivalences.
Thirdly, I argue that Butler reduces the processes of taking power upon
oneself – and respectively the relation between power and the subject – to
subjugation. In particular, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler is concerned
with the question of how the subject takes power upon itself, and she searches
for a way to overcome a concept of power that is simply imposed on subjects.
With the concept of performativity, Butler proposes that in performative acts,
power is not totally reproduced but reiterated. The reiteration cannot be reduced
to a mere imprint. Butler also states that the subject must turn to the norms of
subjectivity and recognize itself as female or male in order to become a subject.
Paradoxically, this implies that the subject has to withdraw from power in order
to turn the norm on itself: ‘[T]he subject is produced, paradoxically, through this
withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a speaking
topos’ (Butler 1997: 198). Nonetheless, Butler still does not offer a tool to
systematically theorize the (ambivalent) activities of the subject in the processes
of taking on power. In other words, Butler does not address the question
how and through which techniques the subject applies heteronormative scripts in
everyday performative practices. Since Butler approaches power as a matrix, she
focuses on juridical modes of acting out power thereby foreclosing the question
about the motor of the subject’s activities. In contrast, understanding power as
hegemony would make room to question how the subject exerts power upon
itself in a self-guided manner. I will return to this point again later on.
To conclude, by conceptualizing power in terms of a heterosexual matrix,
Butler’s approach to heteronormativity remains within a juridical frame even
though throughout her writing Butler claims she does not seek to theorize power
as juridical and solely repressive (Butler 1990: 2–9; 75–7; for a similar critique of
Butler’s work see Lorey 1996). In contrast, approaching heteronormativity by
also considering the notion of hegemony opens up the possibility to overcome
some of the outlined theoretical blank spaces. Firstly, such theorizing could veer
away from framing heterosexual power as sovereign authority. Instead, it would
allow us to raise the question of how it gains authority. Secondly, this kind of
theorizing would enable us to incorporate social relations and struggles as well
as their potential to change the heterosexual matrix into our theorizing – leading
to an understanding of heteronormativity as a dynamic power formation.
Finally, it would allow us to view heteronormativity as a power formation that
also operates using technologies of the self. The constitution of gendered
subjects, then, could be theorized as an effect of simultaneous subjugation
and empowerment. In Bodies That Matter, Butler admits that the concept of the
heterosexual matrix is too static and proposes to replace it with ‘hegemony’ to
better include the openness of power (1993: 13). She adds that using the term
49
hegemony could help to understand ‘the ways in which we consent to (and

reproduce) those tacit and covert relations of power’ (1993: 13). Nevertheless,
she does not systematically revisit her early works from this perspective. In
the following, I will take Butler’s suggestion seriously and investigate how the
concept of a heterosexual power formation changes when it is developed using
the notion of hegemony. I aim to develop an understanding of power that goes
beyond a juridical frame by engaging with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.
Hegemony as a Non-Juridical Formation of Power
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is concerned with the question how ‘Western’
capitalist societies based on oppression and exploitation gain their stability – even
in periods of economic and political crisis. His premise here is that capitalism
is not a system that reproduces itself through automatic economic laws. Rather,
he views the stability of a specific social order (capitalism) as an effect of a
power formation he describes as hegemony. Hegemony is a formation of state
power that operates through ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (Gramsci 1985:
57), which in turn leads its subjects to affirm social orders, social practices
and certain ways of living. Having a job that occupies the main part of our
lifetime, getting married to someone of the opposite sex, considering sexuality
as private, affirming the existence of prisons as useful institutions – all
these various attitudes and social practices are fulfilled and supported by the
majority of people. This is not done through coercion, because such attitudes
and practices are regarded as agreeable, useful and meaningful. Even though
hegemony is a formation of power that operates through leading, guiding and
conducting subjects, it is crucial to note that these worldviews are not forced
upon subjects. Since hegemony is a formation of power that does not primarily
operate through repression but through consent, it relies on self-activities of
the (majority of) subjects – which are simultaneously activities carried out
by subjects themselves and ‘externally directed’ processes. Thus, stating that
hegemony operates through leading and guiding implies that subjects can and
do adopt hegemonic worldviews.
Gramsci describes hegemony as a power formation of the modern state
that is grounded in civil society. Gramsci refers to civil society as a ‘multitude
of … so-called provate initiatives and activities’ (1985: 259). This includes
schools, law courts, libraries and the media (1985: 259). It is crucial to note
that this cannot be read as an ahistorical ‘definition’ of what civil society is.
Instead, it is a historically concrete description of civil society in Italy during
Gramsci’s lifetime. What is considered as part of or outside of civil society
changes throughout time and place. However, from an analytical perspective,
the notion of civil society designates the social realm, which is formally
50
distinguished from ‘the state’ since it is the ‘ensemble of organisms commonly

called “private”’ (Gramsci 1985: 12). Within everyday interactions in civil society
– in neighbourhood communities, religious groups, political associations, trade
unions, schools, newspapers and leisure facilities – hegemonic worldviews about
society are negotiated. These worldviews become part of the state. This offers
an account of state power deeply embedded in civil society. Politics, laws and
state regulations are neither forced upon the subjects nor are they ‘produced’
in state institutions and imposed on society. The notion of hegemony shifts
the traditional understanding of the modern state in two ways. Firstly, since
the modern state not only exercises power through repression and coercion
but also through guiding and conducting, state power can thus be understood
as relying on guiding and conducting. Secondly, instead of operating from a
sovereign centre, ‘the state’ is deeply rooted in civil society. State power as
hegemony includes worldviews, ideas and perspectives of various social actors
that become part of the state.
Hegemony is a dynamic formation of state power that is simultaneously
a medium and a result of social struggles within civil society. Within social
struggles compromises are articulated, which in turn organizes hegemony.
What distinguishes hegemony from domination is that the former relies on the
consensus of the subjects and therefore also needs to integrate demands from
subaltern social groups to a greater or lesser extent (Gramsci 1985: 182). Gramsci
uses the term ‘passive revolution’ to describe this movement of integrating the
demands from social groups that oppose or criticize hegemonic worldviews
for the purpose of maintaining hegemony through transformation (1985:
105). This implies a paradox: while social struggles can challenge hegemony,
the incorporation of the demands and critique from social movements and
struggles simultaneously uphold hegemony through its transformation. Modes
of governing class, gender, sexual and racialized relations through hegemony
change over time. Yet these changes still allow the persistence of a bourgeois,
androcentric, heteronormative and white hegemony. The social movements of
the 1970s and 1980s in ‘Western’ European countries criticized Fordist society
for its hierarchal structures, paternalism, authoritarianism and standardization
of ways of working and living. They fought for more autonomy and more
freedom, as well as for different hegemonic worldviews about labour, family,
social authorities, norms and morality from/in the Fordist era. Since then, all of
these systems of domination have become more flexible and open. Yet, at the
same time, the co-option and incorporation of these demands has been crucial
for the expansion of neoliberalism. Neoliberal discourses have adopted these
demands in a way so that Fordist forms of social inequality, exploitation and
social injustice have not been overcome but transformed. ‘Western’ societies still
rely on and produce inequality and exploitation but the hegemonic worldviews
through which they become possible have changed.
51
Since social struggles are not only integral to hegemony but also constantly
change and transform hegemony (Gramsci 1985: 182), we can never define ‘the’
universal or ahistorical hegemony. Instead, hegemony is always a historically
and geographically specific formation of power – an effect of social practices
within civil society. Consequently, whatever ‘the state’, state power and politics
are at a given time, they are always the effect of social struggles. Obviously, in
the articulation of compromises, not all social actors have the same amount of
resources and importance or receive equal attention.
Clearly, Gramsci solely refers to hegemony as a power formation shaped by
class relations. From a queer-feminist and postcolonial perspective, Gramsci’s
understanding of hegemony necessarily remains restricted as many scholars have
already argued, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Stuart Hall
(1986), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) and Robert Connell (1995). I want to
point out two consequences this restriction has had. First, grasping hegemony only
in terms of class relations forecloses the possibility that gender, ethnic and sexual
relations are also governed through hegemony. If we take Gramsci’s proposal
seriously that hegemony is a specific formation of state power in ‘Western’ late
modern societies, there is no logical reason to exclusively refer to class relations,
since modern societies are also shaped through gendered, heteronormative and
racist power relations. Moreover, since hegemony is a formation of power based
on compromises articulated in social struggles, a perspective that focuses only
on class relations is unable to take into account how class, gender, sexual and
ethnic relations are interwoven within these compromises. And because class,
gender, sexual and ethnic power relations are interwoven, these struggles and
compromises are also shaped by the effects of those power relations on the others.
Given that hegemony cannot be restricted to class relations, I utilize the concept
of hegemony in order to grasp a specific formation of modern state power
through which social relations are governed by means of leading, conducting
and consent. This interpretation is also inspired by Foucault’s argument that
modern state power cannot be reduced to juridical means. Instead, the modern
state also operates through governing in the sense of conducting subjects and the
population (Foucault 2007, 2008).
Heteronormative Hegemony
Having laid out some theoretical problems with the notion of heterosexual matrix
and of an understanding of hegemony as a formation of power beyond a juridical
frame (which cannot be reduced to class relations but is a specific formation
of power in modern societies), I will now take Butler up on her proposal to
approach heterosexuality using the notion of hegemony. I argue that by replacing
an understanding of power as matrix with the concept of hegemony, we can
52
understand the subtle and ambivalent ways heteronormativity operates more

precisely. I prefer the notion of heteronormative hegemony over heterosexual
hegemony, as the former more accurately demonstrates that heterosexuality goes
far beyond certain social, ‘intimate’ practices but rather serves as an imagined
‘normality’ and as a norm, and thus as a crucial and powerful force in current
‘Western’ societies (Warner 1991). Following Butler, I describe heteronormative
hegemony as a power formation that is heteronormative since it constitutes the
binary division of sex as a criterion for the constitution of intelligible subjects.
These effects of power are naturalized through the constitution of femininity
and masculinity as the only intelligible forms of subjects. I will present five
arguments that outline how the introduction of heteronormative hegemony
leads to a different understanding of heteronormativity. I aim to argue that
the notion of heteronormative hegemony leads us to an understanding of
heteronormative power that grasps heteronormativity as grounded in social
relations and social struggles, and that is a formation of power that operates
through governing as a non-juridical modus operandi.
Firstly, heteronormative hegemony is a formation of state power grounded
in civil society. Various organizations, institutions and actors in civil society, such
as intellectuals from the medical and social sciences, law and the humanities,
feminist and queer political groups, family organizations and religious groups,
articulate ‘heterosexuality’, ‘homosexuality’, ‘gender’, ‘sexed bodies’ and images
of ‘normality’. These articulations become state power as the state addresses
subjects on the basis of these hegemonic worldviews. This perspective allows
us to analyse heteronormativity in a more concrete way than referring to Butler’s
notion of a heterosexual matrix. In Butler’s work, the heterosexual matrix
remains abstract since she does not link it to state power or social relations.
Approaching heteronormativity with the notion of hegemony not only enables
us to analyse state regulations such as kinship regulations, family tax policies
and laws that only recognize subjects as female or male ‘beings’, it also allows
us to understand these regulations as a result of articulations within civil society.
Consequently, heteronormative hegemony is a formation of power that does
not operate in a top-down fashion but is rooted in everyday practices within
civil society.
Secondly, heteronormative hegemony is a dynamic formation of power
since it is both an effect of and the terrain for social struggles. It is produced,
undermined, reinforced and shifted within social struggles. Let me emphasize
that this implies a crucial shift: heteronormative hegemony is not a sovereign
law that ‘dictates’ heteronormativity. Instead, heteronormative hegemony gains
its stability and power because it is based on compromises that are articulated
in social struggles. Given that hegemony, as Gramsci argues, is a formation of
power that relies on the consent of the majority of the subjects, heteronormative
hegemony can only gain authority through compromises. Heteronormative
53
hegemony then is always a historically and geographically-specific formation of

power that is the effect of social struggles within civil society at a given time,
which then materializes in state policies. In contrast to ahistorical and static
notions such as Butler’s heterosexual matrix, the notion of heteronormative
hegemony enables us to see how heteronormativity is also shaped through social
struggles. Consequently, because heteronormative hegemony is an effect of
social struggles and compromises, it always entails a certain degree of openness
and contradiction. And it is precisely this openness and inconsistency that make
it so powerful.
In line with Butler, I understand gender as a construction that is constituted
within the discursive realm of heteronormative hegemony. However, the crucial
difference here is that I do not understand gender as a norm that solely relies on
distinct disavowals and abjections but instead I envision it as a regulating system
that is more fluid and, to a certain extent, more open and contradictory. This
is possible because hegemony is rooted in social struggles and compromises
between various social actors, rather than functioning in a top-down manner.
Therefore, I propose understanding gender as regulative to point out its
constructedness and constitution within heteronormative power, and also so
that it cannot be reduced to a juridical norm produced by a heterosexual law as
Butler argues.
Thirdly, in accordance with Butler, I argue that sexed bodies and gendered
subjects are effects of heteronormative hegemony. These effects of
heteronormative hegemony become material through repeated performative
acts in which a female or male body and a ‘metaphysic of substance’ (Butler
1990: 25) and an ‘inner core’ are constituted as ‘naturally’ given and that
‘by which the “one” becomes viable at all’ (Butler 1993: 2). Considering
heteronormative hegemony as a specific form of state power implies that state
power also materializes itself in sexed bodies and gendered subjects – an effect
that remains inaccessible since these are naturalized through performative acts.
Here, I propose considering what Foucault (2007: 88) has called ‘governing’
as the modus operandi for heteronormative hegemony in an attempt to clarify
hegemony’s mode of operation (Ludwig 2010). As I have outlined above,
Gramsci points out that hegemony is not imposed upon subjects but that
it also operates through activities of the subjects. Here, Gramsci tackles an
aspect of power that is described in much more detail in Foucault’s lectures on
governmentality (Foucault 2007, 2008). In these lectures, Foucault states that
governing is power’s mode of operation, which also implies technologies of
the self. He introduces the technologies of the self as a ‘kind of auto–critique’
in his late work (Foucault 1997: 177). As a consequence, he substantially shifts
the understanding of subject constitution. Given that governing is a specific
form of enacting power that depends on the guidance of individuals, he argues
that in addition to techniques of domination, techniques of the self are also
54
of central importance for the constitution of the subject. The techniques of

the self are ‘techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a
certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own
thoughts, their own conduct’ (Foucault 1997: 177). Foucault’s argumentation
appreciates the paradox inherent in this dynamic: while the technologies of
the self are not situated outside of power relations, they are still techniques
that entail an activity undertaken by the subject itself. These techniques are not
forced upon the subject. Instead, the subject applies them to itself in its social
practices. They are simultaneously forms of subjugation and of empowerment.
Even though Butler clearly is influenced by Foucault’s work on power, in her
work on gender and heteronormativity she refers to Foucault’s early work.
Thus, she repeats Foucault’s reduction of subject constitution as subjugation.
Because Butler does not include technologies of the self as a modus operandi
of the heterosexual matrix, her concept cannot grasp the paradoxical interplay
between imposed and self-determined activities within the heterosexual matrix.
By arguing in favour of viewing gender as a result of performativity, Butler
proposes to understand the constitution of the subject as a process that
requires the activity of the subject; yet the theorization of this activity remains
unclear in her theory. She does not offer tools for theorizing the simultaneity of
subjugation and empowerment.
By arguing that the heteronormative hegemony also operates through
governing, I intend to reveal that performing the regulative gender also implies
technologies of the self. ‘Having’ a gender and a sexed inner core is the
materialization of technologies of governing through technologies of the self.
In particular, this is because the body and the idea of having an inner core or
nature play a key role here, as they evoke a dynamic for the genealogy of the
technologies of the self. Theorizing gendered subject constitution as an effect
of heteronormative hegemony through governing reveals that gender is not
imposed on the subjects through a juridical mode of power but, importantly,
that it is precisely a regulative force that evokes technologies of the self.
In these processes of transforming hegemonic worldviews into technologies
of the self, the orientation towards ‘normality’ is a substantial lubricant.
Hegemonic worldviews are transformed into perceptions of ‘normality’ in
what Gramsci describes as ‘common sense’ (1985: 323); they guide our ways
of thinking, feeling and doing our everyday actions. The subject’s orientation
towards a perceived ‘normality’ is crucial to the way hegemony operates.
Against this background, I argue that gendered subject constitution is not
only the result of a heterosexual law, as Butler proposes, but that it is also
an effect of technologies of the self motivated by a desire not to fall outside
of normality, but to live, look and be normal. Consequently, by understanding
heteronormative hegemony as a power formation within which the subject is
also constituted through technologies of the self, the constitution of gendered
55
subjects cannot be reduced to subjugation. Rather, it is both subjugation and

empowerment, as technologies of the self do not operate in a deterministic
manner. Even though they are not outside heteronormative hegemony, they are
able to rearticulate and shift heteronormative hegemony. This argument is not
meant to diminish the effect of heteronormative hegemony. Nor is it meant to
imply that a volitional and rational subject could get rid of his_her gender by
not consenting to it. Instead, my intention is to illustrate that heteronormative
hegemony is not a sovereign form of power that has a divine-like authority.
Instead, it is a form of power that is also consolidated by technologies of
the self, which are a paradoxical combination of the subject’s activities and
‘externally directed’ processes.
Fourthly, I understand the relationship between heteronormative hegemony
and gendered subjects as co-constitutive. Butler’s argumentation, in particular
in Bodies That Matter as well as in The Psychic Life of Power, convincingly illustrates
how in the constitution of an intelligible subject, the heterosexual matrix
materializes itself in a bodily and psychic dimension. Relating these arguments
to the notion of hegemony clearly expands Gramsci’s understanding of
hegemony, since he does not argue that the relationship between hegemony
and the subject is co-constitutive. Furthermore, Butler also takes the bodily
and psychic dimension into account. Nevertheless, I argue that linking Gramsci
and Butler opens up the possibility to realize Butler’s claim to theorize the
relationship between power and subjects as co-constitutive without being
co-determining. It does so without referring to a linguistic argument. The
relationship between heteronormative hegemony and gendered subjects is not
determining, as hegemony is a formation of power that is necessarily open
and dynamic. Hence, hegemony does not operate in a deterministic manner.
Furthermore, based on my understanding of governing as a modus operandi of
heteronormative power, and because governing always entails technologies of
the self that are constituted within power but are nevertheless subject activities
that can also go beyond power, the relationship between power and subject is
co-constitutive. At the same time, it maintains space for rejecting, adapting,
shifting and changing heteronormative hegemony.
Finally, Butler reveals the normative violence of heterosexuality as a
structuring force of bodies and intelligible subjects. In an analogical manner,
I understand heteronormative hegemony as a formation that also entails
normative violence since it relies on the binarity of sex as the only way of
constituting intelligible subjects. Heteronormative hegemony is therefore a
form of non-juridical violence, as it does not act upon already existing subjects
but is rather deeply inscribed in – or even more it is the precondition for –
the constitution of intelligible subjects. Gramsci has pointed out that within
hegemony, the use of ‘legitimated’ violence requires consent. This is also the
case with (hetero)normative violence: hegemonic worldviews that are present
56
within civil society that frame the sex binary and heterosexuality as naturally
given are the precondition for the existence of this form of violence. However,
in reference to Butler, the understanding of violence can be expanded if we
include (hetero)normative violence. Furthermore, it becomes evident that
this form of violence is legitimized through being framed as universally valid
and naturalized – in particular through scientific ‘knowledge’ that frames the
sex binary as a naturally given truth. Because of the naturalization that lies
beyond heteronormative violence, the heteronormative violence also remains
inaccessible as violence.
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to approach heteronormative power in terms

of hegemony. Let me conclude by pointing out the benefits of approaching
heteronormativity with the notion of heteronormative hegemony. I will focus
on four theoretical and political aspects that can be brought to light through the
concept of heteronormative hegemony.
Firstly, the notion of heteronormative hegemony allows us to understand
heteronormativity as a non-juridical formation of power that operates through
governing. Even though heteronormative hegemony is the grid within which
intelligible subjects are constituted, it does not operate deterministically,
since hegemony is a contradictory formation of power and operates through
technologies of the self. Referring to Gramsci, I understand heteronormative
hegemony as a specific formation of state power with its roots in civil society.
Following Gramsci, state power also operates through conduct in everyday
practices. At the same time, the worldviews that allow specific forms of conduct
are articulated in civil society. Grasping heteronormative hegemony as a specific
formation of state power does not imply that the state produces it. Rather,
the heteronormative worldviews are articulated in civil society and engender
specific ways of addressing and governing subjects based on these hegemonic
worldviews. Heteronormative hegemony is articulated in civil society. It enables
citizenship to function as a heteronormative construct and permits laws to
address subjects solely as women or men. By referring to state power, the notion
of heteronormative hegemony can contribute to the further developing of a
poststructural queer approach to state power beyond juridical terms – which
so far has only rarely been done. Interestingly, although many contributions to
queer theory are influenced by poststructural theories, they often reduce the
modern state to a juridical structure (Carver and Mottier 1998; Duggan and
Hunter 1995; Maynard and Purvis 1995; Phelan 1997). In contrast, the notion
of heteronormative hegemony provides a queer-theoretical, poststructural
understanding of state power based on struggles and articulations in the civil
57
society that becomes state power, and therefore it proposes to conceptualize

state power beyond a juridical frame. Furthermore, by arguing that it operates
through governing, and thus also through technologies of the self, the concept
also adds to a non-juridical understanding of heteronormative state power.
Secondly, at the same time, the notion of heteronormative hegemony as
specific formation of state power also goes beyond the current hegemonic
understanding of the state within mainstream state theory. The dominant
theorization of state power as juridical has clearly already been challenged
by Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as state power, which is deeply
grounded in civil society and social struggles and operates through guiding.
An understanding of state power as operating through conduct and guidance
is at odds with dominant (juridical) definitions. However, the disassociation of
hegemony as pertaining solely to class relations opens up the possibility of
expanding the realm of hegemony. The notion of heteronormative hegemony
reveals that bodies, sex and heteronormativity cannot be considered as naturally
given or as prior to state power. Rather, heteronormativity is deeply inscribed
in the formation of state power, which goes far beyond homophobic policies,
as illustrated in the discrimination of non-heteronormative forms of living and
loving. The constitution of intelligible subjects as solely female or male can
be understood as the materialization of a specific formation of state power,
which I have described as heteronormative hegemony. This also reveals that
state power entails a bodily and psychic dimension since both sexed bodies and
self-perception as a woman or man are effects of state power. However, let me
emphasize that ‘effect’ does not suggest that state power as hegemony operates
in a deterministic manner. Arguing that sexed bodies and gendered subjects are
the effect of hegemony implies that they are the effect of interplay between
technologies of governing and technologies of the self. The norm ‘gender’
is not solely imposed on the subjects by force. Subjects also guide themselves
towards hegemonic worldviews about gender, femininity and masculinity. They
integrate hegemonic worldviews about female or male body care, sexuality and
desires in their everyday practices by applying them in a way that makes sense
and feels ‘normal’ to them.
Furthermore, against this background, the understanding of state violence
is expanded by including a (hetero)normative dimension as part of the way
intelligible subjects are constituted in heteronormative societies. It is this
normative violence that categorizes subjects as either female or male and enables
other forms of physical violence (against homosexuals or women – as both are
regarded as deviant in hierarchal conceptions of subjectivities).
Thirdly, the notion of heteronormative hegemony is a dynamic formation
of power that is constantly transforming. These transformations are based on
ambivalent social compromises. Understanding hegemony as a crystallization
of social struggles brings to light that strategies and critique from counter-
58
hegemonic politics and subaltern perspectives are part of these transformations.

Hence, hegemony is never solely organized from the top down. At the same time,
the demands of these counter-hegemonic politics are also integrated through
‘passive revolutions’ and, paradoxically, serve as lubricants for transforming the
heteronormative hegemony in a manner that contributes to its (new) stability.
This implies that queer politics are always located within the paradoxical field
of simultaneous complicity and challenge.
Finally, heteronormative hegemony only gains power to the extent that
subjects adopt it in their everyday lives. It obtains its power by being rooted in the
consensus of the majority of subjects, rather than primarily through coercion.
Consequently, contesting hegemonic worldviews on the ‘naturalness’ of the
dichotomies built around sex and heterosexuality – through interventions in the
‘war of manoeuvre’ (Gramsci 1985: 235) and through using various practices
within civil society – can be viewed as vital to queer politics. Gramsci (1985: 235)
concludes from his understanding of hegemony as a formation of power that
it is deeply rooted in civil society and that emancipatory struggles must address
everyday practices on a micro level. Given heteronormative hegemony’s strong
connection to civil society, the transformation of hegemonic worldviews does
not come about from a divine-like sovereign authority. Instead, transformations
take place on the level of social micro-structures through counter-knowledge,
counter-practices and strategies of equivocation (Engel 2002) that are the crucial
‘battlefield’ for challenging heteronormative hegemony. Intervening in everyday
practices – in schoolbooks, academic curricula, advertisements, street names,
‘private’ conversations in the workplace and the architectures of bathrooms – can
contribute to queering heteronormative worldviews. Heteronormativity will not
disappear through legal changes but rather through intervening in hegemonic
worldviews. Clearly, the outcome of these interventions is unpredictable. Yet,
under the lens of the proposed perspective, this effect would be a motivation
for, rather than an obstacle to, queer politics.
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Chapter 3
Tender Tensions – Antagonistic
Struggles – Becoming-Bird:
Queer Political Interventions into
Neoliberal Hegemony
Antke Engel
Theories of hegemony, whether they directly refer to Antonio Gramsci or start

from the post-Gramscian approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
provide possibilities of thinking about the connections between political rule
and the constitution of (political) subjectivity. Yet, they explicitly do not seek to
provide a theory of leadership based on the liberal model of an autonomous,
rational subject claiming political authority, but their interest is directed towards
identifying the active involvement of subordinated people in the dominant
regime and its forms of ruling. This includes pointing out how dominant forces
depend on the (often unintentional or habitual) cooperation of those who lack
the power to overtly define and design social and political institutions. Relations
of domination cannot be explained solely by looking at repression, disciplinary
control and violence. Rather, one needs to take into account how agreement to
political rule develops; an agreement that at times can conflict with one’s own
interests. One must also examine how relations of domination, be they in social
relationships, civic society or in political rule, come to be seen as acceptable or
even as unavoidable. Hegemony, in the end, depends on consensus production
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Smith 1998).
Queer theory shares this interest in analysing consensus production and
the widespread acceptance of, in this case, the heteronormative hierarchies that
organize sex, gender, sexuality and desire. Heteronormativity is the analytical term
used to explain how heterosexuality and the rigid binary distinction of sex become
I would like to thank Renate Lorenz, María do Mar Castro Varela and Eva von
Redecker for their inspiring comments, which made it fun to work on this paper. They
also, through their insistent questions, helped me to formulate my arguments more
precisely. Many thanks also to Sigrid Sandmann who shared with me her thoughts on
the video and turned the reading processes into a playful experiment.
naturalized and embodied in ways that make them nearly incontestable. A

wide corpus of explanations is available that show how for instance, power/
knowledge regimes, modes of subjectivation, (unconscious) psychic processes,
social institutions and the complex interplay of various social distinctions,
exclusions and privileges ensure the reproduction of heteronormativity
(Butler 1990; Warner 1993; Duggan 2003; Wagenknecht 2003; Cohen 2005;
Hartmann et al. 2007; Dietze, Brunner, and Wenzel 2009; Lorenz 2009).
While this knowledge about processes of power and domination might be
productively inserted into theories of hegemony, from the perspective of
queer theory, it seems promising to take up from theories of hegemony the
conviction that politics consists of ongoing contestations and that the political
can be characterized by its open future, which defines politics’ contingency as
potentiality (Engel, 2010).
Consensus production as an ongoing process implies that politics consists
of breaking up consensus or unquestioned normalities, even if a striving to
provisionally stabilize a hegemonic situation might be temporarily strong or
partly ‘successful’. Thus, politics are redefined as hegemonic struggles. One
major field of interest lies in understanding how politicization takes place,
that is, which measures can be taken and which strategies can be employed so
that the consensus is challenged and the conflicts inherent in the hegemonic
situation may become productive. Laclau and Mouffe (1985), who understand
hegemony as a socio-discursive process of articulation, offer a very plausible
scenario: politicization takes place through antagonizing social compromises or
naturalized power relations and through articulating new, formerly unspeakable
political identities that then challenge a ruling bloc by creating ‘chains of
equivalence’ between unconnected or competitive groups (131–6). This kind of
alliance building depends on a particularity assuming ‘the representation of an
incommensurable totality’ (Laclau 2005: 70). As such, hegemony is built upon
what Laclau calls an ‘empty signifier, [a] particularity embodying an unachievable
fullness’ (2005: 71). Such an empty signifier may function as a ‘nodal point’
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112) that momentarily disrupts the dynamics of the
hegemonic struggle and organizes a new, provisional state of hegemony.
Apart from the fact that one might want to question the hopeful, yet normative
logic of progression that Laclau and Mouffe introduce into what could also
be presented as a circular, never-ending story of ongoing contestation, further
questions arise. For example, what happens if various hegemonic struggles
take place simultaneously? Do they necessarily fight against the same state of
hegemony? Is it necessary that they unite and build chains of equivalence in
order to become powerful? In the more contemporary debate on hegemony,
one finds various references to these concerns, for instance to multiple and
incoherent political struggles, to a non-unified political constituency and to the
acknowledgement of different hegemonic centres or competing or co-existing
64
Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming-Bird
provisional hegemonic stabilizations (Jessop 1990; Smith 1998; Mouffe 2000;

Critchley and Marchart 2004; Laclau 2005). However, another question already
hinted at above remains unaddressed: Are all hegemonic struggles necessarily
aiming at gaining hegemony themselves? Why not consider counter-hegemonic
or subversive politics that either leave the ‘will to power’ to others or envision modes
of organizing societies without hegemonic closures and centres of power?
These are significant questions with regard to late-modern, neoliberal
societies that claim and/or propagate pluralism. Not the least since pluralism
itself is a polysemic and contested `concept that does not necessarily function
in favour of the heterogeneous ways of existences it claims to represent (Laclau
1996; Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Engel 2007a). One needs to consider that
dominant forces might very well be interested in keeping the process of political
contestation open by installing various centres of power, advocating diversity,
splitting up resistance and appropriating difference. It is not easy to distinguish
queer politics that vote for a variety of sexual and gendered ways of existence
from neoliberal pluralism that celebrates diversity as cultural capital (Engel
2007b). Therefore, the option for radical contestation seems to arise from ‘doing’
politics from within these discursive overlaps that blur any clear-cut distinction.
What does it mean for queer politics to introduce its interest in dehierarchizing
social differences into its ‘complicity’ with neoliberal capitalism? How can queer
politics stay loyal to the critique of exclusions, normative homogenizations and
normalizations while still playing on the threshold to relativism? Is it possible
to avoid producing closures and keep political contestations permanently open?
Does this include being open to unexpected or unwanted participation? Or is
antagonizing the only ‘upright’ way of doing anti-capitalist queer politics?
Dandying the Manifesto
Entering the stage – that is, walking onto a freshly ploughed field with a horizon
of blue sky – is a hybrid figure, who at first glance looks utterly familiar, but
then on second thought appears confusing: I do not know whether to read him
as a rocker, a non-organized unionist or the incarnation of a welfare stereotype,
with his white shirt partly lolling from shabby trousers, displaying a bare belly,
contrasted by a black leather jacket with shiny zips exposing his white collar
negligee. His? As he speaks he* declares him*self to be a housewife. And
indeed, now I see the tough mother of six, managing a household lacking wealth
or a steady income. She* is the neighbourhood brain, gathering housewife-
colleagues in the yard, debating feminist politics while hanging out the washing.
Listening to her*, she* wins my sympathy in seconds: Yes, three hours of work
per week are enough! Yes, let’s divorce from the straight, white guy called ‘the
economy’! Yet, the angry, unnerved rocker, unionist macho-loser is not lost
65
from view either. Declaring, or rather rehearsing, a manifesto from a handful of

cheat slips, he* gains my solidarity when I realize that the papers are obviously
experienced as a distress: they disrupt the flow of speaking, or worse, they get
mixed up or lost. In the beginning he* is apparently unconscious about being
watched; when realizing the gaze he* embarrassedly hand-signals the camera to
stop the shooting. I try to do justice to the intimacy of the situation, particularly
when I see that he* acts rather self-consciously, as if speaking to a mirror,
repeatedly checking his* appearance (see Fig. 3.1).
Apart from the papers there is another distraction: a rustling to her*_his*
right. When I follow the turn of her* head, I see a Dandy strolling leisurely
across the field, carefully holding a turtle in one hand and swinging a walking
stick in the other. The cream-coloured summer suit and straw hat play off the
brown earth of the field nicely. Despite the rural atmosphere, a Parisian mall
is also clearly evoked as a ghost setting for the protagonist. Soon, the situation
becomes ironic when in the background, the skyline of suburban high-rise
buildings appears. A blue garbage bag, which before the rocker-housewife-
unionist had aggressively kicked away, now is inspected diligently with the help
of the walking stick and white-gloved fingers. Loads of glossy fabric, colourful
tins and plastic trash also come into view, the Dandy’s turtle slowly finds its way
in between this ephemera and, every once in a while, is lovingly caressed by
the Dandy (see Fig. 3.2).
Charming for the Revolution (2009, 14’) is the title of the video by the two
Berlin-based artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz that introduces these
figures to us – to me, the beholder, and to you, my readers. In this chapter,
I examine what kind of politics are envisioned by this video, what kind of
revolution is going to come and who is the charming subject of this revolution
(if there is one). I also consider whether the two protagonists, the rocker-
housewife-unionist and the Dandy, propose different or even opposing kinds
of politics; what kind of production is effected by the camera; and finally how
the beholders are involved as political agents. Can this video point towards
a queering of neoliberal hegemony? And what does it set out to teach (if it
does) about its entanglements with heteronormativity? What does it say about
economic subjectivities, desires and ways of existence?
The revolutionary subject of Charming, who reads out the manifesto, declares
housework a model of exploited work, yet also a path to freedom if properly
politicized. ‘Becoming housewife is not about a right to privacy’, he* says, ‘it is
about the freedom to be public.’ Meanwhile, the Dandy – celebrating the beauty
of trash and participating in a non-reproductive care relationship with the turtle –
is seen to have a white, fluffy feather tail. The camera risks a close-up that shows
him* presenting the silver knob of his* walking stick, which is shaped in the
head of a bird, against the background of a white feather boa. Almost secretly,
the Dandy’s straw hat has mutated into a glamorous flower hat and when he*
66
Figure 3.1 Werner Hirsch in Charming for the Revolution

(Boudry/Lorenz 2009)

67
turns her* head, we notice she* has delicate skin and is wearing pale rose lip
gloss. Gender ambiguity proliferates. Heteronormativity is bracketed – not only
because ambiguous genders disrupt the normative heterosexual arrangements
but also because clear-cut distinctions between human and animal, rural and
urban and natural and artificial become blurred.
When watching Charming, desire may find various entrance and exit points.
Yet, the desire employed here undermines the subject/object distinction that
commonly introduces the gendered hierarchy to desire (Butler 1993; Grosz
1994; Engel 2006). Here, it is not the case that I or any other beholder is
put into the position of a desiring subject that longs for the protagonist who
is expected to embody the object of desire. Rather, desire, as Elspeth Probyn
(1996) puts it, is deployed as travelling in images on the surface of the social,
drawing connections and forming assemblages, either according to well-known
patterns of identity, difference and their stratified power relations or, as in this
case, travelling in images that confuse and disrupt established normalities and
invoke surprising assemblages. Margrit Shildrick (2009) presents a similar idea
when she, like Probyn, proposes a queer reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (2004):
Desire is not an element of any singular subject; it is not pregiven; it is
neither possessed nor controlled; it represents nothing; and nor does it flow
directly from one individual to another. Instead it comes into being through
what Deleuze and Guattari call “desiring machines”, assemblages that cannot
be said to exist outside of their linkages and interconnections, and which may
encompass both the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic.
(2009: 124)
Desire is not inherent to the subject; desire lets me take part in a movement.
It is not important to know where it is coming from but instead to know
where it is going (Grosz 1994). Desire positions me in a fantasy scenario that
may be shared with others and that is made up out of historically shaped,
publicly available and biographically gained imagery (Lauretis 1994) – effecting
identification as plausibly as repulsion, alienation or self-alienation.
Queering Heteronormativity and Desire
Heteronormativity and desire are central categories of queer theory. While

both of them open up the analysis and critique of relations of power and
domination, the latter also carries an anticipatory potential. Desire can be a
mode of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Shildrick 2009; MacCormack
2009) or a tool of an ‘analytics of the present’ (Foucault 2000) that derives
its critique from a genealogical approach while always already envisioning/
practicing the future (Engel 2002, 2006).
68
The analysis and critique of heteronormativity focuses on the mutual constitution

and enforcement of normative – or even compulsory – heterosexuality and rigid
binary sex/gender orders. Focusing on the (seductive or coercive) power of norms
is central to the critique of heteronormativity. As Samuel Chambers and Terrell
Carver note: ‘The concept of heteronormativity reveals institutional, cultural
and legal norms that reify and entrench the normativity of heterosexuality. In
other words, “heteronormativity” tells us that heterosexual desire and identity
are not merely assumed, they are expected. They are demanded. And they are
rewarded and privileged’ (2008: 145–6). As such, heteronormativity is not limited
to regulating subjectivities and intimate social relations but also takes hold of
macro-political processes and institutions of state, economy and culture (Warner
1993; Genschel 1996; Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002; Wagenknecht 2007).
This asks for consciousness about geo-historical differences and about the
historical legacies of power relations, as ‘the heterosexual matrix never remains
static’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 148) and subversive strategies can always
only respond to specific contexts (Cohen 2005).
Heteronormativity depends to a high degree on rendering unspeakable,
invisible or even unintelligible that which does not fit its norms. Queer theory’s
answer to this force is not to simply widen the space of representation – to
claim visibility for what has formerly been excluded (as if representation could
neutrally display pregiven realities or as if visibility were not a power-saturated
technology of creating realities) (Paul and Schaffer 2009). Rather, queer theory
draws on poststructuralist critiques of the submission of difference to the logic
of identity, and claims that difference does not need to be seen only as ‘the other
of identity’. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) agree on explaining identity’s dependence
on difference as its ‘constitutive outside’, and the principle of clearly defined
and supposedly stable identities. They stress that signification is an ongoing
process of differentiation that can never lead to any final meaning or identity.
Nevertheless, they proclaim the necessity and unavoidability of inserting
provisional closures. With Laclau and Mouffe, there is no space for politics
The focus on norms is most consistently developed by Judith Butler, who points
out a whole range of workings of the norm: as the normality of everyday practices,
the rigidity of legal or medical regulations, the desire for normalization and even the
violence of norms, which might deny the status of being human. Chambers and Carver
regard Butler’s systematic considerations on the ‘power of normativity’ and particularly
its deconstructive ‘consequences for a sovereign model of agency’ as her decisive
contribution to political theory (2008: 157).
Laclau (1996) argues that if one does not accept that signification depends on
drawing frontiers, which produce the supposedly inner coherence of identity through
processes of exclusion, one will ultimately lose the capacity to differentiate at all and
will give up on possibilities of change, since there would be no dividing line defining a
system and thus no outside from where the system could be challenged.
69
that are built upon modes of articulation and forms of representation and that
promote ambiguity, polysemy, paradox (Deleuze 2004) and equivocation or un-
disambiguation (VerUneindeutigung) (Engel 2002). Yet, these are precisely the
spaces where I see decisive moments for queer cultural politics. Thus, from a
queer perspective I would ask: how can one not only avoid the reification of
difference, which is indeed accomplished by a theory of articulation, but also
conceptualize ‘irreducible otherness’ as a political force? The aim here would
be to acknowledge that which remains unintelligible – and that which resists
being integrated into the given regimes of knowledge and power – as a force
that articulates and designs social and political space. Thus, one would not need
to become a recognizable political subject according to the (historically specific)
standards of rationality and agency in order to do politics. The question then
becomes whether this transformation in the understanding of politics would
challenge ‘the political’? In other words: what kind of politics might actually
queer the political?
Politics and the Political / The Political and the Economic
In taking up the poststructuralist distinction of politics and the political (Laclau

and Mouffe 1985; Elam 1994; Mouffe 2000; Critchley and Marchart 2004;
Lummerding 2005), I understand the ‘political’ as an effect of and inherent to
doing politics rather than as being a pre-existing field where politics takes place.
‘Politics’ denotes an array of concrete measures and practices that act upon
socio-historical, symbolic and geo-political relations of power and domination
– thereby inducing or suspending change. In being an effect of and inherent to
doing politics, the political is exactly not independent from concrete relations
of power and domination (see Gressgård in this volume), even though I would
characterize it through potentiality (Engel, 2010). Against the background of
recent queer theorizing, I then argue that gender and sexuality are not only
While Katja Diefenbach (2008) is most sceptical about the notion of potentiality
going along with an ontologization that depoliticizes social conflicts, I emphasize that
potentiality unfolds within socio-historical power relations and will a posteriori be specified
by its contingently evolving effects. Potentiality in doing politics implies a moment of
tension growing out of the fact that decisions have to be taken under conditions of
undecidability. A political act, then, turns the potentiality of tension into non-necessary,
contingent actuality. This understanding partly draws on William E. Connolly’s (2004)
engagement with Ernesto Laclau, where he promotes a ‘politics of becoming’. These
politics, notes Connolly, are ‘paradoxical politics by which new and unforeseen things
surge into being … a new source of moral inspiration, a new cultural identity within
an existing constellation of established identities.… The politics of becoming do not
always generate positive things. Far from it. But it often emerges out of historically
70
regulated by socio-cultural and political forces but are themselves constitutive

of the political. While it is quite common to say that the state is built upon
the family, and that therefore heterosexual reproduction figures as the promise
(or threat) of a nation’s future, the above thesis becomes quite provocative
once sexuality no longer necessarily implies a heterosexual, hierarchical
complementarity of two distinct genders. Thus, the question is as follows:
how do conceptualizations of sexuality and desire that no longer privilege the
heterosexual norm or the rigid binary of sexual difference transform social
practices, effect politics and maybe even challenge established understandings
of the political?
This question, which is at the heart of considerations about how hegemony
and heteronormativity relate to each other, becomes further complicated by asking
about the relation between the political, the sexual and the economic; particularly
if one wishes to avoid an economistic and/or any other foundationalist view.
Laclau and Mouffe propose defining the relation between the economic and the
political as a ‘precarious unity of tension’, thus highlighting their inseparability
while at the same time avoiding or at least deferring homogenization. Notably,
they treat this question as one of identity; not essential identity of course, but
political identity gained through articulation:
Let us accept instead that neither the political nor the economic identity of
the agents crystallizes as differential moments of a unified discourse, and that
the relation between them is the precarious unity of tension. We already know
what this means: the subversion of each of the terms by a polysemy which
prevents their stable articulation. In this case, the economic is and is not present
in the political and vice versa; the relation is not of literal differentiations but of
unstable analogies between the two terms. Now, this form of presence through
metaphorical transposition is one that the fictio iuris of representation attempts to
think. Representation is therefore constituted not as a definite type of relation;
but as the field of an unstable oscillation whose vanishing point is, as we saw,
either the literalization of a fiction through the breaking of every link between
representative and represented, or the disappearance of the separate identity
of both through their absorption as moments of a single identity. (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985: 121)
This statement invites considerations about Charming’s protagonists: can

we read them as enacting a ‘precarious unity of tension’? The thesis that the
relationship of tension between economic and political identities evolves from
unstable analogies can, indeed, be detected in the video. One example would be
specific suffering, energies, and lines of flight that have been obscure to the dominant
or hegemonic formation’ (2004: 175–6).
71
the analogy drawn between the marriage contract and the labour contract, which
ironically opens up the field of labour rights to the possibilities of divorce while
simultaneously casting marriage as a field of exploitation. Another example is
the visually enacted analogy between the political subject as spectacle and the
political subject as modelling a manifesto. In order to pursue my argument, I
suggest that both of Charming’s protagonists inhabit both of these possibilities,
as well as the tension between them. The productive blurring of the protagonists’
divergent political strategies, which I will elaborate on, consists of the spectacle
becoming politicized and the manifesto becoming economized.
Yet, why does the above Laclau and Mouffe quote provide such a limited
scope of ‘metaphorical transposition’ of the relationship between the economic
and the political, primarily literalizing them in the form of fiction or absorbing
them into a single identity? Both possibilities, and here is my critique, give
up on tension rather than choosing to uphold it. Charming, in contrast, plays
on presenting tensions in a paradoxical form that does not stabilize – even
provisionally – but instead creates ever more (rhizomatically spreading)
unexpected connections. As such, the video undermines Laclau and Mouffe’s
simplified construction, which does not provide any hint as to how, for example,
the cultural, the sexual or a transversal discourse like feminism would fit in
or relate systematically with/to the economic and the political. Laclau and
Mouffe, further, do not offer space for ‘speculative figurations’ (Haraway 1992)
like the Dandy-bird or the ‘dance of the crow’ introduced by Charming; that is,
figurations that do not cohere with historically available discourses of politics
or economics but nevertheless exert political agency. I would certainly underline
Laclau and Mouffe’s idea that different discourses will never become the same
(except on a fictional, phantasmatic level); still they are also never truly separate.
Yet, aesthetic and political practices are not limited to discourses that enjoy
intelligibility and relevance in the given symbolic order. They may find various
other ways of ‘making sense’.
Gender Ambiguities, Dissident Sexualities and Neoliberal Economy
So what kind of change does heteronormativity undergo in late-modern,

neoliberal societies? Or, more specifically, how does the neoliberal economy
relate to queer theoretical and socio-cultural developments produced by queer
political movements? Conflicting suggestions exist concerning these questions:
In Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie: Queere kulturelle Politiken im Neoliberalismus
(Engel 2009), I suggest that the paradox provides an alternative way of thinking about
tension, upholding it rather than overcoming it, in order to acknowledge it as something
that is permanently at the threshold of new possibilities. See also Deleuze (2004).
72
whereas some argue that queer only became possible against the background
of neoliberal developments (Hennessy 2000; Floyd 2009), others see an
appropriation of ‘queer’ by neoliberal forces (Duggan 2003; Woltersdorff 2009).
My own approach consists of diagnosing overlaps between queer and neoliberal
discourses that support alliances, which in the end strengthen neoliberal orders
while simultaneously inciting new hegemonic struggles that undermine the
neoliberal consensus production (Engel 2007b, 2009). In late- modern neoliberal
societies, new hegemonic alliances evolve around the ideal of individualism,
the cultivation of difference as cultural/social capital and the privatization of
social responsibilities and services justified by an understanding of justice based
on the achievement principle. Consensus is gained on the one hand through
reference to freedom (understood as civic liberties and consumer rights), and on
the other hand through reference to naturalized affective bonds (be they family
or private property). I interpret the issuing of these contradictory demands for
freedom and bonding as a ‘neoliberal politics of paradox’ (Engel 2007b, 2009),
which activate the individual to work his*_her*self into the socio-economic
order by perpetually trying to make impossible ends meet. Yet the ‘politics of
paradox’ are also promoted from a queer perspective, since they undermine rigid
identity constructions and mobilize sedimentary hierarchies. Thus, paradoxes in
general – and particularly the paradox of individuality and bonding – connect
neoliberal and queer discourses through what Laclau calls ‘empty or floating
signifiers’ (2005: 127–31). Once conflicts about the particular understanding of
the signifiers arise (for example the signifier of ‘privatized responsibility’ that
captures the paradox of individuality and bonding), they may incite hegemonic
struggles. Yet, these struggles do not tend towards provisional closures but
instead are kept open by the dynamic tension of a paradoxical constellation.
The whole range of cultural representations of dissident sexualities,
non-normative desires and gender ambiguities provide for potential sites of
consensus production and hegemonic struggles. These representations can be
found in mainstream media, cultural production and art as well as in subcultural
and activist contexts. The fact that these representations celebrate, rather than
stigmatize non-normative genders and sexualities, signals that in late-modern
societies the regulation of sex/gender and sexuality takes place not so much by
prohibition, exclusion or discrimination but by normalization and integration
See also Lorenz (2009) who suggests the term ‘sexual labour’ in order to understand
the role sexuality plays in people’s readiness to submit ‘voluntarily’ to oppressive relations.
In analysing complex horizontal and vertical ‘crossings’ of social sites, Lorenz provides
a method of taking seriously the heterogeneous and singular ways people develop in
connecting the ‘deployment of alliance’ and the ‘deployment of sexuality’ (Foucault
1981). Yet, the notion of crossings also allows her to characterize recent neoliberal power
regimes as dependent on the interwoven nature of sexuality and labour.
73
of differences and diversity. I agree with Duggan (2003) that such ‘affirmative’
visual and textual representations support neoliberalism’s effort to establish
hegemony. Following Gramsci, who points out the importance of civil society,
media, education and culture for processes of consensus production, cultural
politics are as important for the neoliberal transformations as are fiscal, financial
and labour politics; economic decisions taken by banks and companies; and
actions by economic lobby organizations. Duggan draws our interest to the
rhetorical strategies and cultural politics deployed by neoliberal forces that
create a wide range of consent from different social groups. This happens
even though neoliberal political and economic measures systematically effect
an upward redistribution of capital and resources, aiming not only at enhancing
profit rates but also at distributing them according to meritocratic rather than
social principles, thus increasing overall economic inequality (Duggan 2003: xi).
But these measures would not be (as) effective if they were not transported
through cultural politics and if they did not constitute certain subjectivities that
actively work themselves into the socio-economic framework.
‘Projective Integration’ as Hegemonic Consensus Production

and the Modernization of Heteronormativity
A decisive moment of neoliberal cultural politics is a mechanism of integrating

social differences, which I have recently termed ‘projective integration’ (Engel
2007b, 2009). This is a process that makes use of visual imagery and that coins
difference as cultural capital. Images function as a means of addressing multiple
audiences, who then use the image as a screen for projecting their divergent
desires. Projective integration fulfils a double function: normalized subjects can
project their desire onto images of difference, while dissident or marginalized
subjects enjoy inhabiting an avant-garde position. If today we can find positive
images of dissident sexualities and gender ambiguities, this is not primarily a
sign of social recognition. Instead, these images act as screens of projection
that stand in for individuality, flexibility and above all, for the ability to manage
the contradictory demands of late-modern life. In representing ‘difference as
cultural capital’ and making it economically usable, former rejection, exclusion
or assimilation is turned into a celebration of (certain normalized forms
Acknowledging the importance Gramsci designates to cultural politics, one

should also critically reflect upon the authoritative and judgemental voice applied by
Gramsci in the passages mentioned as well as his desire for homogenizing a collective
consciousness (See Gramsci 1991–2002, H10: 1375–89, H11: 1490, H15: 1730–31,
H23: 2111, H24: 2172–3).
74
of) difference. As such, projective integration creates alliances and supports

processes of hegemonic consensus production.
What I would argue here is that ‘projective integration’ not only explains
late-modern processes of hegemonic consensus production but that it also goes
along with a modernization of heteronormativity. Differences are no longer
seen as essential or absolute ‘otherness’ but rather as particularity, hybridity
and the products of individual practices in need of continuous refinement
(Ha 2006). This also effects and indeed ‘modernizes’ the understanding of
heteronormativity, since sex, gender and sexuality are no longer understood
as natural givens. Projective integration supplements and sometimes replaces
assimilatory integration or multicultural pluralism, both of which take the given
normative order for granted and stabilize the positions of those who claim
‘normality’ for themselves. In contrast, projective integration is built upon
the premise that normative social orders undergo constant transformations.
It also creates alliances by engaging dominant social subjects as often as it
does marginalized ones. In late-modern times, everybody is expected to find
ways of expressing difference as particularity and specialness, as well as to
balance the precarious threshold between difference as promise and difference
as threat. Even though, of course, resources and conditions of managing the
precariousness are unequally distributed. While projective integration blurs the
distinction between normalized and dissident (and dominant and marginalized)
subject positions, it still installs social differentiations (Wagenknecht 2003;
Cohen 2005; Ha 2006; Woltersdorff 2009).
I suggest understanding ‘projective integration’ as a hinge between theories of
hegemony and theories of heteronormativity, thus providing new insights into
both fields while simultaneously explaining how they are intertwined. Projective
integration is a form of hegemonic consensus production that does not aim at
homogenization or at creating coherent (political) identities but rather aims at
diversity and pluralism. As such, it resonates with theories of heteronormativity
that see flexible normalizations – rather than rigid normativities – as the organizing
principles of gendered and sexualized identities. Considering this kind of
entanglement between queer and neoliberal discourses, what could queer cultural
politics look like and what kind of hegemonic struggle could they incite?
Pushing Politics of Subversion
In order to point toward and indeed strengthen those tendencies in queer theory
and politics that make use of their own entanglement with the social relations
they want to oppose, I will start from the concept of a ‘politics of subversion’.
Yet I will argue that this politics can be pushed further by opening up an
anticipatory perspective and by integrating the dimension of paradox. Referring
75
to Charming, I will explain how its politics depends on paradoxically combining

a ‘strategy of tender tensions’ and a ‘strategy of antagonistic struggle’. In doing
so, a virtual space develops where, through a notion of becoming, the future is
present when desire moves in ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
Chambers and Carver (2008) explain why a ‘politics of subversion’
provides an adequate means to change heteronormativity. If heteronormativity
depends on the ‘power of the norm’ and if the norm is indeed that which is
constitutive of socio-sexual subjectivities, it is obvious that politics has to start
from within the norm (Butler 1990, 1993). No position exists from where one
can address the norm without being affected by it. As Chambers and Carver
remark, ‘Subversion must be a political project of erosion, one that works on
the norms from the inside, breaking them down not through external challenge
but through internal repetition that weakens them. A subversive politics thus
becomes a subtle politics, one that requires patient, repeated, local action’
(2008: 142). Since Chambers and Carver insist that this is also true for what
they describe as Butler’s notion of ‘normative violence’ (Butler 2004) – the
violence exerted by a norm that defines what counts as ‘liveable life’ – a politics
of subversion does not limit itself to changing discursive conditions but also
hints at those of embodied existence, particularly at those which define who
counts as abject or unintelligible and thus as imperceptible. Furthermore, this
extends our understanding of heteronormativity and therefore provides new
venues that critique it: heteronormativity cannot be reduced to sexual and gender
norms, since in the violent figure of a ‘liveable life’ normative regulations of
all different kinds of embodied subjectivities and social relations intersect with
one another.
Yet the politics of subversion as presented by Chambers and Carver
does not (easily) open up an anticipatory approach that ‘traces the future in
the present’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008: 75). Nor does
it provide space for irreducible otherness or for ‘the Other of the Other’
(Butler 2004) to turn into a political force (Engel 2007a, 2010). Charming, I
argue, invites us to push the politics of subversion further by introducing such
an anticipatory move. It may also be what transposes late-modern processes
of projective integration from within. Earlier, I introduced desire as a ‘mode
of becoming’ or as tool of an ‘analytics of the present’ that derives its critique
from a genealogical approach while simultaneously always already envisioning/
practicing the future. This formulation describes what Charming is doing when
it quotes various historical manifestos – from The Communist Manifesto to
Chambers and Carver undertake a certain shift in interpreting Butler’s understanding

of politics by not simply referring to performativity as the mode of change, but through
positioning performativity as part of a politics of subversion where it is not iteration in
itself but specifically the iterative working on norms that defines her politics.
76
feminist ‘pay for housework’ manifestos to the ‘queer army of lovers’ – while
simultaneously counteracting the agonistic mode of the manifesto with the
Dandy’s performances of time, leisure and glamour.
Charming presents its enactment of these historical memories partly as a
rehearsal and partly as a process of fantastic bodily transformations, both of
which envision/practice a future by making use of today’s hybrid scenery: a
skyline of suburban high-rise buildings overlooking a freshly ploughed field,
complete with an electricity tower. Desire inhabits the future’s presence in the
form of becoming-bird, a concept I will explore in detail later (see Fig. 3.3).
Here, I only want to point out that becoming-bird is also what connects two
strategies detectable in the video: a strategy of antagonism and a strategy of
what I would like to call ‘tender tensions’. These two strategies are opposed to
each other but are, in the end, not contradictory.

The Strategies of ‘Tender Tensions’ and ‘Antagonistic Struggles’
‘Tender tensions’ may seem to be the result of the depoliticization of social

conflicts, that is, they impact consensus production. Nevertheless, they might
incite modes of politicization and hegemonic struggle that radically undermine
the preconditions of the hegemonic socio-economic order. Used as a political
strategy, tender tensions are interesting because they avoid the exclusionary
77
effects of homogenizing political identities. Still, they do not stand in opposition

to ‘antagonistic struggles’; they might even produce interesting modifications
of these struggles. Different forms of subjectivity and relatedness accompany
the strategy of antagonistic struggles and the strategy of tender tensions,
both of which I will examine and compare with regard to their political and
economic dimensions.
Watching the protagonists’ performances, as the camera shifts between
the two, I am confronted with the contrasts of shabbiness and elegance, of
excitedness and relaxation, of speech and silence. But while the strategies of
antagonistic struggles and tender tensions might at first sight seem oppositional,
if not contradictory, in the course of the video, this clear distinction is subverted;
affinities are displayed and strategies become mixed up and blurred. Taking
into account these developments, the politics promoted by Charming must not
be read directly from the embodiments of the protagonists, but rather must
focus on this mixing and blurring. And indeed, after a while, the tender Dandy
starts quoting the agonistic manifesto, and the fighter for houseworker’s rights
is becoming-bird when he*_she* dances the crow.
This kind of mixing and blurring effectively works upon the fact that tender
tensions and antagonistic struggles provide two different forms of intervention
into the neoliberal economy. The strategy of tender tensions seems to
characterize almost too well the way neoliberal politics operate. It translates
social inequalities into hopeful particularities; issues the promise that social
injustices and discriminations could be solved through a clever management
of ‘difference as cultural capital’; ontologizes political contradictions; and
concedes gains of personal freedom, cultural recognition and social integration
as a consumer subject. All of this, of course, justifies the price of upward
redistribution and redefines justice from the solidarity to the achievement
principle. Open conflicts or antagonistic social positions are relativized through
individualization and the diversification of social power. Yet the tender tensions
deployed by the Dandy’s habits and practices do not buy into the neoliberal
version of individualization so easily – even though individuality is in fact what
the Dandy stands for.
The Dandy’s performance produces tender tensions through a strategy
of equivocation or un-disambiguation (VerUneindeutigung) (Engel 2002);
the beholder is put in a position where standard criteria of perception and
interpretation are of no help in understanding the figure. The idleness deployed
by the Dandy does not fit the expectation of either labour or leisure: searching
through the trash cannot be decoded as either curiosity or necessity and her*_
his* relationship with the turtle holds both and neither love and indifference
and care and appropriation. Further, the Dandy seems far from any economic
troubles: He*_she* is elegantly dressed and well-equipped with accessories and
time. He*_she* relaxedly strolls in the sun and visits the zoo. There are no hints
78
as to whether this is the Sunday outing of someone who is normally employed

full-time; the occasional escape of a housewife and mother of six (taking with
her the neurotic family turtle); a poor artist looking for a muse; or someone
living off their inheritance. Without the context that normally accompanies
Parisian mall dandies, clichés do not easily apply. Instead, I am offered space for
my own fantasies.
Having the space to fantasize, it is all the more significant that, as the Dandy
sorts through the trash, she* suddenly transforms into a bird, complete with
a bird mask and a feathery fan. This transformation takes place immediately
before the relaxed stroll turns into an enactment of political agitation. Even
though this is a radical shift, it is again presented by the video as a tender
tension. Previously silent, the Dandy then begins quoting a fighter’s manifesto:
‘In the factories, in the offices ... we are married.’ Here, he*she* claims a we*
and a workplace and situates his*_her*self as part of a workforce. She*he*
addresses most saliently the zoo’s family of pelicans, whom he* resembles –
though not fully, as he* still has human features and wears the three-piece suit.
Tender tensions are embodied by this hybrid figure, whom I call Dandy-bird.
The pelicans excitedly answer the Dandy-bird after he* speaks. They issue their
replies in the voice of a crow – thereby proliferating hybridity.
Here, the beholder is exposed to a form of politicization that develops out
of tender tensions and modifies the strategy of antagonism. It is desire travelling
in images of becoming-bird that subverts the opposition of antagonism and
tender tension on its way to subverting heteronormativity and neoliberal
capitalism. The Dandy-bird evokes tender tensions between the human and the
animal, the avant-garde and the precariat does not hesitate to read the manifesto
and agitate the formerly indifferent constituency, which answers with the tender
tensions between the elegant pelican and the insurgent crow. Consequently, the
strategies of antagonism do not necessarily stand in opposition to strategies of
tender tensions and can in fact become part of a queer politics of subversion.
This potential depends on activating an understanding of antagonism that is not
built on oppositions or contradictions. While the latter imply logical or material
positivities, Laclau and Mouffe’s articulatory theory of hegemony characterizes
antagonism (in the singular) as the ‘unbridgeable chasm’ that constitutes the
limits of society by securing the impossibility of closure: ‘Antagonism as the
negation of a given order is, quite simply, the limit of that order, and not
the moment of a broader totality in relation to which the two poles of the
antagonism would constitute differential – i.e. objective – partial instances’
(1985: 126). While antagonism (in the singular) is the precondition for the
political, the precondition for an ongoing potentiality, in doing politics there are
antagonisms (in the plural): all the historically specific and always provisional
strategies of creating an opposition built upon phantasmatic identities. As such,
antagonisms interrupt the (always provisional) state of hegemony: ‘Strictly
79
speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather; they
constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting
itself ’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 125).
Thus, on the level of politics, the antagonistic relation ‘arises not from
full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution’ (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985: 125), an impossibility, which is called ‘antagonism’. What I find
interesting about Charming is that (on a content level as much as a theoretical
level) the impossibility of fully constituting itself is articulated and enters
representation. If one sticks to the idea that representation always pretends to
articulate ‘positivities’ (‘something rather than nothing’) (see Lummerding in this
volume), this would indeed be a paradox of representation. Yet, insisting that
representation might articulate that which resists closure and definite meaning
– for example ambivalence, equivocation and paradox as modes of signification
that represent neither something nor nothing – could open up possibilities for
queer cultural politics by claiming the paradoxical figure of ‘imperceptible
politics’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Hutta, 2010). The shifts
between becoming-housewife, becoming-bird and becoming-imperceptible
presented by Charming could then be understood as decisive moments of queer
cultural politics – and as a queering of hegemonic struggles.
Becoming-Housewife, Becoming-Bird, Becoming-Imperceptible
What are the politics of becoming-bird? And how do they relate to hegemony
and its queer critique? Becoming-bird should not solely be read as a certain move
of becoming ‘through which social actors escape normalising representations and
reconstitute themselves in the course of … changing the conditions of their
material corporeal existence’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008:
81), as the authors of Escape Routes remark, but rather as a mode of becoming-
imperceptible. Jan Simon Hutta (2010) explains this latter concept as follows:
‘Becoming-imperceptible means reconnecting with the world on levels below
our common thresholds of perception, letting us be affected by intensities that
run underneath and often right across identitarian markers of difference’ (Hutta
2010: 152). When Hutta proposes the concept of ‘paradoxical publicness’, an
understanding of publicness open for heterogeneous unexpected articulations
and ‘imperceptible becomings’, he points out that introducing the figure of the
paradox allows for the extension of perspective beyond a simple opposition of
hegemonic publics and counterpublics. He notes, ‘The point here is not to claim
‘Becoming’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ are notions developed by Deleuze and

Guattari (2004). They are taken up by the authors quoted here in order to conceptualize
queer and anti-racist migration politics.
80
paradoxes as good or contradictions as bad, but rather to extend the analysis

beyond a focus on antagonistic struggles, even if these may also be important’
(ibid., 152). Thus, Hutta explicitly supports the idea that tender tensions and
antagonism might create a promising alliance.
As a result, becoming-imperceptible is not the same as exiting the field
of representation or becoming unintelligible.10 Rather, it means becoming
imperceptible to certain regimes of representation. In the case of Charming,
it means becoming-imperceptible from the perspective of an economic order,
which interpellates subjectivities into ‘entrepreneurial selves’. It also means
becoming-imperceptible from the perspective of a political order, which
demands sovereign agency from an autonomous individual as a precondition of
being recognized as a political subject. Becoming-imperceptible thus results in
a shift of perspective: political transformation is no longer defined as resistance
to or emancipation from a given order of domination and governance. Rather,
the dominant order is understood as belated, as forced to continuously react and
as trying to recapture the ongoing movements that enjoy relative autonomy. As
Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos remark: ‘[A]s it becomes a constituent
force of social transformation it forces power to follow the line of escape and
reconstitute itself ’ (2008: 75).
Consequently, becoming-bird can be understood as a mode of becoming-
imperceptible; indeed, there are ‘various modes’ since there are various
birds. Birds embody ‘lines of flight’ and ‘escape routes’ as much as the flying
movement of desire. While I already described how the Dandy-bird socialized
with the cranes and formed a chain of equivalence with the pelicans, I would
now like to take a look at the housewife-unionist-fighter who also undergoes
transformations during the video. For one, he*_she* takes up some of the
Dandy’s attitude; that is, he*_she* is infected by becoming-bird. Yet, he*_she*
does not lose his*_her* aggressiveness; he*_she* becomes quite another
becoming-bird than the Dandy-bird. The housewife-unionist-fighter turns into
a becoming-crow, who in the end uses the trash as a stage for dancing its pogo-
dance – a wild crow hopping about unnerved yet relaxed. As such, it loses track
of the demands of achievement, success and utility – even in the sense of utility
and success as an agitator.
10 This is a decidedly different use of the term ‘representation’ than the one
offered by Escape Routes (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008), where the
strategy of becoming-imperceptible is presented as an alternative to representation,
which is exclusively theorized as supporting regimes of regulation and control.
81
‘Just leave me alone!’
Charming does not counter neoliberalism’s demand for individualism by proposing

community economies or collective politics (Gibson-Graham 2006), but rather
claims individualism: it works from within the individualistic paradigm but
subverts the neoliberal understanding of individualism by explicitly failing to
achieve its norms. Efficiency, success, speed, creativity, flexibility – none of these
values are embodied by the protagonists. Material goods are not celebrated for
their exchange value; elegant dress does not keep them from wading in the trash;
privatized responsibility and intimate bonding (with husbands or turtles or alter
egos) are not organized according to the principle of utility or fidelity. Rather, as
the housewife-unionist-fighter proclaims, ‘Neither love nor money justify ….’
Subversion, here, takes place through the suggestion that there might be
different affective relations to individualism than those offered by the neoliberal
model (which promotes the never fulfilled longing for freedom coupled with
anxiety and fear). Instead, in Charming, relaxation and joy are gained through
giving up on the promise and living freedom now – even though this may only
be the freedom of the crows to dance on the trash. Yet ‘lines of flight’ spread
in various directions: the turtle and the Dandy-bird disappear by the end of the
video. There are no signs of them losing their freedom or of them becoming lost
in neoliberalism.
Giving up on the promise is the same as giving up on a model of desire
as lack. This is exactly why the individualism promoted here is not a lonely or
isolated individualism. Desire is movement and assemblage; it draws connections
and flies in certain directions. The kinds of connections, directions, speeds and
intensities of flight are not determined, though they can be designed. Images
of becoming-bird connect the tower and the trash, the field and the high-rise
buildings and the zoo, the sheets of paper and the airplane and the dance.
Neither the model of the self-employed entrepreneur nor of the freelance
artist capture the individualism promoted here. So then what are the forms of
relatedness claimed by this kind of individualism?
Individualism Claiming Relatedness: The Freedom of Assemblage
In order to understand the versions of relatedness that Charming promotes,

one must consider how the protagonists and the formal set-up of the video
establish relationships with the audience. The Dandy, for one, promotes a
‘giving-oneself-over-to-the-audience’. He*_she* enjoys the gaze and being the
object of attention. Yet he*_she* also bears the risk of being exoticized and
turned into a spectacle. The housewife-unionist-fighter, in contrast, at first
tries to ignore the audience and demonstratively signals that he*_she* can do
82
without us. Relatedness here is instead enacted through attention to political

abstractions (his*_her* use of such phrases as ‘we housewives’ and ‘they’).
While in the beginning, the external gaze of an employer or union supervisor
is suggested, after a while the housewife-unionist-fighter emancipates his*_
her*self from potential bosses as well as from the audience; he*_she* displays
that he*_she* is unnerved by the gaze and takes control over the situation.11
He*_she* transforms.
One could read the Dandy-bird as a figure that invites the audience to engage
in projective integration. In its glamour, gloriousness and relaxed confidence,
the Dandy-bird is certainly an attractive articulation of difference. His*_her*
address is double: For normalized viewing positions, it embodies the promise
of escaping the constraints of everyday working lives and gender performances,
and it holds the prospect of becoming-bird. For dissident viewing positions,
it provides an image of embodied difference that is seductive, as it presents
difference as particularity and exception, as something open for self-definition.
The Dandy-bird suggests the power in having control over the gaze, seducing
the audience rather than giving in to its stigmatizing power (see Fig. 3.4).
Both of Charming’s figures are constructed as spectacles, although in quite
different ways. They both contribute to turning the spectacle into a powerful
staging of subversive politics. During the video, the spectacle is transformed
from a tool of alienation and objectification into a potential stage for self-
representation. In the third part of the video, back from the zoo, both
protagonists gather around the electricity tower. Now, the stage performance
of the fighter has changed significantly. He*_she* is actively addressing the
audience, gesturing to the camera with his*_her* finger. ‘You!’ she*_he* says,
mockingly performing the Althusserian interpellation that turns the addressee
into a subject by submitting her*_him* to the law. ‘You can continue to watch
this video. It’s for free. But you have to pay 50 cents.’ This is a quote from
performer and filmmaker Jack Smith (2001) that transfers the situation directly
into Smith’s ‘spectacular’ critique of capitalism, which can actually be understood
as a 1970s version of politics by which the system is transformed from within.
Smith is not simply pointing the finger towards the impertinent promises of
‘freedom that always demands its price’ but also occupies and embodies it – and
11 As a beholder I am not supposed to feel agitated; rather I am watching how he*_
she* learns the role of the agitator and transforms in this process. I am neither addressed
as housewife nor exploiter, but as an audience (‘You can continue to watch this video’): as
such, I do not remain neutral but become an ally, not with the housewife/agitator, but with
the performer. The precariousness of his*_her* performance resembles the neoliberal
requirement of balancing on the threshold between difference as a promise and difference
as a threat. However, what is noticeable about the performance is that the housewife-
unionist-fighter does not take much trouble to cover the threat and turn it into a promise.
83

does so wrongly, that is, appropriating alienation and exoticization as means of

self-expression.
While projective integration functions according to the economic logic of
exchange and mutual utility, in Charming the relationship between the audience
and the image (as a cultural representation, a fantasy and a social embodiment)
is transferred to another logic, a logic that undermines the promise/threat of
integration. Charming involves its audience through desire. This desire is the
desire of becoming that ‘entails an inherent transgression of boundaries that
turns the pleasures – sexual or otherwise – away from dominant notions of
human subjectivity’ (Shildrick 2009: 125).
Consensus as a Desiring Machine
How does a queer reading of Charming theorize hegemony? In accordance

with the notion of projective integration, I argue that late-modern societies
experience a ‘neoliberalization of consensus’: consensus no longer depends
on homogenization or a phantasmatic whole but instead presents itself as an
individualizing/differentiating consensus built from rhizomatically spreading
84
alliances and as such undermining coherence. This is what Duggan suggests

when she writes,
[N]eoliberal politicians have constructed complex and shifting alliances …

shaped by the meanings and effects of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers
of difference. These alliances are not simply opportunistic, and the issues not
merely epiphenomenal … the economic goals have been (must be) formulated
in terms of the range of political and cultural meanings that shape the social body.
(2003: xvi)
This line of argumentation also corresponds with Laclau’s definition of

heterogeneity as excess and as a constitutive part of hegemony:
The consequence of this multiple presence of the heterogeneous in the

structuration of the popular camp is that the latter has an internal complexity
which resists any kind of dialectical homogenization. Heterogeneity inhabits the
very heart of a homogenous space … a more complex game in which nothing
is ever fully internal or fully external. (2005: 152)
However, even if consensus is now infected by heterogeneity I still suggest

understanding Charming as displaying a politics of subversion and strategies
of becoming-imperceptible that explicitly undermine processes of consensus
production; although it is noticeable that this happens without contrasting
consent with dissent or by creating a simple opposition between strategies of
tender tension and strategies of antagonisms. Therefore if the ‘neoliberalization
of consensus’ is characterized by individualizing/differentiating consensus,
then the politics of subversion work from within this normalizing process
and consist in doing-it-wrongly; that is, in claiming individualism without
conceding to the neoliberal norms of autonomy, privatized responsibility,
personal achievement and economic utility. Instead, individualism insists on
infinite possibilities of building alliances according to improbable, uncommon,
anomalous or amazing criteria – ‘unnatural alliances’, as Patricia McCormack
calls them with reference to Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Unnatural alliances are
molecular entrances into something else’s politics, desires, alliances that traverse
proportion and proportionality rather than swap it or change places within the
maintained hierarchy’, she notes (McCormack 2009: 144). The aim of ‘unnatural
alliances’ is not to concentrate forces and develop into a ‘critical mass’ but
rather to create space for living heterogeneous ways of ‘individualism claiming
relatedness’, an individuality that is continuously becoming and characterized
by interconnectivity (Shildrick 2009: 126) or intercorporeality (Shildrick
2009: 118). This is the politics of ek-static selves (Butler 2004), of hybrid
assemblages that do not depend on strict psychic, bodily or social boundaries
85
but merge self and the irreducible other, or ‘present an encounter of self as
more than one’ (McCormack 2009: 136).
Yet, how are politics of subversion queer politics? This must be argued,
it seems to me, in two steps. First, one needs to recognize how politics of
subversion engage and constitute desire. Second, one needs to understand that
processes of queering that effect and affect politics are already constitutive
moments of the political. Thus, while queer politics have supported late-
modern, poststructuralist transformations of the understanding of the political,
they are simultaneously inspired by a notion of desire that evolves from the
political rather than being reducible to a psychic or socio-symbolic process
(Lummerding in this volume). Desire – as the orientation towards irreducible
otherness – is what produces the impossibility of closure of the political.12
Let me elaborate on these two steps. If politics of subversion,
simultaneously working from within the norm yet also against it, engages and
constitutes desire, this desire subverts the premises of identitarian subjectivity
and heteronormative coupling. As Shildrick remarks, ‘What mobilizes desire
are not the endless substitutes of psychic loss, but the surface energies and
intensities that move in and out of multiple conjunctions that belie categorical
distinctions and hierarchical organization’ (2009: 124–5). The linkages and
interconnections between ‘desiring machines’ present the possibilities to build
‘unnatural alliances’ (Shildrick 2009: 124–5), to reconstitute the field of politics
through enabling processes and to develop relations that are not bound to the
norm. This is a reconstitution of politics that indeed also means subverting and
rearticulating the distinctions between politics, economy, sexuality and culture.
From this point of view, desire is a constitutive and constituting moment of
politics of subversion. Yet, since politics of subversion work from within the
norms of the hegemonic order, this would also allow us to say that there is no
hegemonic consensus without desire, or that, indeed, one could reconceptualize
consensus as a desiring machine. This would open up hegemonic struggles for
the participations of various ‘Others of the Other’ (Butler 2004; Engel 2009),
not only for heterogeneity that ideally, or at least potentially, translates into
articulated identities (Laclau 2005), but also for irreducible otherness. This means
acknowledging irreducible otherness as a political force that queers processes
of decision-making and the design of social space; irreducible otherness as
constitutive of society would become part of an antagonistic pluralism (Mouffe
2000; Smith 1998) that deserves this name.
12 Here it would be interesting to consider whether ‘irreducible otherness’

corresponds with Lummerding’s (2005) use of the Lacanian ‘real’. Taking sex (sexual
difference) as a structural, truly anti-essentialist figure, Lummerding argues for an
understanding of the political as constituted in sexual difference.
86
Nevertheless, one could still go one step further and conceptualize what
I would like to provisionally call ‘the sexual political’. In order to understand
the political as potentiality, desire cannot be understood as secondary or as
an additive component. It can be turned into a constitutive moment of the
political if it is acknowledged as orientation towards irreducible otherness and
as such as undermining the phantasmatic promise of identity: a ‘line of flight’
that ‘cuts across, not up or down’ (McCormack: 144). This is what produces the
impossibility of closure that defines the political.
Thus I would like to conclude by claiming that there is an irreducible queer
connection between politics and the political that becomes visible against
the background of an alliance defined by tender tensions between queer and
neoliberal politics. Thanks to certain queer and neoliberal politics, striving for
identity and for the phantasmatic unity of a so-called integrated society loses
its attractiveness. People learn to accept ambiguity, heterogeneity, irreducible
dissent, radical contingency and indeed, precariousness as part of their lives.
This provides for a form of consensus production – albeit a late-modern
form of consensus built upon heterogeneity. Simultaneously, the openness
to contingency and ambiguity is coupled with a desire for new provisional
closures, for identities and belongings, or at least for an individualized power
of definition and decision-making that substitutes for social, economic or
humanist assurances. In the end what remains is a paradoxical tension on
the level of the political that translates into ongoing hegemonic struggles on
the level of politics. Thanks to queer theory, we* can give this paradoxical
tension between the contingency of socio-historical dependency and self-
assertion in connectivity a name: desire. Desire as a constitutive moment of
the political as well as queering subjectivity, which thus opens up towards
irreducible otherness.
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Chapter 4
Normative Dilemmas and the
Hegemony of Counter-Hegemony
María do Mar Castro Varela / Nikita Dhawan
‘… man muss diese versteinerten Verhältnisse dadurch zum Tanzen zwingen,

dass man ihnen ihre eigene Melodie vorsingt!‘
– Karl Marx
Opposition to same-sex marriage and registered partnership in most countries

can be read as an indication of how threatening this alliance is perceived to
be for the hegemony of heterosexuality. Simultaneously, it highlights the
central importance of heteronormativity for the idea of the nation. Yet,
same-sex marriage and registered partnership laws have at the same time
visibly reinforced the hegemony of the institution of marriage and of the
‘heterosexual imaginary’ (Ingraham 1996). This brings to light the dilemmas at
the heart of same-sex marriage politics. On the one hand, as a form of mimicry
of heterosexual marriage, same-sex alliances carry the potential to intervene
in heteronormative orders. On the other hand, by consenting to a hegemonic
institution and thereby striving for special privileges, same-sex marriage
stabilizes the hierarchy between legitimate intimate associations and those
who cannot enter the hegemonic order and are thereby condemned to remain
‘… one must force these petrified social conditions to dance by singing to them
their own tune’ (Marx 1976: 381; our translation).
The legal status of same-sex marriages matches that of heterosexual marriages
in only nine countries worldwide: the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway,
Portugal, Iceland, Sweden and South Africa. The latter is a particularly interesting
example in the postcolonial context, as the constitutional recognition of queer rights
is an important aspect of decolonization, even as the Nepalese and Argentinean
governments have announced their intention to legislate on same-sex marriage by
2010. Granting of same-sex marriages is also being considered by several countries in
Europe (such as Slovenia and Luxembourg), whereas in Mexico and in the US, several
cities and states legalized same-sex marriages and adoption by same-sex couples (for
example Mexico City and Washington D.C.). Various other possibilities exist in differing
countries with regard to same-sex partnerships, which are accompanied with diverging
rights. Thus there are huge international discrepancies in the recognition of same-sex
marriage and registered partnerships or civil unions.
illegible and vulnerable to ‘normative violence’ (Butler 1999: xx). This chapter
engages with the normative dilemmas faced by queer politics in the context of
same-sex marriage and addresses the following questions: What role does the
institution of marriage play in securing the hegemony of heterosexuality? Does
same-sex marriage as mimicry of heterosexual marriage have the potential to be
counter-hegemonic? How is hegemonic heteronormativity transformed and/
or reinforced through same-sex marriage? And we ask with Butler (2004: 53):
‘[W]hat departures from the norm constitute something other than an excuse or
rationale for the continuing authority of the norm? What departures from the
norm disrupt the regulatory process itself ?’
(De)hegemonizing Heteronormativity
Let us begin with the term ‘heterosexual matrix’, which is employed by Butler
to designate ‘the grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders,
and desires are naturalized’ (1999: 194n6). The matrix can be described as an
assemblage of norms that operates to produce ‘intelligible’ subjects whose sex,
gender, sexual practice and desire all cohere (Butler 1999: 23). Normative ideals
of sex and gender determine who can be conceived of as a legitimate subject
by constituting certain bodies, desires and actions as legible or natural. Not
always enforced coercively, norms are most visible in the effects they produce
(Butler 2004: 41–2). These regulatory practices manufacture and constrain
‘gender intelligibility’ by structuring the social, political and cultural worlds not
just through influencing ideas, values and beliefs but also materially through
institutions (Chambers and Carver 2008: 147). From insurance to taxes, from
adoption to immigration, one can trace how heteronormativity secures privileges
for those who consent to hegemonic norms, while non-normative behaviours,
relationships and practices are stigmatized, illegitimated and rendered illegible
(Chambers and Carver 2008: 147).
First coined in 1993 in the now canonical book Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael
Warner employs the term heteronormativity to describe how heterosexuality is
taken to be normative. It is interesting to note that as early as 1975, a Dutch
feminist group called ‘The Purple September Staff ’ published an article titled
‘The normative status of heterosexuality’. Here, they argued that heterosexuality
is a ‘normalized power arrangement that limits options and privileges men over
women and reinforces and naturalizes male dominance’ (qtd. in Ingraham 2002:
74). The term heteronormativity is useful in understanding how heterosexuality
achieves hegemony. But before we engage with ‘hegemonic heteronormativity’,
it is necessary to first clarify our understanding of hegemony.
Introduced in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, hegemony is a key term
in understanding operations of power. Given that Gramsci was making notes to
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Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-Hegemony
himself and did not provide a systematic, precise definition, the term hegemony
remains controversially discussed. The most commonly accepted understanding
of hegemony is that instead of direct domination, it is the ‘spontaneous consent’
given by the masses to bourgeois ideas, values, norms, perceptions, beliefs,
sentiments and prejudices, which are all historically produced as ‘common
sense’ (Gramsci 1971: 12). A consensus emerges in which the working class
identify their own interests with the interests of the bourgeoisie, thereby
accepting the status quo rather than challenging it. Raymond Williams elucidates
that ‘common sense’ is the sphere where dominant ideology is naturalized and
exercised so that the values of the hegemonic group become values applicable
to all (1977: 100).
Consent to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant class
is historically manufactured. According to Gramsci, subordinated groups agree
to hegemonic norms partly because of the prestige and moral authority that the
dominant group enjoys. ‘Through their presence and participation in various
institutions, cultural activities, and many other forms of social interaction, the
dominant classes “lead” the society in certain directions’ (Buttigieg 2005: 44).
Thus, for Gramsci, hegemony is a combination of economic domination plus
intellectual and moral leadership. Rule by hegemony is maintained through
moral authority in conjunction with the ‘free’ consent of dominated masses to
the existing social order (Lears 1985: 568). This functions through the successful
legitimizing strategies of dominant discourses and institutions accompanied by
the delegitimization of alternative visions. Consent, for Gramsci, involves a
‘“contradictory consciousness” mixing approbation and apathy, resistance and
resignation’ (Lears 1985: 570). It is important to point out here that within liberal
political theory, consent is a fundamental ground for the legitimacy of political
authority (Mehta 1999: 59). Those marked as unable to exercise reason either
permanently (for example ‘the mad’) or temporarily (for example children) can
be excluded from the political constituency (Mehta 1999: 59). In other words,
those unable to exercise consent by virtue of lacking the qualified capacity to
reason may be governed without their consent.
Gramsci elucidates how the State, comprising political and civil society,
functions to advance the interests of the ruling class in the name of promoting
the greater common good (1971: 12). Political society includes the armed
forces, police, courts of law and prisons, together with the governmental
administration including taxation, finance, trade, industry and social security.
These all function as an apparatus of the State’s coercive power that legitimately
enforce discipline. However, coercion is only employed if efforts to manufacture
consent are unsuccessful. Civil society is the sphere within which the State
creates and consolidates hegemony. This includes organizations such as the
church, schools and the media, which are all typically thought of as benevolent
and non-political. Social institutions of civil society secure certain norms and
93
practices consistent with the hegemonic social order through complex and
constantly changing processes and mechanisms (Buttigieg 1995: 7). Herein
the traditional intellectuals are ‘deputies’ and ‘functionaries’ of the dominant
group, and thus invaluable in the production of consent. Gramsci argues that
occasionally civil society is even more influential than the State in sustaining
hegemony (1971: 238). It is important to note that the production of consent
is not a one-time event but a recurrent process that engenders contradictory
and incalculable effects. It is exactly here that space for counter-hegemony
emerges. Thus, the notion of hegemony problematizes a straightforward top-
down model of social control and transformation; it also explicates how actions
and perceptions of a group of people are shaped by exercising power over
them without explicit compulsion. Since it functions subtly, hegemony can be
even more violently coercive in its effects to shape and regulate thought and
action than more explicit forms of domination. The production of hegemony
in civil society involves regulating everyday activities and interactions sustained
over time so that it is no longer perceived as an operation of power. Through
repetition, it becomes so deeply inscribed in the everyday that it is invisible as
a form of control. ‘Hegemony … represents itself everywhere in its saturating
silences or ritual repetitions’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 30). Undeclared
and unspoken, hegemony only becomes a site for contestation when its invisible
power is made transparent. And because hegemony must constantly be made,
by the same token, it may be unmade. Intrinsically unstable and shifting over
time and space, hegemonic orders are vulnerable.
This brings us back to our initial question, namely, how does heterosexuality
become hegemonic? It is important to clarify that heteronormativity is not a
simple account of the fact that the majority of the population is ‘heterosexual’;
rather it is a critical term that unfolds how heterosexuality operates ‘within social
practices as the implicit standard of normalization’ (Butler 2004: 41) inciting
each of us to conform to heterosexual standards. Another important aspect of
heteronormativity is the mutual constitution of normative heterosexuality and
the rigid binary gender order, whereby there are only two genders and one can
only belong to one category at a time. As an intrinsic aspect of ‘normalizing
society’, heterosexuality may be coercively implemented through an edict or
law but generally operates much more subtly as a ‘disciplinary norm’ affecting
every aspect of daily life, informing social relations and influencing public
policy (Foucault 2003: 39). Heteronormativity as a concept is not simply the
detection of discrimination against non-normative sexualities and bodies;
rather it unpacks the extent to which everyone, straight or queer, is expected
to consent to the heterosexual norm, so that ‘heterosexual desire and identity
are not merely assumed, they are ... rewarded and privileged’ (Chambers and
Carver 2008: 145).
94
Here it is instructive to bear in mind Foucault’s insightful analysis on

processes of production of consent. He argues that we should not ask why
and how subjects agree to being subjugated but rather should focus on how
hegemony manufactures subjects (Foucault 2003: 45). How are certain bodies,
gestures, desires and pleasures identified and constituted as heterosexual and
thereby as normative? How do diverse operations of hegemony support and
reinforce one another, thereby guaranteeing that they function (2003: 45–6)?
Here, subjects are not ‘inert or consenting targets of power’; rather, as Foucault
argues, ‘power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them’ (2003: 29).
This unfolds how politics governs social and sexual relations; it also determines
the mechanisms of regulation of that which is to be regulated.
Any attempt to denaturalize gender through the critique of heteronormativity
is deeply linked to uncovering the ‘normative violence implied by ideal
morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural
or presumptive heterosexuality’ (Butler 1999: xx). Normative violence is the
violence of particular norms that determine not only who ultimately counts
as human, but also regulates what is legible and intelligible within a specific
framework. Those vulnerable to not being recognized as legitimate subjects
risk ‘social death’ (Mills 2007: 137). In our everyday understanding, violence
is seen to be exerted on an autonomous subject, whereby it is condemned
precisely because it violates the subject’s sovereignty. In contrast, normative
violence is not exerted on preformed subjects but exercised in the formation
of subjectivity. Gender norms exert violence on those bodies that violate such
norms (Chambers and Carver 2008: 76), whereas those who conform to the
norms profit. The body does not exist prior to violence; instead it is constituted
through it, thereby being an effect rather than simply a recipient of violence.
Furthermore, Butler’s notion of normative violence does not attribute the
agency of violence to erring homophobes but to the norms themselves, so that
normative violence both enables typical physical violence, while simultaneously
erasing the trace of the violence (2008: 76). Thus the capacity of norms to
exert violence is twofold: On the one hand there is the occasional and incidental
violence that relates to the particular manifestation of the norm. On the other
hand is the violence internal to norms by virtue of their constitutive ‘world-
making’ and ‘reality-conferring capacity’ (Mills 2007: 140).
One of the biggest challenges lies in the difficulty of making normative
violence visible – unfolding how ‘norms of recognition function to produce
and to deproduce the notion of the human’ (Butler 2004: 32), thereby making
some lives ‘impossible’ and ‘unlivable’ (1999: viii). Certain forms of violence
are deemed as legitimate and permissible, since those at the receiving end fall
outside the hegemonic norms of recognition. The threat of violence in the face
of non-compliance with hegemonic norms is a constant reminder that to defy
norms is to court death (2004: 34). The very possibility of a ‘lived life’ depends
95
on being recognized as a legitimate and legible subject. Normative intelligibility

is deeply linked to survival, as ‘we continue to live in a world in which one
can risk serious disenfranchisement and physical violence for the pleasure one
seeks, the fantasy one embodies, the gender one performs’ (2004: 214).
Norms not only normalize but also valorize by rewarding compliance and
punishing deviance. Thus norms are inextricably linked with incentives and
consent that are produced and legitimized in the social, religious, economic
and cultural spheres. Butler’s approach shifts the focus on the question of the
relationship between sanctions and norms on two important points. Firstly,
power in Butler’s thinking is not understood only negatively as something that
prohibits or represses. She moves away from a juridical understanding of power
where one subject harms another. Instead, she sees the power of norms as
productive; they produce certain pleasures and desires while delegitimizing others.
Secondly, Butler’s argument marks a shift away from the liberal conceptions
of the subject as a rational being who makes informed choices about which
norms to conform to. Rather, norms produce subjects and bodies even as they
regulate them, á la Foucault. Liberal readings, which understand normativity
only in terms of deliberate choices made by autonomous subjects over which
norms to comply to, ignore the issue of survivability of non-normative bodies.
Challenging the fiction of the sovereign subject, Butler foregrounds instead
the vulnerable subject because of its dependency on norms (Mills 2007: 134).
Moving away from a voluntarist notion of resistance, she unpacks how norms
are a site of political agency, even as the vulnerability of the subject is closely
related to normative regulations.
Political attempts to dehegemonize heteronormativity usher in a conceptual
shift from minoritarian identity politics aimed at social inclusion to challenging
the ‘normative violence’ of heterosexuality. Within liberal theory, the problem
of sexual orientation has been resolved by making discrimination against
queers illegal (Chambers and Carver 2008: 145). The promise being that this
will guarantee equality and freedom. But critique of heteronormativity is not
only about individual acts of discrimination or overcoming the prejudice of the
heterosexual majority.
Heteronormativity sustains itself through constant iteration, so that
subversion becomes possible precisely because regulatory practices have to be
endlessly repeated to sustain themselves. As the iteration of norms is crucial
for their sustenance, there is the possibility that norms can be ‘deterritorialized
through ... citation’ (Butler 2004: 52). By virtue of being vulnerable to
disruption, normative orders can be resignified through subversive iteration
(2004: 223). However, deviation from the norm does not automatically entail
subversion, because norms depend on deviations for their continued existence
(Butler 2004: 149). Challenging the norm is still being defined in relation to
the norm. Following Foucault, Butler argues that norms both limit and enable
96
what humans can be (2004: 42). Foucault for his part learns an important lesson
from Kant’s analytic of finitude – that we are indebted to limits for they are not
only constraints but also conditions of possibility, namely, ‘enabling limitations’
(Simons 1995: 14).
Norms are not frozen in time, nor can they be challenged in the same way
at all times. The analysis of the historical conditions in which norms emerge
and in which they regulate is crucial for a counter-hegemonic politics. Thus,
the line between subversion and a mere imitation of norms is not easy to draw.
Subversion does not happen automatically and its effects cannot be predicted
in advance. Counter-hegemonic practices do not lie in the mere empirical
chance that numerous individuals undermine gender norms by participating
in the mimicry of heterosexual norms. Thus, there is no guaranteed way to
contest heteronormativity, whereby subversion is an incalculable effect. Butler
resists offering criteria to judge if a practice is subversive, instead arguing
that an act may prove to be more subversive through its capacity to irritate
hegemonic norms of recognition; that is, because of its illegibility (1994: 38).
Heteronormativity makes sexuality legible through the coding of everyone as
heterosexual. Those who do not comply with heterosexuality are expected to
declare their deviance from the norm clearly and explicitly through ‘coming out’.
Accordingly, to subvert heteronormativity would therefore be to render sexuality
less legible and to undermine the practices of reading sexuality produced by
heteronormativity (Chambers and Carver 2008: 155). Butler notes that ‘the
affirmation of homosexuality is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse’
(1993: 308), so that ‘I come out only to produce a new and different closet’
(309). This is not a straightforward disclaiming of queer identities but rather
a question of developing strategies for subverting the heteronormative norm
without stabilizing homonormativity, even as ‘judgements on what distinguishes
the subversive from the unsubversive … cannot be made out of context [and]
cannot be made in ways that endure through time’ (Butler 1999: xxi).
The ability to critique existing norms is linked to the capacity to articulate
‘alternative, minority versions of sustaining norms’ (Butler 2004: 3). Survivability
depends both on being recognized by others as a legible subject and also
on the ability to render one’s speech intelligible to others (Mills 2007: 142).
Normative violence does not mean that norms are non-negotiable – though
the negotiability of norms does not imply that norms cannot be violent and/or
coercively implemented. The contingency of norms makes room for creative
political agency. Even as subjects are dependent upon and emerge from within
normative orders, they are not fully determined by them, so that ‘norms do
not exercise a final or fatalistic control’ (Butler 2004: 15). Thus norms at once
enable and hinder the subject’s legibility and intelligibility. This reveals the
normative dilemmas we face, namely, that ‘although we need norms in order
to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social
97
world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence

to us, and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose’ (Butler 2004:
206). This indicates the ‘constitutive and regulatory effects of norms’ as well
as their ‘aspirational and destructive dimensions’ (Mills 2007: 134). Instead of
the common sense understanding of the normative as action guiding, Butler
unfolds the nexus of violence, norms and subject constitution (Mills 2007: 134).
Norms enable and hinder survival through normative constitution of ‘lives
worth living’. Furthermore, Butler isolates the force of the norm by exploring
the effects normative regulations induce. Norms as a ‘form of social power’ or
‘apparatus’ (Butler 2004: 48) do not possess an independent ontological status;
rather, norms operate as an ideal against which actions are rendered legible or
illegible (Mills 2007: 138). Instead of being imposed from the ‘outside’, the
norm produces its field of application (Mills 2007: 139).
Political contest resides in exceeding and reworking the norm; it rests on
negotiating normativity. If there are norms of recognition by which the human
is constituted and these norms encode operations of power, then it follows
that counter-hegemony entails a contest over the power that works in and
through such norms (Butler 2004: 31). The capacity to challenge hegemonic
norms presupposes an ability to re-imagine our relation to norms. Against this
background, let us turn to the politics of same-sex marriage, in order to explore
whether it serves as an extension of the heteronormative order and/or whether
it holds the potential for counter-hegemony.
Bride and Prejudice
Marriages are quintessential heteronormative practices, not merely because they

have until now been the exclusive privilege of heterosexual couples but also
because as a heteronormative institution par excellence, marriage functions as a
crucial instrument of hegemony. By virtue of the numerous privileges marriage
encompasses, it manages to incite the majority’s consent. Heterosexuality
ensures its hegemony in that it is held to be ‘normative’ in marriage and marital
status (Ingraham 2002: 76). There is always a good reason to marry, even as
the desire to get married is taken to be ‘common sense’, in that it is presumed
that everyone wishes to get married at some point in their lives, whether for
romantic or pragmatic reasons. The institution of marriage, which is at the
heart of the ‘heterosexual imperative’ (Mills 2007: 136), has a long tradition. In
line with Gramsci’s insight that the civil society, for instance the church, plays
a significant role in the consolidation of hegemony, we will attempt a brief
historical analysis of the ascendency of heterosexual marriage.
The Christian church’s influence has left its mark on the occidental
understanding of marriage, which asserted itself in the 12th century and spread
98
throughout Europe, and informs current normative understandings of affect

relations. In the Bible – Ephesians 5:32 – marriage is referred to as a mystery.
Later it was translated into Latin as sacramentum and affirmed by the Catholic
Church as a ‘sacrament’ (Winkler von Mohrenfels 2006: 533–4). In Christian
theology, the sacrament refers to a religious rite that sets a visible sign for
God’s invisible Being and serves as a reminder thereof. The sacrament’s formal
offering is associated with God’s promise of spiritual healing. The Canon Law
of Marriage (Canon 1055.1 and Canon 1055.2) reads as follows:
The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between

themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of its own very nature is
ordered to the well-being of the spouses and to the procreation and upbringing
of children has, between the baptized, been raised by Christ the Lord to the
dignity of a sacrament. Consequently, a valid marriage contract cannot exist
between baptized persons without its being by that very fact a sacrament. (See
also McAreavey 1997)
Although this is a prerogative of baptized Catholics, Christian conceptions directly

influenced Europe’s civil laws, and are today part and parcel of a hegemonic
understanding of marriage as a highly special form of partnership exclusively
between two persons of the opposite sex. Even a brief historical analysis of
the role of marriage as an institution within the political sphere unfolds its
violent side. For example, the Spanish Civil Code, dating back to 1889, defined
Spain as a Catholic state and declared religious marriage for baptized people
compulsory, whilst civil marriage was restricted to non-Catholic individuals
(Platero 2007: 332). During Franco’s Catholic-fundamentalist dictatorship from
1939–1975, the Civil Code was reformed in 1958, making ecclesiastic marriage
mandatory if one of the two spouses was Catholic (Platero 2007: 332). Civil
marriage was limited to two non-Catholic partners, even as divorce was not
permitted. The law regarding divorce follows the logic that humans may not
separate those whom God has brought together. What is particularly striking
is the link drawn between marriage and eternity. Similarly the German Civil
Code (§1353, article I) states that ‘marriage is for life’ and article VI declares the
protection of heterosexual marriage to be a ‘national objective’.
Another important aspect of the debate is the supposedly natural link
established between reproduction and the heterosexual family, where it is
contended that the foremost and genuine goal of marriage is procreation.
Here reference is made to the Vulgate, the Latin Bible text, which has been used
extensively since late antiquity.
Divorce was only legalized in 1981 and that too in the face of massive opposition
from the Catholic Church (Platero 2007: 333).
99
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that ‘reproductive heteronormativity’

means that it is normal ‘to be heterosexual and to reproduce, and it is in terms
of that norm that society is made: legal structures, religious structures, affective
structures, residential structures, everything …. It may be displaced into that
corner, this corner, and so on, but it … is not something that will go away’
(2007: 193). Reproductive heteronormativity predates both capitalism and
socialism, and sustains colonial as much as postcolonial structures, even as both
colonizers and anti-colonial nationalists instrumentalized it.
It is not a coincidence that the right to adopt, closely associated with
reproductive heteronormativity, is a key point of contention in the fight for the
recognition of same-sex marriages and registered partnerships. The Catholic
Church denounces same-sex marriage as being ‘evil’ mainly on the grounds
that it corrupts the idea of the family and implies death and destruction of
humanity at large. Marriage and family have historically been key terms for
(ultra-)conservative ideology. For instance, the regulation of marriage was
central to the Nazi as well as the South African apartheid regime (Vos 2008) in
order to safeguard the ‘racial purity of the nation’. Ann Laura Stoler describes
this as the ‘biopolitics of racial rule’ (1995: 45). In the context of Germany,
the Nazi regime passed the Gesetz zur Verminderung der Arbeitslosigkeit (Law for
the Reduction of Unemployment) in 1933, which enabled married couples to
obtain home loans and start a family while single men and childless couples
were heavily taxed. Other laws, like the Nürnberger Gesetze (Nuremberg Laws)
were put in place to secure racial segregation, prohibiting mixed marriages
between Germans, Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ who were not considered to be
German citizens or who did not qualify to become German citizens, for example
‘non-Whites’. Amendments of such laws have not automatically resulted in the
transformation of kinship structures. Registered same-sex partners in Germany,
for instance, do not have the right to adopt or to tax benefits like heterosexual
married couples. In the Spanish case, even though Article 39 of the Spanish
Constitution no longer defines family in terms of marriage, this legal reform
has not transformed prevailing structures; family as a heterosexual institution
remains firmly embedded in the hegemonic imaginary (Platero 2007: 330).
In contrast to postcolonial contexts, in Europe same-sex marriages are mostly
lobbied for by conservative LGBT associations like the LSVD (Lesben und
Schwulenverband in Deutschland), with the right to marry being presented as
In order to ensure employment for men, single women were offered marriage
loans on the condition that they gave up their jobs.
For instance, on 15 September 1935, the Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und
der deutschen Ehre (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour) was
passed, which prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between ‘non-Aryans’
and ‘Germans’.
100
the goal of queer emancipatory politics. This risks stabilizing ‘homonormativity’,

namely, a kind of politics ‘that does not contest dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising
the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized
gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan 2003: 50).
Critical queer theorists and activists often reject marriage per se as conservative
and typical of assimilatory politics. They in turn risk underestimating the
importance of such a powerful political-juridical issue, which has led to a
significant lacuna in the analysis of the relation between sexuality and hegemony,
even as powerful intersecting systems of violence have been overlooked.
The Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić, in her project Looking for a Husband with
E.U. Passport , attempts to simultaneously parody the sanctity of marriage as
well as EU border politics by unfolding the interplay between nation and family.
To this end, she posted her nude photo on the Internet with an accompanying
text stating that she wished to reside in the EU and was in search of a man with
EU citizenship whom she could marry. After exchanging more than 500 letters
with applicants from around the world and following a correspondence of six
months with a German man, she arranged a meeting as a public performance
and married him one month later in New Belgrade. With her marriage certificate
in hand, she received a family unification visa for Germany. This illustrates
how (heterosexual) marriages open doors even as they are the most common
cause for migration, especially for women. Normative marriages are not always
a result of romances. Rather, as feminist studies have shown, marriage and the
‘white wedding under transnational capitalism is, in effect, a mass-marketed,
homogenous, assembly-line production with little resemblance to the utopian
vision many participants hold’ (Ingraham 2002: 80). Moreover, as discussed
earlier, Spain under Franco, Germany during the Nazi regime and the Apartheid
regime of South Africa are good examples of how marriage laws and the idea
of family are at the heart of biopolitics.
Here it is interesting to take a closer look at the South African case, which is
the first postcolonial country to extend full marriage rights to same-sex couples
(Vos 2008: 162). Although this is seen as an important step forward in the
process of decolonization and democratization, the controversies and debates
Tanja Ostojic, ‘Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport: Interactive Web

Project’, culturebase.net Europe Now | Europe Next, http://www.europe.culturebase.
net/contribution.php?media=34 (accessed June 1, 2010).
Despite the provocative nature of Ostojić’s project, she clearly reproduces a
heterosexual economy of desire with the ad reading ‘Looking for a husband with E.U.
passport’ (authors’ emphasis) – and thereby stabilizing heteronormativity.
The US wedding industry, for example, is a 32 billion dollar industry (see
Ingraham 2002: 78).
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surrounding the bill make transparent how heteronormativity is at the heart of

postcolonial nationalisms. In the face of objections from religious groups, the
South African parliament did not amend the common law definition of marriage
or the relevant provisions of the Marriage Act in a way that would allow same-
sex couples to get married under this act.10 Instead, the parliament adopted a
separate Civil Union Act – open to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples – that
extends the right to marry to all unmarried couples over the age of 18 (Vos 2008:
162). The irony is that the newly formed alternative institution provides same-
sex couples the full range of rights without having to enter the ‘conservative’
institution of marriage (Vos 2008: 170) and thereby provides ‘competition’ to the
normative institution of marriage as do customary11 and Muslim marriages.
Given the centrality of marriage in organizing social, economic, political,
ethical and also race relations, any ‘mischief ’ with the sanctity of marriage is seen
as a threat to society. In this context, so-called sham marriages are particularly
interesting, as the term implies that there are true marriages that are distinct
from those deemed to be a sham. The German legal theorist Jens Eisfeld (2005)
claims that the concept of ‘sham marriage’ was invented by the Nazis. His
historical analysis of the instrumentalization of marriages in 19th and 20th
century Germany unpacks the process of ideologization of the marriage law.
Despite their criminalization, it is relatively difficult to expose sham marriages.
European state officials repeatedly admit this with regret. In the last few years,
the legal and moral discourse on sham marriage is increasingly hostile; they are
denounced as a betrayal of the sanctity of marriage. Thus registrars in Germany,
for example, may refuse to marry a couple should they suspect a marriage to
be a sham. In the UK, already since 1999, the Asylum and Immigration Act
includes provisions to prevent sham marriages (Kofman et al. 2000: 67). And in
some cities, like Berlin, reasonable doubt prevailing, couples may be interrogated
10 It is important to note that there was a wider demand to overhaul the Marriage
Act of 1961, passed during the Apartheid era, to make the institution more inclusive.
This also affected, for instance, the legal recognition of customary marriages and
Muslim marriages. Thus discourses about race, religion, culture and sexuality, as shaped
by colonialism, were crucial elements in this controversial debate (see Marriage Act,
1961 (Act No. 25 of 1961); Marriage Act, Extension Act, 1997 (Act No. 50 of 1997);
Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, 1998 (Act No. 120 of 1998); Civil Union Act,
2006 (Act No. 17 of 2006). The authors thank Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel for bringing
this to our attention.
11 ‘A customary marriage is a marriage negotiated, celebrated or concluded
according to any of the systems of indigenous African customary law which exist in
South Africa and that this does not include marriages concluded in accordance with
Hindu, Muslim or other religious rites’. South African Department of Home Affairs,
‘Registration of Customary Marriages’, http://www.home-affairs.gov.za/custom_
marriage.asp (accessed June 20, 2010).
102
separately before or after the wedding on such matters as their partner’s date
of birth, their eating habits, circumstances under which they met, the names of
their in-laws etc. In this instance, issues deemed to be private turn into matters
of public interest. The sanctity of marriage is temporarily suspended, with the
most intimate acts made accessible to state officials in order to preserve the
sanctity of marriage. This is an irony that should not be lost sight of.
To summarize, marriages are at the heart of hegemonic heteronormativity, as
they serve to stabilize compulsory heterosexuality and the idea of the racially pure
able-bodied nation. The romantic view on marriage veils ‘how institutionalized
heterosexuality actually works to organize gender while preserving racial, class,
and sexual hierarchies as well’ (Ingraham 2002: 76–7). It also makes invisible
the violence that is part of the ‘home-making’ and ‘home-preserving’ ideology,
which in effect secures the hegemonic idea of the able-bodied, pure and healthy
nation/home.
Of Mimicry and Marriage
Our society, as any society, can survive only if new human persons are
generated. The marital union of a man and a woman who have given themselves
unreservedly in marriage and who can consummate their union in a beautiful
bodily act of conjugal intercourse is the best place to serve as a “home” for new
human life, as the “place” where this life can take root and grow in love and
service to others. A marriage of this kind contributes uniquely to the common
good. It merits legal protection; same-sex unions are not the same and sadly merely
mimic the real thing. They can in no way be regarded as marriages in the true sense.
(May 2004: 314; emphasis ours)
The quote above, which appeared in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly,
writes off same-sex marriage as a ‘mere’ mimicry of ‘real’ heterosexual marriage.
Let us explore whether this practice of mimicry, one of the key concepts within
contemporary critical discourses such as feminism and postcolonial theory,
can subvert the hegemony of heterosexuality. Butler (1999: 67–8) proposes
that mimicry and masquerade form the ‘essence’ of gender. Similarly, in his
discussion of colonial mimicry, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha analyses
mimicry as at once a site of power and resistance. In his influential essay
Of Mimicry and Man (1994), he locates mimicry as one of the most elusive
and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. Colonial mimicry
represents the epic project of mission civilisatrice to reform the colonized Other
by initiating it into colonial normative orders. The European colonizer demands
that the colonized subject imitate and adopt European values and norms, whose
presumed superiority merits emulation. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry illuminates
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the agency of the colonized by exploring how the colonized at once adopt
and adapt the hegemonic colonial norms (1994: 87). Mimicry is neither a blind
aping nor solely a forced assimilation into the hegemonic norms; rather it can be
seen as an imitation with difference. It is an exaggerated copying of hegemonic
practices and behaviours that irritates the idea of the colonized subjects’
servitude. Bhabha explains that mimicry does not merely rupture the colonial
discourse; instead it creates anxieties through the play between equivalence
and excess. The mimic man is both reassuringly similar and terrifying, so
that ‘mimicry is at once resemblance and menace’ (1994: 86). Employing the
Lacanian concept of camouflage, Bhabha unfolds how mimicry is blending in
with something which entails becoming ‘almost the same but not quite’ (1994:
89). This ‘flawed colonial mimesis’ (1994: 87) enables resistance to hegemonic
norms insofar as ‘mimicry represents an ironic compromise’ (86). The colonizer
wants the colonized to imitate him but not be identical to him. If there were an
absolute equivalence between colonized and colonizer, then colonial rule would
no longer be justifiable. The legitimacy for subjugation rests on a necessary split
between an original and its copy, thereby justifying the privileging of one group
of people over the other. But mimicry as a process does not mimic original
fixed or foundational identities. There is not an absolute pre-existing identity
of ‘the colonizer’ that must be imitated, nor is the colonized betraying his ‘real’
identity through mimicry. And yet, there is the ‘desire to emerge as “authentic”
through mimicry’ (1994: 88). The colonized subject is drawn into circulations
of identification and disavowal.
What remains open is the question of who gains from mimicry as a strategy
of resistance. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry has been extremely popular among a
diverse range of counter-discourses that seek to challenge hegemonic identities
and formations. Here, mimicry of dominant cultures and identities is seen as a
moment of subversion that ruptures hegemonic discourses. Let us now explore
the openings and limits of mimicry as a strategy of subversion in the context
of the same-sex marriage debate in Europe. If hegemonic heteronormativity
functions through normalizing hetero-alliances, then by opening up the
institution of marriage to negotiation, there is the possibility of not only
denaturalizing heterosexuality but also rendering visible the embedded violence
exerted through the exclusiveness of the right to get married. If heterosexual
marriage functions subtly and invisibly, by presenting itself as common sense
and bringing respectability, social status and material benefits to those who are
permitted to enter this institution, then same-sex marriage can be read as a
contestation of hegemonic heteronormativity. It forces hegemonic institutions
to rethink their structures and to reconsider who has the right to be a member,
including on what grounds and in what permutation and combination. For
example, in various countries where same-sex marriage has been legalized,
fundamental changes in tax laws, medical insurance, pension rights etc. have
104
been undertaken. And long debates on same-sex marriage in the public sphere
have challenged the ‘sanctity of marriage’ while mobilizing other ideas of
partnerships and affective relationships.
Whereas registered partnerships have largely contributed to symbolic
equality12, same-sex marriages have intervened more radically into heterosexual
monopoly over privileges13. In several countries in Europe, same-sex marriage
has, for example, offered queer postcolonial migrants from countries where
homosexuality is criminalized the opportunity to acquire citizenship rights
through marriage with EU citizens. It has also granted them adoption and
pension rights as well as tax benefits.
Spain presents an interesting case study in this regard. In 2005, Spain became
the third country in Europe, after Belgium and the Netherlands, to permit
same-sex marriage and to allow non-heterosexual couples to adopt children.
While conservative opposition leaders condemned the law as a ‘grave act of
irresponsibility’14, Spain’s socialist president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero,
proclaimed that the new regulations provide ‘for a more decent country, because
a decent society does not humiliate its members’.15 Immediately after the law
was passed, questions arose regarding the legal status of bi-national same-sex
marriages. A Spaniard and an Indian national were denied a marriage license
on the grounds that Indian law did not permit same-sex marriage. Shortly
afterwards, marriage between a Spanish woman and her partner – an Argentinean
national – was registered: the first same-sex marriage between women in Spain.
The judge gave priority to the right to marry in Spain over Argentinean law,
which did not legally permit same-sex marriages. Subsequently, within Spanish
law, marriage between a Spaniard and an alien or between aliens of the same
sex was deemed valid – even if the alien’s national legislation did not allow or
recognize the validity of such a marriage.16 This of course opens up interesting
debates regarding national sovereignty, international law and transnational
12 Registered same-sex partners do not have the same rights as heterosexual

couples. Thus parity of participation in privileges is still not guaranteed through
registration.
13 As we know from the days of the AIDS epidemic in Europe and North
America, when non-married partners were not even allowed to visit each other in the
hospital, it is risky to underplay the importance of constitutional recognition of same-
sex intimate relations.
14 Fox News, ‘Spain’s Parliament Approves Gay Marriage’, American Policy
Roundtable, June 30, 2005, http://www.aproundtable.org/news.cfm?NEWS_ID=568
&issuecode=marriage.
15 Alicia Fraerman, ‘Gay marriage law for a “decent society”, says Prime Minister’,
IPS, June 30, 2005, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29291 (accessed May 31, 2010).
16 See Boletín Oficial del Estado, ‘Otras disposiciones’, http://www.boe.es/boe/
dias/2005/08/08/pdfs/A27817-27822.pdf (accessed June 9, 2010).
105
bureaucracy. For instance, in most European countries, aliens are required to

produce a ‘marriagibility certificate’, which is issued in the person’s country of
origin and documents the person’s eligibility to the institution of marriage. In
many countries, for example in India, this certificate of eligibility can only be
obtained if the person in question is not ‘mentally challenged’ and is ‘fertile’
– namely, capable of bearing and rearing children. In the case of Germany,
for instance, this ‘marriagibility certificate’ must be submitted to the registrar’s
office after verification from the German Embassy in the alien’s country of
origin. Often, the Embassy sends an independent lawyer to the alien’s place of
origin to interview family and neighbours in order to confirm the authenticity
of the document. This procedure can take up to two years. Given that Germany
only permits registered partnerships (and not marriages) for same-sex couples,
and that these partnerships do not entail the same adoption rights or tax
benefits as heterosexual marriages, same-sex couples undergo the same lengthy
process as their heterosexual counterpart but the resulting privileges are not the
same. Furthermore, a registered partnership is not an option for citizens from
countries in which homosexuality is criminalized, as one can only access the
required documents at the risk of being persecuted.17 This unfolds how nation-
states collaborate with each other to uphold the hegemony of heteronormativity,
despite the rhetoric of equality and tolerance of sexual minorities. Against this
background, European claims of being tolerant are not easy to uphold. In Italy,
the centre-left coalition approved a draft bill in 2007 to recognize domestic
partnerships. The bill proposed giving unmarried couples (including same-sex
couples) health and social welfare benefits as well as providing couples who
had been living together for at least nine years the right to inheritance. The
bill faced extensive opposition from the Roman Catholic Church and from the
majority of the right wing opposition in the Senate – it was eventually stopped
from reaching the floor for a conclusive vote. The role that the Catholic Church
played in this outcome is self-evident.
Pope Benedict recently stated that it is just as important to ‘save’ transsexuals
and homosexuals as it is to ‘save’ the rain forest.18 The former president of
the Pontifical Council for the Family, Alfonso López Trujillo, also recently re-
emphasized that the use of condoms is immoral, stating in an interview: ‘Same
sex “marriage” is another step towards the total destruction of the institution
17 International NGO’s like ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans

and Intersex Association) are active in the sphere of international civil society on
scandalising such issues.
18 Phil Stewart, ‘Pope likens “saving” gays to saving the rainforest’, Reuters,
December 22, 2008, http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE4BL2FE20081222
(accessed May 31, 2010).
106
of the family, the most valuable heritage of all peoples and all humanity’.19
Meanwhile, Cardinal Rouco Varela, the Archbishop of Madrid, refers to
homosexuality as an ‘epidemic’ and described the legalization of same-sex
marriage as the biggest assault on the Catholic Church since Luther.20 This is
not a harmless assertion if one recalls that it was made in a country where the
law of inquisition was still in power in the 18th century and where the military
government enforced Catholic fundamentalism until as recently as 1975 (Pérez-
Sánchez 2007). In fact in 1971, Spain introduced the Law of Dangerousness
and Social Rehabilitation. This statute declared homosexuals to be dangerous,
thereby justifying their segregation in order to rehabilitate them. From 1971 to
1979, 1000 homosexual men were incarcerated in jails or special disciplinary
centres (Pichardo Galán 2004: 159).
Against this background, the legalization of same-sex marriage in Spain is a
remarkable achievement. In a time-span of 30 years, there has been significant
transformation of social, economic, political and legal structures, which is an
important aspect of undoing fascism. Thousands of couples have married
and it is not a coincidence that many of them are bi-national.21 In 2006, two
transsexual lesbians got married in Girona, causing disbelief among queers and
conservatives alike, though of course for different reasons. This illustrates that
bio-political regulations as well as the divine order are being shaken up. Same-
sex marriage has forced society to question the naturalness of the ‘heterosexual
imperative’. The undermining of heterosexuality functions through making
that presumption explicit, opening it up as something to be defended rather
than assumed. A good example of this is the Federal Defence of Marriage
Act (DOMA)22, which makes heteronormativity more explicit by writing it into
19 Agenzia Fides, ‘Same sex “marriage” is another step towards the total
destruction of the institution of the family, the most valuable heritage of all peoples
and all humanity’, May 2, 2005, http://www.fides.org/eng/news/2005/0505/02_4784.
html (accessed May 31, 2010).
20 Zuber, Helene, ‘The battle of the “Theocons”’, Spiegel online international, July 3,
2008, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,540095,00.html (accessed
May 31, 2010).
21 According to data compiled by the Spanish National Statistic Institute on same
sex-marriages registered between July and December 2005, there were ‘twice as many
same-sex as different-sex marriages with a foreign spouse’ (Platero 2007: 335). This is
an important figure that Platero does not analyse further, despite it being so striking.
22 DOMA is a federal law of the United States passed on 21 September 1996
as public law and has two effects: First, no state (or other political subdivision within
the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a
marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. Secondly,
the federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man
and one woman.
107
the law. The act was aimed at preventing state level same-sex marriages from
attaining federal recognition in the United Sates (Duggan 2004). Even as ‘this
is a dramatic setback in the struggle for equal civil rights for lesbian and gay
citizens’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 156), the codification of heteronormativity
in the name of the ‘sacred institution of marriage’ – which is cast as imminently
threatened – points to the vulnerability of hegemonic heteronormative orders.
Yet, although the legalization of same-sex marriage might in some ways contest
hegemonic heteronormativity, the most important counter-hegemonic move
would be to eliminate state-sanctioned marriage altogether. Butler argues that
the ‘recent efforts to promote lesbian and gay marriage also promote a norm
that threatens to render illegitimate and abject those sexual arrangements that
do not comply with the marriage norm’ (2004: 5). The challenge is how does
one counter the homophobic objections to lesbian and gay marriage without
embracing the marriage norm as the optimal social arrangement for queer
sexual lives? Butler advocates that ‘a critical relation to this norm involves
disarticulating those rights and obligations currently attendant upon marriage’
so that those who live sexually and affectively outside the marriage bond are not
disenfranchised (2004: 5).
Counter-Hegemony, Subversion and Agency
Let us re-evaluate the merit of mimicry as a strategy of resistance and, accordingly,

the potential of same-sex marriage politics. Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry
is clearly inspired by the French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s idea of gender
mimicry. Irigaray argues that women mimic feminine norms as a necessary
masquerade (1985: 134); in a world colonized by male desire, women confirm
to gender norms as a strategy of survival. Mimicry allows women to pass from
an ‘imposed mimesis’ into a female miming that has no recognizable referent.
According to her, through a tactical mimetic parody of phallocentric discourse,
the disruption of misogynist theory may be possible. The ‘deliberate’ assumption
of the feminine role entails the transformation of a form of subordination into
an affirmation, thereby subverting it (1985: 76). Irigaray argues that women must
resubmit themselves to ideas about the feminine norm elaborated by a masculine
logic in order to make them visible through ‘playful repetition’ (1985: 76). She
proposes that women must challenge the norms they oppose from within.
Through the tactic of mimesis, that which was supposed to remain invisible
is unveiled. Women’s strategic mimicry of imposed feminine roles does not
amount to a mere reproduction of gender norms, whereby ‘if women are such
good mimics, it is because they are not simply absorbed in this function’ (1985:
76). One can conclude that femininity is not natural but rather, as Simone de
Beauvoir famously asserted, ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one.’ The
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mimetic play offers the possibility of uncovering modes of domination without

reducing resistance to a discursive effect (Irigaray 1991: 124).
Challenging representational norms of the feminine by exaggerating
stereotypical images of the female body in order to undermine them, namely,
‘undoing by overdoing’, has been sceptically received within (postcolonial)
feminist circles, as many fear that such ironic imitations merely serve to reinforce
those stereotypes. If one adheres to this logic, dykes are bad actors who mess up
their roles, whereas those women who successfully conform to gender norms
are appropriately rewarded.
In her insightful analysis, Anne McClintock (1995: 62) argues that in
celebrating mimicry as an essentially female strategy, Irigaray risks reinstating
gender binaries, just as she completely overlooks the question of race.
McClintock also points out that Bhabha ignores Irigaray’s understanding
of mimicry as gendered subversion; in his analysis of colonial mimicry, the
protagonists are only men. Bhabha’s ‘ungendered mimicry’ (McClintock 1995:
64) also ignores class – focusing only on race. As a primarily male strategy of
resistance, it reinstates elite masculinity as the invisible norm of postcolonial
discourse (McClintock 1995: 64). Moreover, as has been elucidated by other
theorists, mimicry sometimes implies simple imitation and assimilation of the
colonizer’s culture, and it is not always a process of the hybridization of the
dominant order (Moore-Gilbert 1998: 181). This overlooks the effectiveness
of mimicry as a strategy of colonial control, wherein mimicry can reinforce
hegemonic regimes of desire rather than disrupt it.
Along similar lines, the ‘counter-hegemonic’ practice of same-sex marriage
can be exclusionary as well. Even when marriage is an option for certain queers,
it still remains a union exclusively between two persons. This is not yet open
to negotiation. And though same-sex marriages may be read as parodies of
heterosexual marriages, so long as the privileges are limited to those who
are eligible to this alliance and consent to this norm in its present form, it
is still reassuring for the majority. Accordingly, prominent lesbian and gay
rights organizations have been increasingly critiqued for pursuing agendas that
strive for inclusion and acceptance within neoliberal economic and political
systems at the cost of those who are unable or unwilling to be part of the
hegemonic order. This promotes a form of ‘sexual subalternity’ (Kapur 2005)
that makes it impossible for certain non-normative subjects to be included
in counter-hegemonic orders. If subalternity is a condition of not having
access to hegemony, then those who cannot participate in the transformation
of heteronormativity may be understood as ‘sexual subalterns’. Queer rights
politics is increasingly being instrumentalized by social conservatives who
endorse reproductive homo-alliances that still uphold the centrality of family
as an institution, while marginalizing those who ‘indulge’ in polyamory and
challenge mono-normativity and the institutionalization of sexual and intimate
109
relations. Same-sex marriage politics, insofar as they are focussed on acquiring

economic and sexual justice for a small group of people, can still be tolerated by
hegemonic heteronormativity. The inversion of the feminist slogan ‘the personal
is political’ into the political is ‘only the personal’ seems to underlie same-sex
marriage politics, whereby ‘the need to rebel’ has ‘quietly ceded to a desire to
belong’ (Sullivan qtd. in Polikoff 2008: 57). What becomes clear is that when a
counter-hegemonic strategy is embedded in an extremely conservative logic, the
strategy of resistance can become toothless. We thus need to be critical of the
idea that every LGBTIQ-related politics targets hegemonic heteronormativity.
Provincializing Euro-American Queer Studies
As has been discussed in recent queer scholarship, same-sex marriage and

registration laws have increasingly been instrumentalized as a marker of
European cultural maturity and tolerance. This conveniently disregards
Europe’s legacy in the former colonies – since in most postcolonial contexts,
the criminalization of homosexuality was introduced during colonialism.23 The
appraisal of postcolonial migrants’ ‘sexual tolerance’ through the introduction
of citizenship tests in several European countries like the Netherlands and
Germany serves as a further interesting example for this argument. These tests
assess the ability of migrants to integrate into European values and norms. In
the Netherlands, migrants are shown a photo of two kissing men and assessed
on their reaction. In some federal states in Germany, one of the questions in
the test asks the applicants how they would react if they were to find out that
their son is gay.24 Interestingly, this integration test was supported by Germany’s
main LGBT rights group, the LSVD – the implication being that all migrants
are homophobic. Along similar lines, a regular feature in the Western media is
news about the persecution of queers and other sexual minorities in countries
like Iran. Racist and imperialist queer politics, which is complicit in Western
self-representation as ‘sexually enlightened and modern’ vis-à-vis the ‘sexually
repressed’ and ‘unemancipated’ Other, feeds into the paternalistic rescue
narratives where the ‘white queer is trying to save the brown queer from the
brown straight’ (à la Spivak). Thus, the politics of homonormativity exercises
an influence beyond Euro-American borders and despite its Eurocentrism,
it claims transnational legitimacy. However, it is also important to highlight
that it is dangerous to primarily focus on queer imperialism while ignoring
the heterosexist violence experienced by queers in the global South. When
23 For example, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, also known as the
‘Unnatural Sexual Practices Act’, was introduced in British India in 1860.
24 This question has been withdrawn in the meanwhile.
110
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was asked after his talk at Columbia University in

2007 about the persecution of queers in Iran, he answered that there were
no such people in Iran. The audience incredulously laughed at his response
and he knowingly smiled back.25 Similarly, recent efforts in Uganda (with the
support of US American Evangelical Christian church) to introduce an anti-
homosexuality bill that would broaden criminalization of homosexuality with
‘aggravated’ homosexuality being punishable with death26 is another example of
how different hegemonic orders are entangled with one another and mutually
legitimize each other.
The recent turn within Euro-American queer theory and politics
increasingly focuses on diasporic queers of colour on the one hand as ‘targets’
of homonationalism (Puar 2007) and on the other hand as agents of utopian
futurity and queer world-making (Muñoz 2009). The representation of
diasporic queers of colour as simply ‘victims’ of queer imperialism masks their
location on the privileged side of transnationality.27 Moreover, their valorization
as intending subjects of resistance and agents of queer emancipation reifies
queers of colour as a ‘site of difference’ even as it entails a disavowal of the
messy complicity of postcolonial diasporic subjects in neo-colonial structures
(Dhawan 2007). There is a certain impulse in Euro-American queer studies and
politics to universalize their interests and critique, so that even as ‘U.S. sexual
exceptionalism’ (Puar 2007: 2) is challenged, ‘U.S. academic exceptionalism’ is
consolidated – an interesting ‘repetition-in-rupture’. Moreover these queers of
colour based in the ‘West’ take themselves to be the norm for the ‘Rest’. There is
a certain monopolization of agency by those who, with First World citizenships
and hard currency, can afford to reject ‘pragmatic’ politics in favour of more
‘radical’ interventions in the face of queer imperialism. Puar, for example, sees
gay marriage as ‘a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights’
(2007: 29) as well as ‘attendant citizenship privileges’ (30). She, of course, only
focuses on Euro-America (2007: 20) and does not once mention the South
African case, even as her claims prove to contradict ‘ground reality’ at least
in the Spanish case, where most same-sex marriages are binational and where
queers of colour acquire citizenship privileges through marriage. Another
interesting move is that although Puar begins with an analysis of Abu Ghraib,
25 seethroughit, ‘Ahmadinejad on the treatment of women and homosexuals’,

youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xou92apNN4o&feature=related.
26 Gay Rights Uganda, http://www.gayrightsuganda.org/.
27 The colonial continuity of the politics of migration in the European context or
the experiences of racism and discrimination that are part and parcel of the everyday life
of queer migrants are urgent issues that need to be scandalized, as we have attempted to
do in this chapter. And yet we take seriously the politics of location and the conflict of
interests between the struggles in the global North and the global South.
111
her main focus is the racial profiling of non-normative migrant subjects in the
global North. Thus, the Third World falls even more deeply into shadow.
There is an urgent need to provincialize Euro-American queer theory and
politics. This is both a necessary as well as an impossible task as these theories
are at once indispensable as well as inadequate in understanding Third World
realities (Chakrabarty 2000). Anti-racist politics in the global North are related
to but are not continuous with the processes of decolonization in the global
South. It is instructive to evoke Spivak here:
To see the problem of race simply in terms of skin color does not recognize
that the only arena for that problem is the so-called white world, because you
are focusing the problem in terms of blacks who want to enter and live in the
white world, under racial laws in the white world. That obliges us to ignore the
fact that in countries which are recognized as Third World countries, there is a
great deal of oppression, class oppression, sex oppression, going on in terms
of the collusion between comprador capitalists and that very white world. The
international division of labor does not operate in terms of good whites, bad
whites and blacks. A simple chromatism obliges you to be blind to this particular
issue because once again it’s present in excess. (1990: 126)
In most countries of the global South, queer activists and theorists are struggling
for constitutional recognition of sexual rights, including same-sex marriage, as
an important aspect of sexual justice, even as these are rejected in the global
North as politics of appeasement. And yet, even if law does not guarantee
justice, one cannot not want rights (Kapur 2005: 37). Thus arguments against
same-sex marriage, put forth as being ‘commonplace’ concerns for assimilation
in a ‘corrupt mainstream’, need to historicize and contextualize the struggles,
whereby there are no ‘natural’ alliances between queer politics (whether black
or white) located in the global North and that in the global South on the issue
of sexual justice. In contrast to celebrating queers of colour, we favour the
Gramscian-Spivakian politics of acknowledging complicities in hegemonic
orders. Taking inspiration from Spivak, we argue against any romantic models
of agency and are sceptical of ‘cheap urban radicalism’ (Spivak 2007: 175) that
sells itself as anti-colonial resistance.
Negotiating Normativity in Queer Politics
According to Gramsci, proletarian counter-hegemony can only function if it is

able to build alliances by overcoming its ‘prejudice’ vis-à-vis other groups. Civil
society offers dominated groups the possibility to organize counter-hegemony,
which unfolds into new alliances of interests. Political struggle, for Gramsci,
112
necessarily involves a struggle to bring hegemony into crisis. To this end, the
dominated need to raise themselves into a class capable of leading its allies
by moving beyond their own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests to exert
intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with
a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’
(2000: 193), employing a term from the French philosopher and syndicalist
Georges Sorel. He proposes two strategies for challenging hegemony, namely,
a ‘war of manoeuvre’ and a ‘war of position’ (2000: 225). The former involves
directly confronting the coercive apparatus of the State, whereas the latter is
political struggle in the form of boycott, passive resistance and through an
organic process of transformation through education.28 Gramsci explains that
‘repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality’ (2000: 340), so
as to undermine the consent given by the masses to the authority of the ruling
class and to establish counter-hegemony through ‘passive revolution’29.
In modern liberal democracies, direct confrontation in the form of armed
uprising or general strike does not threaten the dominant groups as long as
their credibility and authority is firmly rooted in civil society, which ‘far from
being a threat to political society in a liberal democracy, reinforces it—this is
the fundamental meaning of hegemony’ (Buttigieg 2005: 41). Accordingly, ‘one
should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and
concentrate instead on the difficult and immensely complicated tasks that a “war
of position” within civil society entails’ (Buttigieg 2005: 41). A ‘war of position’
involves the slow and patient process of creating alternative institutions and
intellectual resources and is a more viable possibility than physical violence
(Buttigieg 2005: 232). Gramsci warns that economic crisis will not automatically
provoke the exploited classes to revolt, nor will it disempower the hegemons or
force them to ‘abandon their positions, even among the ruins’ (Gramsci 2000:
227; Buttigieg 2005: 253). Rather, he advocates ‘passive revolution’ as a tool for
counter-hegemony, which involves gradual rather than sudden transformation
of social relations. These changes manifest themselves subtly, so that they are
perceived as the ‘organic’ evolution of society.
Against this background, same-sex marriage could be read as form of ‘passive
revolution’ that transforms ideas of marriage and family step by step. Perhaps
‘[a]mong the likeliest effect[s] of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery
slope to legalized polygamy and “polyamory” (group marriage). Marriage will be
transformed into a variety of relationships contracts, linking two, three or more
28 Gramsci remarks that ‘Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position’ (1971:

107), even as he critiques it for being ‘naïve theorisations’ with ‘religious overtones’ (229).
29 Gramsci coined the term during the interwar period in Italy to describe a more
practical form of revolution than the violent Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
113
individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination

of male and female’ (Kurtz qtd. in Duggan 2004).
The famous Thompson vs. Kowalski case in the USA unfolds the complexity
of issues of marriage rights and domesticity, whereby a simple pro or contra
position is risky. Robert McRuer (2006: 86) summarizes the paradox as follows:
‘gay marriage works against disability, gay marriage works for disability’. In
1983, Sharon Kowalski was in a car accident and sustained severe physical and
neurological injuries (Polikoff 2008: 46). Although she had been living together
with her partner for four years, Karen Thompson, the hospital authorities as
well as Sharon’s father, the court-appointed guardian, did not permit Karen to
visit her. Although, Sharon subsequently expressed her preference to live with
her partner, the courts upheld her father’s decision and for three and a half
years Karen was not allowed to see Sharon (Polikoff 2008: 46–7). The ensuing
court case, which was supported by feminist, lesbian and disability rights groups
alike, went on for eight years. Only legal recognition of the couple’s rights would
make it impossible for the Kowalskis to ignore their own daughter’s will to live
with her partner. The executive director of the LGBT organization Lambda
Legal believes that this case ‘proved the imperative of achieving marriage for
same-sex couples’ (Polikoff 2008: 57).
McRuer unpacks how ‘straight ideologies of domesticity’ (2006: 102) and
marriage as a normalizing institution function ‘as a site for the development of
the able-bodied identities, practices, and relations’ (89). However, as he points
out, the Kowalski case is simultaneously a good example for the conflation of
heterosexuality, ability and domesticity and for an alternative model of home,
where ‘the drive toward marriage potentially works for disability’ (McRuer 2006:
85). Thompson won the case against the Kowalskis and Sharon lives with Karen
and her new partner under one roof. As McRuer concludes, ‘It’s a fairly queer
domestic arrangement, suggesting that queerness, in its most critical sense,
might generate disability, while disability might breed queerness’ (2006: 102).
Instead of rejecting the struggle for marriage rights as a conservative
move, perhaps the bigger challenge for queer politics is negotiating how
non-normative organization of sexual and affectual relations may become
hegemonic. If, as argued by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), hegemony emerges
in a field criss-crossed by antagonistic articulatory practices with ‘interests’
being constituted in the process of representation, then political struggle is
not simply the process of the realization of pregiven interests of particular
groups; rather it entails acknowledging the contingency and heterogeneity of
queer politics. When counter-hegemonic groups assume the representation and
the pursuit of interests for a community, they must be attentive to how these
interests conflict with those who do not qualify to belong to this group. For
instance, as argued previously, the politics of queers of colour in the global
North are not automatically connected with queers located in the global South.
114
Queer politics seeks to focus on the invisibility and exclusion of non-normative

sexualities within socio-political structures. The aim is to extend legitimacy to
non-normative subjects by having their interests represented. Paradoxically,
as Butler advises us, representation will be worthwhile for queer politics only
when the production of subjectivity as well as the processes of representation
are persistently problematized (1999: 3–4). This implies that it is not enough
to merely inquire how the interests of queers may be more fully represented.
What is even more crucial is to analyse how the category ‘queer’, the subject of
queer politics, is produced and constrained by the very structures of discourse
through which emancipation is sought.
Coming back to same-sex marriage politics, the question is whether they
contribute to homonormative hegemony. Is this the hegemony of counter-
hegemony? It is important to note here that for Gramsci, proletarian hegemony
is not the same as bourgeois hegemony30 – an important differentiation that is
sadly overlooked by some queer theorists, who see same-sex marriage as the
simple accumulation of privileges by ‘non-critical’ queers. The crucial difference
is that subaltern agency exposes power, while domination, in order to prevail,
veils its power. Interestingly, Gramsci does not advocate the preservation of
subaltern spaces; rather his political project is one of ‘undoing subalternity’
through the insertion of the subaltern into hegemony. Along similar lines,
Spivak remarks: ‘Who the hell wants to protect subalternity? Only extremely
reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers. No activist wants to keep
the subaltern in the space of difference.… You don’t give the subaltern voice ...
you work against subalternity’ (1992: 46).
For Gramsci, hegemony is not necessarily bad or immoral. And inversely,
being ‘outside’ hegemony does not ensure one is pious or innocent. It is a
Christian approach to politics to believe that the oppressed are automatically
better human beings. As Spivak remarks, ‘We are good because we were
oppressed, and they are bad because they oppressed us. I don’t think history is
like that’ (2000). It is not about celebrating or romanticizing those who are not
part of the hegemonic order, it is about intervening in hegemony. Hegemony is
not something to be avoided but to be achieved.
Consequently, the claim to marriage rights for same-sex and transgender
couples must not be seen as a simple stabilization of traditional marriage. Instead,
it could result in the transformation of the idea of partnerships. Duggan notes
that ‘[m]oral conservatives have so far taken the lead in the struggle to frame the
meaning of the “marriage crisis”. In their apocalyptic imagination, the stability
of heterosexual unions and the social order they insure are threatened on all
sides – by the spectre of gay marriage...’ (2004). If moral conservatives fear that
30 Along similar lines, Duggan rejects the equalizing of homonormativity to

heteronormativity.
115
same-sex marriages could lead to such devastating consequences as the end of

mankind, queer activists should perhaps take a closer look at the possibilities
for counter-hegemony through the contestation of the ‘sanctity’ and privilege
of marriage. If, as Bhabha tells us, mimicry is a strategy of both subjection and
subterfuge (1994: 88), then it is about ‘making possible and making trouble,
both at once’ (Bhabha 1995: 110). Mimicry is not just imitation, it is mockery.
It is not just re-appropriation and re-interpretation, it is misappropriation,
misinterpretation, mistranslation and estrangement. Heteronormative marriage
is mocked in that it is mimicked. However, same-sex marriage cannot function
as some sort of ‘direct-action tool’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 153) of queer
politics, even if it holds subversive potential in so far as it denaturalizes the
heteronormative imperative. In the spirit of Gramsci, the struggle towards
societal transformation must keep in sight the difficult task of winning the war
of position where emancipatory ideas and practices replace repressive ideology.
But as Stuart Hall warns: ‘[H]egemonizing is hard work’ (qtd. in Lipsitz 1988: 146).
To conclude, the politics of same-sex marriage is at once an effective and
risky strategy, which unfolds the ‘normative dilemmas’ of queer, postcolonial
politics. It offers the possibility to challenge the sanctity of heterosexual
marriage, contests the normativity of customary kinship structures and makes
visible the normative violence of traditional marriages. As an experiment in
living otherwise and as a mode of existence that disrupts the hegemonic norms,
same-sex marriage has led to the heterosexual majority’s loss of monopoly over
a variety of privileges. Moreover, it entails the possibility of intervening in
migration politics in the global North by allowing same-sex and transgender
partners from postcolonial countries to acquire citizenship rights through
marriage. If the politics of same-sex marriage manages not to silence ‘dissident
voices that question the differential impact of marriage on “other” individuals
(lesbians, illegal residents, racialized people, etc.)’ (Platero 2007: 336), then it
offers an opportunity for the resignification of normative orders. Our brief
analysis unfolds that same-sex marriage can neither be read as a simple counter-
hegemonic practice nor as something that is straightforwardly complicit with the
hegemonic order. Debates surrounding same-sex marriage politics problematize
the idea of family, rearticulate care-politics and reinvent partnership, but they
also stabilize the idea of monogamous love and exclude certain non-normative
alliances from parity of participation. Thus resistance against heteronormativity
comes with the risk of reproducing ‘normative violence’. Mimicry of a powerful
institution like heterosexual marriage can be co-opted to legitimize violence
against non-normative Others. As Ingraham notes, ‘To interrupt the ways in
which the heterosexual imaginary naturalizes heterosexuality and conceals its
constructedness in the illusion of universality requires a systematic analysis of
the ways in which it is historically imbricated in the distribution of economic
resources, cultural power, and social control’ (1996: 169). Thus, the agenda of
116
queer politics must be broader than just claiming sexual rights and should contest
other social forms of violence, among them poverty, imperialism, international
division of labour and global capitalism. If a new historic bloc creates a counter-
hegemony directed at the redistribution of resources and transforms the idea
of family and nation, and if it simultaneously aims for transnational sexual and
economic justice, then this would be a hegemony worth fighting for.
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Chapter 5
How Sam Became a Father,
Became a Citizen: Scripts of
Neoliberal Inclusion of Disability
Kateřina Kolářová
Queer and Crip: Necessary Intersections
In a 2005 queer double issue of Social Text, David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam
and José Esteban Muñoz state that
[t]he contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity – as a mass-

mediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal category – demands a renewed
queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not
extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to firm understanding
of queer as a political metaphor without fixed referent. (2005: 1; my emphasis)
Although the authors expressly set out to map the future directions of queer
critique, none of the texts gathered in the collection of professedly queer
intersectional work considers disability as a category (or one of the categories)
that intersect(s) with queer analyses of heteronormativity. This is a curious
omission, given that as recently as 2003 GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies
published a special issue titled Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability
Studies, edited jointly by Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson. This issue
provided a collection of inspiring essays that sketch out the multiple ways in
which disability and queer critiques interact. Over the past seven years since this
issue, the interest in exploring the ways, forms and modes of mutual conditioning
and intersections, as well as the genealogies of both categories and analytical
perspectives, has multiplied significantly (see most importantly McRuer 2006;
I wish to express my thanks to the editors of this volume for their inspiring
comments and critique on the earlier drafts of this chapter. This work has been supported
by a junior research grant provided by the Czech Academy of Science (GAAV ČR;
KJB908080902). My gratitude also goes to George Washington University and particularly
to Robert McRuer for his support during my short study stay in January 2010.
see also Colligan 2004; Dietze, Haschemi Yekani, and Michaelis 2007; Guter and
Killacky 2004; Kolářová, 2010; Raab 2007; Shildrick 2009).
Focusing on the popular US film I Am Sam (2001), directed by Jessie
Nelson, this chapter offers a reading without a fixed referent; a reading that
would ‘claim queer and crip sites where those linkages can be forged and
can work against the current neoliberal order of things’ (McRuer 2006: 170).
I Am Sam, which tells the story of Sam (Sean Penn), a cognitively disabled man
and a single parent fighting for custody of his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning),
provides insights into the ways in which heteronormativity strives to reassert its
hegemonic position in the present neoliberal context and does so by making use
of a rhetoric applauding individuality, personal difference and individualized
choice. As Stuart Hall notes, ‘cultural hegemony is never about pure victory
or pure domination … it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about
shifting the balance of power in relations of culture; it is always about changing
the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it
…’ (1996: 468; see also McRuer 2006: 170). An intersectional reading traces the
ways in which this struggle to (re)establish and maintain the ‘moving equilibrium’
of hegemony as conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci (Hebdige 2006: 15; see
also Clarke et al. 2006a: 28–31) involves work along various axes of difference.
Hence, the key question of this chapter is: how does hegemony appear under
neoliberal conditions when the relationship between sameness and difference
is no longer one of a simple hierarchy – that defines sameness in opposition to
subordinated differences – but instead becomes dynamic?
Heteronormativity, as a theoretical concept, makes it possible to reveal and
deconstruct the processes by which gender and sexuality become part of a
normative matrix that designates what is regarded as a ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ and
most importantly ‘livable’ life (Butler 2004). Notably, the Butlerian definition
of livable life via the ‘correct’ and hence intelligible embodiment of the sex-
gender-desire matrix, in which sexuality features prominently, makes explicit
its contingency upon the social processes that distinguish the normal from the
abnormal, the healthy from the pathological and the ‘livable’ from those whose
lives are consigned to social death, misrecognition and devaluation. Along these
lines, Jutta Hartmann and Christian Klesse (2007) also acknowledge the ways
in which ‘hegemonial heterosexuality’ comprises normative assumptions about
‘healthy corporeality’. This, however, does not exhaust the socially prescriptive
effects of heteronormativity and its ‘productive’ role in construing dis/ability,
as the points of contact between heteronormativity and the cultural production
of disability are more complex than this. All of the single categories lumped
together in the triad of the heterosexual matrix outlined above have their own
complicated relationships with the binaries that inform the category of disability
(such as normal/abnormal; healthy/degenerative; congenital/acquired; valued/
122
How Sam Became a Father, Became a Citizen
dejected and so on). Conversely, the ‘normate’ (Thomson 1997) against which
the ‘disabled’ is created has always already been married to the threesome
of heteronormativity.
In her incisive introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick famously argues that ‘an understanding of virtually any aspect of
modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its
central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis
of modern homo/heterosexual definition’ (2008: 1). Robert McRuer takes
up this call in his Crip Theory (2006) to argue convincingly that not only do
‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ operate in
parallel structural binaries (homo/hetero or dis/ability, respectively) but that also
they are as hierarchical as they are inseparable. Further, both normative regimes
activate the illusion of choice, while in fact effectively precluding it. The most
valuable contribution of McRuer’s analysis lies in its capacity to demonstrate
that ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ and heteronormativity interact and rely on
each other in often unexpected and contradictory ways.
The neologism of crip theory is thus an attempt to think queer and disability
together in innovative ways and to define novel directions for a concerted critique
of hegemonic able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. Embracing crip as the
desirable liaison between queer(ness) and disability, I use this critical perspective
throughout my analysis to revisit (some) of the urgent issues outlined by Eng,
Halberstam and Muñoz (2005: 2) in the opening essay of Social Text’s special
issue What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now: ‘[Q]ueer studies now more than ever
needs to refocus its critical attention on public debates about the meaning of
democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and community,
and the alien and the human in all their national and their global manifestations.’
In particular, this chapter reconsiders the neoliberal triumph of privatization
and individualism in relation to contemporary politics of kinship and belonging
as well as politics of citizenship, recognition and social inclusion.
I Am Sam: Scripts of Neoliberal Inclusion of Disability
Counterintuitive (as well as counterfactual) as it is, I Am Sam makes a statement

about a ‘cognitively disabled’ man’s parental rights and guides the audience
to the recognition that Sam’s rights have been violated and that he has been
discriminated against. The number of various awards the film has received,
including a 2002 Oscar nomination for Sean Penn as Sam (see Siebers 2008:
Rosemary Garland Thomson (1997: 8) describes the ‘normate’ as follows: ‘This

neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the
array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries’.
123
115), suggests that the film does manage to persuade the audience to embrace
the notion that Sam – despite having ‘the mental capacity of a seven-year-old’
child – can be a valuable and competent father who should be granted custody
of his daughter. It also manages to produce a strong narrative, one that affects
‘us’ in the ways this chapter explores.
Sharing critical interest in the forms of neoliberal governance and the
ways in which it operates in the service of the present hegemonic status
of heteronormativity, I will be reading I Am Sam for its explicit and, more
importantly, for its implicit ways of juxtaposing disability against queerness.
Hence, this analysis explores the triangular constellation of hegemony –
heteronormativity – compulsory able-bodiedness.
As much as it defends Sam’s parental abilities, I Am Sam also makes a point
about social recognition and inclusion. Arguably, the film’s narrative recognizes
Sam as a worthy subject to whom both social and legal justice need to be
extended. In other words, the film’s narrative portrays the transformation of
Sam into a citizen. To acknowledge the power of this argument, we need to
realize that cognitive disability has long been – and still is – excluded from the
Tobin Siebers discusses I Am Sam in Disability Theory (2008). As he says, the

film has been praised by several critics for its ‘accurate representation of “mental
retardation”’ (2008: 115). Siebers, however, labels the film as ‘disability drag’, that
is, a strategy of masquerading disability (2008: 115). According to him, drag and/
or masquerade ‘[provides] an exaggerated exhibition of people with disabilities but
question[s] both the existence and permanence of disability’ (2008: 116). I share Siebers’s
critique of the film; however I do not agree with this assessment. Contrary to Siebers,
I appreciate drag and masquerade for their destabilizing and disruptive potential. If
he critiques drag for questioning the permanence of disability, I would actually see
this as an intriguing point of possible openings for crip reading and critique. This is
not to question the phenomenological quality of disabilities but rather to suggest that
in the binary logic of signification, to question the permanence of disability means
– necessarily – also to question the permanence and self-evidence of ability. Further,
Siebers grounds his critique of the issue upon notions of accuracy: ‘[I]t is difficult to
agree that the film portrays disability accurately because accuracy does not lie only in the
performance of actors but in the overall narrative structure and plot of films, and here
the film fails miserably.… [T]he film creates scene after scene, designed to set [Sam]
apart as a freak’ (2008: 115–6). Here again, my reading of the film and its politics of
signification departs from Siebers’s. My reading strives to point out that the narrative
is inscribed in conflicting strategies of signification that both portray Sam as a freak
(that is, they over-emphasize and ingrain him in his presumed difference/disability), but
also simultaneously embrace him as a model citizen and use him as a prosthetic device
(Mitchell and Snyder 2000) to formulate scripts of neoliberal governance.
Throughout the text, I employ the generic ‘we’ to accentuate the phatic effects
of the film’s narrative and of its preferred reading; the ‘we’, then, does not refer to the
actual but to a presumed audience, to the ‘addressees’ of the film narrative.
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predominant liberal definition of citizen and citizenship (for crip and/or queer
critiques of these notions see Bell and Binnie 2000; Berlant 1997; Duggan 2003;
Erevelles 2002; Goodley 2001).
Likewise, the film needs to be read against the context of systemic and
systematic discrimination against parents with intellectual disabilities. People who
are labelled intellectually disabled have been and still are exposed to sterilization
and/or deprived of their parental and/or sexual rights. Parents with cognitive
and intellectual disabilities are also subjected to surveillance and pressure from
social services and social workers, rather than being offered assistance and
guidance in their parenting. In many cases, this results in children being taken
away from them and placed in foster care or other institutions (see McConnell
and Llewellyn 2002; Strike and McConell 2002; Tarleton and Ward 2007).
In contrast, I Am Sam presents a picture of a society(-to-come) that not only
embraces difference and diversity but that ‘even celebrate[s] [it]’ (McRuer 2006: 2).
Here, I want to complicate the mythology of the inclusive society (re)produced
by I Am Sam and argue that we need to unravel its phatic and ideological effects
and functions. In this respect, the caution articulated by Axel Honneth (2004)
that specific politics of recognition in fact work as ideology’s covering tools to
keep up hegemonic relations of inequality appears extremely relevant.
Interestingly, the film narrative manifests a dynamic negotiation of the
normative understandings of all notions in question. I Am Sam calls notions
such as recognition, citizenship and even family into question. The film narrative
plays out a conflict between two approaches to disability as difference while it
simultaneously makes a move away from the liberal ethos of recognition. I Am
Sam does not fashion Sam as a representative of an identity group – someone
put forth so the film can make a generalized argument against discrimination
and the unequal treatment of people with disabilities. Rather, I Am Sam singles
Sam out of the community of his crip friends and thus raises many questions,
including: Why Sam? What distinguishes him from his crip friends? What
choices does he (have to) make on his rite of passage to citizenship? Working
with the thesis that I am Sam accentuates individualized difference as a potential
to be used creatively rather than abjected and/or negated, it is impossible to
escape the question of possible interpellative effects of the narrative. How
does the story of Sam becoming a citizen signify for the (presumably abled)
audience? What are the ways in which the dynamic negotiation of the concepts
of citizenship, recognition and inclusion resonate with the moving equilibrium
In order to denaturalize the position of ability and to draw out its constructed
nature as well as its dependence on social consensus, I work with the term abled rather
than able-bodied. Analogically to the term disabled, which accentuates the social and
cultural barriers built for certain bodies, senses and ways of perceiving the world, abled
refers to the (hidden and unacknowledged) mechanisms of privileging.
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of hegemony? How does the narrative of Sam’s creative use of his particularity
(cognitive disability) interact with the narrative of Sam’s being/becoming a
father? And finally, how do heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness
interact in the scripts of neoliberal governance?
Seduction into Inclusion
As introduced above, the discrimination and unequal treatment of people with

intellectual disabilities has a long and elaborate history (not only) in respect to
sexual, reproductive and parental rights, but also in respect to the freedoms
these rights entail. Taking this into account, it would be reasonable to expect
that a film taking a stance to defend the parental rights of a father with
intellectual disabilities (let alone his being a single parent) would make for a
highly controversial agenda and would lead to serious, heated discussions. The
nature of cognitive disability, the inevitable limits of ‘social inclusion’, as well
as the question of what kinds of rights should (not) be extended to people
with cognitive disabilities at all. Yet, this does not seem to be the case in I Am
Sam. Why? And what is it about the film that allows it to circumvent such kinds
of controversy?
Strangely, under other circumstances and away from the workings of the
silver screen, the majority of ‘us’ would doubt (rather than be confident in) the
ability of people with an IQ of a ‘seven-year-old’ to work for us or even live
next to us. At the very least ‘we’ would not acknowledge their right to erotic
and sexual lives, not to mention their capacities to parent. How then does I Am
Sam manage to guide us – these same people – into highly emotionally charged
identifications with Sam, into overriding the negative stereotypes and abjection
commonly associated with intellectual disability, and even into convincing
the audience that Lucy belongs with Sam? How does the film navigate our
(dis)identifications with Sam, the ‘mentally retarded’ person? And how does it
persuade the abled audience to identify with Sam and Lucy in their fight against
the state and its discriminatory mechanisms?
Theorizing ‘infantile citizenship’, Lauren Berlant argues that the ‘patriotic
view of national identity, which seeks to use identifications with the ideal
nation to trump or subsume all other notions of personhood’ often makes
use of subaltern bodies and identities ‘which bear the burden of representing
desire for the nation’ (1997: 27; emphasis in the original). Even if Sam’s story
does not emphasize the question of American nationhood, Berlant’s remark
In my reading, I wish to point out that Sam’s biological fatherhood does not
suffice to make him a father; rather than his being a father, I argue, the narrative sees
him as becoming one (parallel to his becoming a citizen). It is precisely this process of
becoming that interests me in this chapter.
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about the strategic deployment of subaltern bodies and subordinate groups

for constructing narratives about nation very much applies here. The central
conflict of the film’s narrative concerns the question whether or not Sam
should be recognized as abled to raise a child. Here, obviously, the symbolism
of child(hood) and the gender dynamic of the father-daughter relationship
suggest that the question of parenthood is linked to both the participation in
and the future of the nation; to acknowledge Sam as a father (a person who has
a sanctioned right to parent a child) is to acknowledge his participation in the
future of the shared community, that is, to acknowledge him as a citizen. Despite
his intellectual disability, which is over-accentuated rather than de-emphasized
in Penn’s performance, Sam is represented as a citizen whose rights have to be
recognized and protected. He is also represented as a loving, sacrificing and
eventually even competent father.
The story of Lucy’s conception and birth defies all notions of romanticism.
Her mother, we are told by the state attorney during the custody trial, was an
unlucky homeless woman who was seeking overnight shelter with Sam, and
who took off to pursue her own luck immediately after Lucy was born. This
story is significant for the manner in which it frames how Sam happens to
become a father: The film envisions Lucy’s conception as a chance encounter
and in fact as the outcome of an unfortunate situation of need; any romantic
liaison or wanted pregnancy remains in the realm of the unimaginable. The
thought that someone with the intellect of a seven-year-old (a fact we are
incessantly reminded of in the film) is left in charge of a newborn baby may
be disconcerting to the audience. However, a series of cameos picturing Sam’s
process of learning how to take care of his daughter – and of his and Lucy’s
happy moments together – are meant to reassure us.
The initial confusion over the complexities of baby care, as well as the
enjoyment Sam later draws from parenting, are offered to the abled audience as a
source of identification with Sam and as a means of transcending his otherness
(read: disability). We, the cognitively abled audience, are encouraged to recognize
Sam’s experience as identical to at least comparable to ‘our’ own (past, present or
future) experiences of parenthood. The scenes that stage Sam’s fatherhood and
his creative (while different) responses to duties of parenting are the scenes that
downplay, if only momentarily, Sam’s disability and difference in favour of an
experience that is presumably common to ‘us’ all. In this way, I Am Sam assumes a
mythology of (shared) parenthood – a mythology that is then turned into a base
upon which the film grounds its argument for Sam’s equal citizenship.
However, the cameos from Sam and Lucy’s life together engage in an
incessant play on the binary of difference/sameness. The scenes of domestic
idyll are now and then interrupted by the intruding and complicating difference
of disability. It is Lucy herself who raises the conflicted questions and spares ‘us’
the strain of asking if it is ethical and/or correct to even think about this strain:
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‘Daddy, did God mean for you to be like this or was it an accident?’ Another time
she comments: ‘You are different.… You are not like other daddies.’ Yet, being
the child of futurity, Lucy finds an answer to these difficult questions, remarking
at one point: ‘It’s ok, Daddy. It’s ok. Don’t be sorry. I’m lucky. Nobody else’s
Daddy ever comes to the park.’ Interestingly, Lucy’s commentaries manage both
to draw out Sam’s difference – and thus to set him apart from ‘other daddies’,
other parents like ‘us’ – while simultaneously posing this difference as a positive
contribution to their life. Sam is then allowed to conclude the scene and reassure
himself (and the audience): ‘Yeah, we are lucky. Aren’t we lucky? Yeah.’
But as she grows up, Lucy becomes more acutely conscious of her father’s
(intellectual) difference and, more importantly, increasingly aware of the
negative perceptions Sam provokes in her peers. She even comes up with a lie
about being an adopted daughter, thus distancing herself from Sam’s biological
lineage. All this comes out at a birthday party that Sam, together with his crip
friends, throws for Lucy. Realizing the full extent of her betrayal, she runs away.
This is the moment at which social services comes into the plot; the custody
trial opens and the performance of citizenship begins.
The character of Lucy, the child, functions both as the identification foil
for our present differentiations from disability and at the same time serves as
a projection for the narrative of progression into a ‘better’ and more inclusive
future. Thus, it is Lucy herself who juggles the contradictory meanings and
ambivalences for the abled audience. She functions as both the safe carrier that
articulates discriminatory messages about disability and as an ominous symbol
of a progressive and accommodating futurity that will be capable of embracing
it. The film employs Lucy, the child bringing a different future, to carry out
the conflict between what the film judges as stereotypical, discriminatory
preconceptions about disability – that is, the notion that we need to reject
disability – and the vindication of the rights of people with disabilities. Sam
is both figured as the same as all of us and simultaneously as different. But
Lucy does the work for us to articulate the compulsory gesture of educated
tolerance. This is a fantasy that figures disability as same but different and that
is essential for sustaining the normativity of compulsory able-bodiedness, with
all its power hierarchies and dynamics that the film also participates in.
The role of Lucy is thus important for the film’s narrative, as it bears the
potential to balance the various meanings of disability that the film invokes.
Concretely, as suggested above, it is first the invocation of the stereotypical,
more or less explicitly negative, readings of the difference of disability (Sam
as a threat to Lucy’s development, Sam as the ‘mentally deficient’ and ‘feeble
minded’ and so on). Second, though, Lucy’s character allows the film to present
and vindicate (presumably) positive readings of Sam’s difference as it recognizes
and accentuates the positive potential in Sam. Again, the fact that Lucy is the
child of a (better) futurity buttresses the preferred reading of Sam’s difference
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as a (conditioned) promise for society and as someone who enriches the lives
of those who come into contact with him. Balancing the two meanings of
disability/diversity is the film’s ideological work on ‘the moving equilibrium’
of hegemonic meanings/relations, as well as the way in which it formulates a
particular form of governance.
Becoming Sam
I Am Sam replays an archetypal narrative about the transformative effects of the

encounter between a man and a (girl) child. In George Eliot’s Silas Marner, the
powers of a girl foundling change the Weaver of Raveloe from a bitter recluse
back into a good man, reinstalling his belief in humankind and bringing him
out of his self-imposed seclusion. So too, in the film, does Lucy transform
Sam. The fight for custody of Lucy challenges Sam out of his (crip) seclusion,
the film seems to argue, and forces him to encounter the ‘real (normal) world’.
Yet, I Am Sam fashions a very particular form of transformation for Sam. As
‘we’ are guided towards accepting Sam as a potential and proper father to his
daughter, ‘we’ are offered a narrative that pictures Sam’s development – let’s
call it maturation. This narrative of maturation supports ‘us’ on our way
to embracing Sam despite his disabilities. And it is this rite of passage that
represents Sam’s ‘growing up’ into a(n integrated) member of society that
facilitates the perception of Sam as a ‘full citizen’ whose parental rights are
worthy of ‘our’ protection.
The motif of Sam’s becoming a citizen asserts, as well as reworks, the myth
of the inclusive world. In I Am Sam, both parties – the normal one as well as
the one that needs to be included to become normal(ized) – are presented as in
some ways complementary and as contributing to each other’s well-being. In
this sense, I Am Sam juggles the seemingly contradictory figurations of Sam as,
on the one hand, in need of protection, and yet on the other hand, as someone
who is a source of caring, guidance and even educational inspiration. Once
people start noticing Sam and his different personality, he has recognizably
positive and transformative effects on their lives. However much the depiction
of Sam feeds on the notorious stereotype of ‘the aspiring/inspiring crip’ (see for
instance Longmore 1986; Shakespeare 1994), there are traces of an interesting
and significant innovation that we need to explore to understand the dynamic
cooperation between the heteronormative and able-bodied normalization in
creating hegemonic hierarchies.
It is unsurprising that the two people through whom the film narrative
demonstrates Sam’s invaluable contributions to society, his payback to ‘us’ for the
benefits of inclusion so to speak, are two women who are both mothers: Lucy’s
foster mother and Sam’s lawyer. The guidance and inspiration that they draw
from their contact with Sam relates primarily to their maternal performance.
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Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), Sam’s professional, attractive, overambitious and

overachieving (‘I cannot lose’) lawyer, might excel in her professional life, yet
she fails both as dramatically in her private one. She is failing both as a mother
(‘My son hates me’) and as a wife (‘My husband screws someone far more
perfect than I am’). Initially, Rita takes up Sam’s case pro bono, as a form of
self-promotion that should help mitigate her image as an arrogant, selfish career
woman. However, under Sam’s influence, she begins to change. Her shield of
arrogance and selfishness falls off, so that her more gentle, empathetic and caring
(read: feminine) self can be expressed. Before the custody drama clears up,
Rita’s life changes: she leaves her husband, downscales her workload and, most
importantly, becomes a devoted mother. Or, as The Internet Movie Database
(IMDb) puts it, ‘A mentally retarded man … teaches his cold-hearted lawyer
the value of love and family.’ Clearly, Rita and her maternal (in)capacity is used
as a strategic argument to defend Sam’s parental capabilities and, hence, rights.
Even though she fails in her maternal role spectacularly, Rita’s parental rights
are never questioned in contrast to Sam, the good and yet socially unacceptable
father. Further, it is Sam’s influence that leads Rita to become a good and self-
conscious mother. Thus, Rita not only defends Sam’s parental rights in her
competence as a lawyer, her maternal disability further bears out Sam’s paternal/
parental abilities. How should we read this complex narrative juxtaposition of
disability and parenting (both as fathering and mothering respectively)? What
phatic and ideological effects do these juxtapositions have? And how do we
read the ways in which the film narrative couples the notion of transforming
and educating influence of disability with the discourse of parenthood and
family values?
Now, returning to the ways in which the film develops the difference of
disability: the portrayal of Sam, the ‘mentally retarded’ man, as a morally positive
transformative influence has a significant flaw. Sam’s capacity to morally inspire
is figuratively drawn from his intellectual incapacity. Sam is represented as the
eternal child, who, arguably for the simplicity of his mind, has not lost the
blessed wisdom of the heart. In this way, Sam’s difference becomes cemented
into a notion of defining the profound and perhaps unsurpassable otherness
that divides Sam and us (‘the normal’, ‘the intellectually-abled’, ‘the unmarked’).
And as with the binaries upon which the heteronormative gender order and the
distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality are founded, the notion
of complementarity between Sam (the to-be-included member of society) and
the abled society obfuscates and further reinforces the hierarchy inscribed in
this relationship.
See The Internet Movie Database, ‘I Am Sam’, http://www.imdb.com/title/

tt0277027/ (last accessed June 10, 2010).
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However, at the same time I Am Sam seems to push the normal/abnormal

distinction beyond such a clear-cut view and to manifest a different power
dynamics than the one embedded in the liberal model of inclusion. Fiona
Kumari Campbell (2005: 112) notes that ‘[u]nder liberalism, the production and
government of disability is facilitated, in part, through its taming into a mere
logical and discrete etiological classification and ensuing ontological space’. I
Am Sam shows a marked dissolution of the etiological classifications and of
the ontological space of several boundaries: the boundary between Sam and
the ‘normal’ as well as those boundaries within the category of disability itself,
as the film appears to treat Sam differently than the rest of his crip friends.
In fact, I argue that to appreciate the full interpellative force of the film’s
narrative, we need to account for the work of opening up the distinction
between the normal/abnormal as well as the category of disability for a more
flexible negotiation and redefinitions. The narrative figuration of becoming Sam
is intricately related to the ideological work on redefining these boundaries. In
other words, reading the ways in which the film envisions Sam becoming Sam
gives us insights into the ways in which liberal normalization transforms into
different forms of governance and discipline. This is a governance that deploys
the relationship between norm(ality) and otherness in different ways that affect
both those deemed within the norm (here the abled and normal) as well as those
deemed either queer, disabled, crip or any and all of the above. If this chapter
shows that difference is (conditionally) appreciated and embraced (and in which
ways this is done), we simultaneously need to ask how the recognition of the
potential lodged in difference transforms hegemonic relations. Furthermore, it
is worth examining if (and how) difference is being normalized and governed.
Crip Love’s Labour Lost
The film performs and undertakes much normalization work by creating the
home into which Lucy is eventually allowed to return. Interestingly, the home
into which Lucy was born and from which she is ‘rescued’ by social services was
a crip home of a sort. Sam and Lucy’s home was not – by definition – the home
of a nuclear (heteronormative) family; it included Sam’s friends, crip uncles
and an aunt who lavish their love on Lucy. In fact, there are few moments in
which the film allows for crip and queer fantasies to bloom. Take, for instance,
the scene that shows the group of Sam, Lucy and the crip uncles buying new
shoes for Lucy. There is a lot of crip pleasure to be derived from this scene as
it plays up – unknowingly – the campy desires of the crip uncles for girly shoes.
Each one of them goes around the shop to bring back the pair he likes most;
This section’s title has been inspired by Eve Kittay’s argument in Love’s labor:
Essays on women, equality and dependency (1999).
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each one of them is allowed a brief moment to imagine Lucy (or himself ?) as a
diva. Nonetheless, Lucy cannot be imagined as growing up in the midst of this
crip family.
Yet, interestingly, the film narrative chooses to place the conflict elsewhere;
it is not Sam’s single parenthood or the non-normative form of his crip family
network but rather his ‘mental deficiency’ that represents the troublesome
deviation from the hegemonic understandings of home, family and parent/father
figure. Rather, it is Sam’s ‘intellectual deficit’ and its fundamental divergence
from one of the defining features of the parent-child relationship that fuels the
narrative. Sam’s parenting is imaginable, as long as he keeps up with the parental
hierarchy defined (also) by intellectual capacity. Lucy’s turning seven, reaching
her father’s intellectual capacity level, therefore serves as a symbolic threshold
for the struggle over significations of parenthood, home and family as well as
normality, citizenship rights and responsibilities.
It is a lovely morning in a city suburb. In his best clothes, a bouquet of
flowers in hand, Sam appears on the horizon. It is the day of his court-appointed
visit to Lucy, who is staying with a court-ordered foster family. Momentarily, the
camera eye focuses on Lucy. She is seated on the porch of a suburban family
house, her foster mother at her side. In the next shot, we witness Sam take in
the scene, (mis)read it and retreat. The famous Beatles tune helps to decipher
the logic of Sam’s action:
Here I stand head in hand

Turn my face to the wall
If she’s gone I can’t go on
Feelin’ two-foot small
Everywhere people stare
Each and every day
I can see them laugh at me
And I hear them say
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away …
In the shock of recognition, Sam comes to realize that Lucy deserves a proper
family, a caring mother and a proper home. Realizing that he cannot provide her
with all this, he decides to retreat and leave Lucy to be happy in her foster home.
It is only when Sam is confronted with middle-class suburban propriety that
he doubts his parental rights to Lucy. He breaks down. He despairs. He quits his
job at Starbucks. He shuts himself off behind a wall of self-made origami. The
confrontation with the ideal(ized) home that appears both best and necessary
for Lucy finally broke Sam, causing him to lose faith in himself and in his
parental abilities.
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It takes Rita’s force to bring Sam out again. Yet, it is more than Rita’s
persuasive skills that are needed to break through Sam’s despair. Paradoxically,
it is Rita’s breakdown that makes Sam realize that he has given up too easily.
Rita, the shrewd lawyer, the strong and perfect woman, breaks down in tears
when Sam accuses her of being incapable of understanding how hard the trial
is for him. He tells her: ‘People like you don’t know anything … don’t know
how it is to be hurted [sic] … people like you don’t feel anything … because
you were born perfect and I was born like this.’ Rita responds, ‘Do you think
you have a marked corner for human suffering?’, and lectures him about how
false and misguided his perception is. ‘People like me feel lost, little and ugly
and dispensable … Every morning I wake up and I fail and I look around me
and everybody seems to be pulling it off, but somehow I – I can’t … no matter
how hard I try. Somehow, I will never be enough.’ This exchange between Sam
and Rita is crucial and marks the transition point in the process of becoming
Sam. The next time he visits Lucy, Sam does not arrive with flowers in hand but
with a couple of leashed dogs. To boost his chances of regaining custody of
Lucy and increasing his income, Sam has taken up dog sitting. What it means
to becoming Sam is finally fully revealed: becoming Sam equals becoming a
neoliberal citizen of privatized responsibility and individualized potential. The
exchange between Rita and Sam is therefore a crucial moment in which (some
of) the normative outlines for neoliberal forms of citizenship are articulated.
The stormy dialogue and its aftermath are to clarify beyond doubt that Sam
understands that his fight for custody and parental rights must be linked not
only to his taking up the responsibilities attached to parenthood, but also
to the creative choices that would turn him into a non-dependent and self-
sufficient member of society. Or to use Foucault’s famous term, turn him into
a homo oeconomicus or an ‘entrepreneur of himself ’ (2008; italics in the original).
Swapping the flower bouquet for dog sitting symbolically manifests Sam’s choice
between the courtesy of visiting Lucy and economic pragmatism of diligence
that presumably (and in due course) would create the proper home for her. It is
beyond the scope of the present analysis to discuss the politics of labour and
the ways in which the film carves out a form of economic citizenship. However
it is important to observe that parental love and its manifestation as expected
from Sam is intricately related to (gender specific) labour. Whereas Sam’s labour
of care was initially disregarded as an argument for leaving Lucy in his custody,
Rita instructs Sam about the importance of (adequately) paid labour in order to
Here, in the heated dialogue between Sam and Rita, the film’s narrative strangely
undermines its own ideological work invested in modelling Sam into an entrepreneur of
his own fate. Rita’s confession that she knows that ‘[she] will never be enough’ seems to
bear the double baggage of both catapulting Sam into responsibility as well as revealing
the futility of this task.
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convince the court (and us) that he is capable of parenting his daughter. Sam’s
inclusion (in the sense of acquiring full citizenship status) is conditioned by a
different form of inclusion: that is, by an inclusion into the circuits of labour
exchange in the capitalist economy.
New Homes
The capacity to become a (responsible) citizen is contingent upon the ability

to make proper choices. Sam exercises his ability to choose abundantly: for
instance, to be closer to Lucy, he moves homes. This is a significant move on
the social map: Sam moves out of the part of town that the film associates with
single-person apartments, studios and public transportation and moves into a
suburban area populated by family houses; he leaves the part of town where
his crip friends live and where his supportive social networks are located and
moves to the suburbs, where no crips and/or queers (or any ‘others’ for that
matter) reside.
As Sam moves closer to Lucy, Lucy’s sleep becomes disturbed. Every night
she wakes up to climb out of her window and rushes through the streets in
her pyjamas to find her bed at Sam’s. Every night Sam carries her sleeping to
the home where the court decision placed her. These spatial metaphors (Sam’s
moving homes and Lucy’s compulsive commuting) seem important in figuring
the relationship of the two ‘homes’ between which the film negotiates for the
child of the future. And once again, Lucy plays out the role of a negotiator and
translator between the present and the future, as if her nocturnal trips were
measuring out how far we need to go before we come to be ‘at home with
disability’ (McRuer 2006: 76). Her steps draw out both the (present) distance
between the two homes – the one she, as a visionary of futurity, desires and
the one that society sees as desirable for her – as well as the possibility of
bridging the distance. However, it is important to note that Lucy’s travels are
equally a ritual of erasing the memory of the crip family. The more often we
travel together with Lucy between these two homes, the more difficult it is to
remember that there was once a possibility of a crip and queer home.
The nocturnal pattern of Lucy’s visitations repeats itself until it culminates
in, to use a hyperbole, a night of a miraculous resolution when the foster mother
eventually acknowledges Sam as the parent Lucy wants and needs. Sam, in turn,
asks her to be a mother to Lucy. It is tempting to entertain this different fantasy of
a crip family, shared care and ‘distributed parenting’ (see Kittay 1999).10 However,
as expected, this fantasy proves short-lived; I Am Sam fails to sustain it.
10 Kittay has coined the term ‘distributed mothering’ in her essay on mothering
a child with severe cognitive disability. I appreciate her concept for its revolutionary
resignification of mothering, in terms of responsibilities attached to mothering as well
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The miraculous and somewhat unexpected narrative closure to the conflict

that has fuelled the entire story is worthy of closer examination. The (foster)
mother recognizes Sam as the father on her own accord, while he acknowledges
(again without an official court order) that a child needs both parents. This
resolution to the conflict is as logical as it is ‘magical ’.11 The arguably transparent
logic of this resolution (does it not after all appear to be the best and only
option?) is an effect of the ideological work of the film’s narrative and its ability
to reassert the hegemonic position of the heteronormative family: it manages
to negotiate between the undisputable fact of Sam’s biological fatherhood and
the no less disputable necessity of maternal influence and of parent’s gender
complementarity.
Simultaneously, the film succeeds in reasserting the hierarchies produced by
compulsory able-bodiedness. Sam’s disability is ‘included’ in the metaphorical
home; it is even praised for bringing new quality and diversity into parenting
while the hierarchies sustaining the norms of ability remain in place. The man
with intellectual disability is allowed to be become a father (only) when he
is supervised by an abled mother and provided that he knows how to make
the correct choices of a model citizen. Such a resolution of the conflict over
custody rights is in truth (merely) magical while the offered solution does not
solve the contradictions that have built up the conflict in the first place. ‘Magical
resolution’ offers ‘purely magical transcendence’ – it ‘fails to pose an alternative,
potentially counter-hegemonic solution’ (Clarke 2006b: 159).
In this way, Sam’s disability functions as a narrative prosthesis (Mitchell
and Snyder 2000) to prop up the hegemony of the heteronormative and abled
family and kinship structures. Furthermore, Sam’s disability is also turned into
a gendered interpellation addressed to women as mothers. Rita spells this out
for us as she turns to Sam with a symbolic ‘thank you’; her eyes overflowing
with tears, she mutters: ‘I am not sure who got more of this relationship …’
Here, Rita celebrates Sam’s ability to teach her to cherish her motherhood. And
here I am tempted to recast a statement from Greg Walloch’s F**k the Disabled!
show (2001): ‘With his cognitive disability, Sam has been brought to this family
melodrama to heal the family with one sweeping gesture of love.’12
as in terms of the concept’s challenge to governance of mothers and mothering. In

my mind, it is also very useful not only, but especially, in the context of mothering/
parenting (with) disabilities.
11 I am again borrowing a term to shift it slightly. In its original meaning, the
term ‘magical’ was referring to subcultural functions of style and its ability to provide
a ‘magical’ resolution of the social conflicts from which subcultures were seen to form
themselves (see Phil Cohen 1972; Hebdige 2006).
12 In the original show, Greg Walloch says: ‘Cerebral palsy was brought to this
world to heal the family with one sweeping gesture of love.’ I am thankful to Robert
135
A Wonderful Choice Without Choice
At work at Starbucks, Sam takes care to congratulate the customers on their

choice of coffee as he goes around sweeping tables and meticulously putting all
the sugar bowls, disarrayed coffee cups and other Starbucks props into order.
‘Cafè latte is a wonderful choice. This is a wonderful choice’, he says. Sam
does not campaign for any particular type of coffee; his comment is merely a
friendly gesture, encouraging the customers in whatever they are doing. If not
as a comment on our excellent manoeuvring of Starbucks’s coffee variations
extravaganza, what then is the wonderful choice Sam congratulates us on? And
why do we need Sam to pronounce this congratulatory statement?
In formulating answers to these questions, I propose a reading that unmasks
the encouraging statement of ‘This is a wonderful choice’ as a rhetorical device
of specific interpellative force. The repetitive excess of this phrase – Sam uses
it generously and in all possible contexts – is presented suggestively as a sign
of Sam’s mental deficiency. However, I prefer to read the incessant reiterations
as a nervous sign of deficiency of another sort, that is of equity and justice,
which needs to be covered up by the congratulatory performative speech act
pronounced by the subordinated subject himself. Is this not a fitting description
of how hegemony works?
As this chapter has argued throughout, it is through the performative effect
of the film narrative that Sam emerges as the embodiment of citizenship and
an emblem for inclusion and recognition. In this sense, the courtroom becomes
the symbolic space where the citizen Sam Dawson is being spoken into being. A
crip reading then needs to unearth how the acts of ‘speaking’ Sam into a citizen
who deserves recognition of his rights define (and are defined by) the web
of relationships between the discourses of family and home, work and social
relations as well as the relationships between the private, the economic and
the social. In other words, I suggest we crip the logic that binds the normative
appellations to be a ‘good father/private citizen’, a ‘good employee/economic
citizen’ and a ‘good member of society/civil citizen’.13 To outline however
McRuer for introducing me to Greg Walloch’s work.

13 In The Twilight of Equality? (2003), Lisa Duggan advocates for a political critique
that would recognize the ways in which neoliberalism interlocks cultural politics with
economic structures. She remarks, ‘Neoliberalism, a late 20th century incarnation of
Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality
[and disability] as well as economic class and nationality or ethnicity and religion.
But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies
human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing
terms’ (2003: 3; emphasis in the original). In other words, Duggan believes that social
movements and political critiques cannot emerge strongly as long as ‘cultural and identity
136
roughly these interrelations, I again take up the notion of choice, which cuts
through the entire narrative of the film to produce a complex network of
signification. Actually, the ideology of choice is the cornerstone of the narrative
about Sam. It is the key to the ways in which the film negotiates its view on
the troublesome difference of disability, as well as something that serves as an
essential and indispensable argument for keeping up the illusion of a balanced
and optimal social constellation upon which hegemony is founded.
Becoming Sam hence commences with Sam making specific choices: for the
first time in his life he asserts himself, finds a lawyer and stands up to the state’s
intrusion into his family life. Later in the course of the custody trial, he chooses
to do whatever is necessary to be convincing as a father: he moves homes, finds
re-employment after quitting his job at Starbucks and eventually even submits
to the foster mother’s authority. All these choices are framed by his desire to be
a good father; and all of them bind him invisibly. On the one hand, by making
these choices he asserts his rights and carves out a space in society to become
an integrated member within it. Yet, on the other hand, they bind him into a
network of responsibilities that effectively de-crip him.
Sam’s ability to make the (correct) choices is also the answer to a question
posed earlier: what singles him out from the crip community and makes him a
hero we want to identify with? Sam’s choices are the reason for the significant
shift in the ways Sam’s disability is signified; through them, the despite comes close
to because of. Antke Engel’s concept of ‘projective integration’ (2007; see also
2009) is extremely useful here to expose the dynamics of this shift and also to
understand its hegemonic function. Engel characterizes ‘projective integration’
as a ‘characteristic version of a late modern, neo-liberal governmentality’ that
‘pluralises the norm by providing positive images of difference’ (2007: 127).
Difference is then ‘seen as non-essential, either as product of individual
practices or of social complexities’ (2007: 127). Crucially, though, as Engel
argues, projective integration fulfils a ‘double function: the majoritarian subjects
can project their desires onto the images of difference while the minoritarian
subjects enjoy inhabiting an avant-garde position’ (2007: 127). In other words,
the neoliberal form of appreciating diversity/difference interpellates queers and
crips in other ways so that they become ‘model neoliberal citizens’ (Engel 2007,
2009; see also Woltersdorff 2007). Thus, even if the film narrative puts forth
Sam as a highly individualized particular identity, his choices in the process of
becoming Sam/father/citizen drive him to a universalized, perhaps even model
position of a (neoliberal) citizen.
issues are separated, analytically and organizationally, from the political economy in
which they are embedded’ (2003: 3).
137
Furthermore, this narrative dynamic attests to a new form of norm(ativity)

being laid out on these foundations; Jürgen Link coins this phenomenon ‘flexible
normalisation’ (2006) and Anne Waldschmidt builds on this:
Graphically, this mechanism can be described as follows: In expanding, in moving

outwardly towards normality, the band that binds the normal center with the
boundary zones must not break. Any threat that the entire normal field could
dissolve would spark a backlash, a return to strategies that emphasize narrow
normality zones and fixed boundaries. In other words, the normalizing society
is tolerant and accepts many escapades; nevertheless, normality boundaries
continue to exist and may not be heedlessly crossed. (2005: 196)
Against this argumentative background, the exclamation ‘This is a wonderful

choice’ appears as a performative statement invested in masquerading a
semblance of choice where there is none. The tension inscribed in the wonderful
choice without choice mirrors the fact that all Sam’s choices can be described as both
logical and magical. If the choices Sam is guided into making for his daughter,
the child of the future, appear as the correct ones and as perhaps even the only
ones possible, then they are logical and the solution they offer is purely magical.
This is paradigmatically represented in relation to home and work/labour. In the
process of flexible normalization, Sam is integrated into society because of his
difference, while at the same time, the difference is subdued and negated in
the novel relations of subordination. In other words, Sam’s difference is not
allowed to make different choices.
In Conclusion
One of the goals of this analysis was to provide a reading of the specific visions of
inclusive futurity as a manifestation of a ‘very particular, historically specific, and
temporary “moment”’ of “settlement” (Hall 1996: 424; see also McRuer 2006:
244n16); settlement that marks the momentary equilibrium of the hegemonic
relations. So what does I Am Sam tell us about this temporary moment? How
should we read the promise of the film’s subtitle: ‘All you need is love’?
The reading presented here argues that the social conflicts inherent in the
relationship between the abled and the disabled are resolved as if through a
magical resolution in a way that depoliticizes and desocializes. The film’s
narrative deploys Sam’s cognitive disability as a prosthetic device to serve
the specific cultural need of re-establishing the heteronormative mythologies
of family and childhood, of citizenship and the ‘desire for nation’ – all of
which are based upon specific inequalities and power imbalances – while at the
same time crediting proclaimed diversity and individualized difference. I have
138
simultaneously attempted to chart the dynamic shift observable in relation to

these concepts, a shift that seems to attest to the process of negotiating and
re-establishing the moving equilibrium of hegemony. The ways in which the
film manages the difference of disability manifests the dynamic renegotiations
(between difference as a promise vs. difference as a threat). Sam’s disability is
no longer fashioned as the ‘other’ to all of these terms but rather as a particular
potential that can be used productively in their service. The fact that Sam’s
dealing with the abled world is predominantly carried out through his relations
with women who are portrayed in specific gendered positions (mother and
daughter), signals that (his) disability can become a useful apparatus in governing
(gendered) subjects.
Further, this renegotiation is apparent in the ways the narrative juxtaposes
the state (standing in for the public sphere) with the private and privatized
space of the family. Significantly and interestingly, the state is figured as the
non-inclusive patrolling force, incapable of assessing and accommodating the
individual(ized) potential of each and every particular subject/person. Instead,
it is the private space and specifically the family space – embodied by the
two mothers – that holds the promise of a more inclusive society capable of
appreciation and accommodation of diversity.
Sam’s intellectual deficiency is normalized through the ‘sweeping gestures
of love’, while it simultaneously helps to produce the complex mythology of
the heteronormative family as not only the best solution for the child of the
future but as the best solution for the future itself.
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Chapter 6
Signifying Theory_Politics/Queer?
Susanne Lummerding
Signifying. In opening this text with the term signifying, it is less the adjectival
mode that I want to focus on but rather the verb (in its gerundial mode) or, more
precisely, the processual and productive aspect of an apparently self-evident and
minor operation and its political relevance. Signifying will in the following be
introduced not as something that could possibly as well be avoided but rather
as the inevitable production of meaning that is intrinsic to representation and
articulation and, most notably, to perception – hereby performing a constitutive
function for producing reality. It is not merely in revealing constructions of
reality as necessarily hegemonic that I will ascertain a crucial reference to
the contestability of constructions of reality but particularly in analyzing the
reason why that which is produced as reality can never be anything else but the
preliminary outcome of hegemonic negotiation processes.
With the term hegemonic, which draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe’s (1985) modification of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, I
want to emphasize that, in contrast to romantic ideas of oppositional/subversive
positions ‘outside’ power, there is no space ‘beyond’ or ‘free’ of power relations.
The term hegemony in this sense does not equal dominance, supremacy,
superiority or oppression. Rather, it indicates, as I want to point out, processual
relationalities. This further develops Laclau’s (1997: 262) definition of hegemony
– which he constructs as ‘a relationship by which a particular content assumes, in
a certain context, the function of incarnating an absent [i.e. unavailable] fullness’
– by accentuating its crucial theoretical references. For one, Laclau/Mouffe’s
definition of hegemony draws on a Foucauldian rationale that defines power
as assemblages of power-knowledge. Here, power is not a repressive force or
a norm but contingent assemblages of actions with regard to possible actions
necessarily constituting subjects of action (instead of assuming subjects as given and
as counterparts within binaries of powerful and powerless). A second reference
that Laclau/Mouffe substantially draw on to build their concept of hegemony is
a Lacanian linguistic-psychoanalytical rationale. And it is on exactly this account
Laclau’s later definition of ‘hegemonic identity’ as ‘an empty signifier, its own
particularity embodying an unavailable fullness’ in its modification highlights even more
the importance of linguistic-psychoanalytical theory for this reasoning (2005: 70–71).
that their concept allows for deducing a far more radical conceptualization of
hegemony than Laclau/Mouffe themselves make explicit.
In their work, Laclau/Mouffe emphasize the importance of the category of
articulation as a starting point for the elaboration of the concept of hegemony.
For them, hegemony as a political relation always occurs as an articulation
within a field of discursivity (and is the result of both the polysemy of that
field and of equivalential chains of identification/differentiation which in turn
create social antagonisms). They also appropriate Sigmund Freud and Louis
Althusser’s notion of overdetermination (which is related to Jacques Lacan’s idea
of excess or surplus enjoyment – a going-beyond of meaning/language) (Laclau/
Mouffe 1985: 96–8). Given the importance on articulation to Laclau/Mouffe, a
close reconsideration of a linguistic-psychoanalytical conceptualization of the
functioning of articulation/signification (interrelating the notion of desire and
that of the political) appears useful in order to reconceptualize interrelations
of an analytical notion of queer and of hegemony. What is implicated by
Laclau/Mouffe’s emphasis on ‘the symbolic or overdetermined character of
social relations’ which indicates that ‘society and social agents lack any essence’
(1985: 98) and aims at a ‘critique of every type of fixity’ (104) is that there is no
non-hegemonic position or discourse. That is, there is no position available that
is not involved in, constituted by and contributing to the relationalities of power
at work. This is to say that allegedly ‘powerless’ positions actually are involved in
power – inasmuch as they are construed by these relational processes in the first
place and that they are by no means given, discrete, unambiguous and exclusive
but instead are inconsistent.
Thus, a common definition of hegemony as dominance, which attributes
power to discrete positions or identities imagined as unambiguously discernable
entities, ignores that, much to the contrary, identities are perpetually generated
and rearticulated in ongoing processes of negotiation. The notion of
dominance designates an allegedly distinct position (in terms of ‘more or less’
power or ‘having or not having’ power) and suggests a notion of responsibility
that could unequivocally be located and limited to a discrete position/instance.
Hegemony, in contrast, in the following will be defined as relational processes
or processual relationalities of negotiating that cannot ever be reduced to
binaries of dominance versus subordination/impotence or identified as distinct
and having exclusive positions of either/or. Consequentially, the term hegemonic
is not tantamount to the term dominant but designates nothing less than the
inevitable, complex and inconsistent involvement in (and conditonality by)
processes and relationalities of power.
The implications of this emphasis on the inevitable inconsistence of identity

that has already been deduced by Laclau/Mouffe from Gramsci, nevertheless in general
remain widely unconsidered by approaches that draw on theories of hegemony.
144
In order to examine the analytical and political implications of practices

that might be designated as queer, I will focus on the challenge that queer as
an analytical concept implies not only for binary constructions of identity but
most importantly for any notion of discrete, unambiguous entities of meaning
and identity. Hence, queer in this sense will not be considered as exclusively or
primarily referring to questions of heteronormativity in terms of sexuality and
gender. Rather, this conceptualization of queer will allow for shifting the level of
analysis taking into consideration not only articulated constructions of difference
(implied by the notion of heteronormativity) but also the logical preconditions
of this operation. On this basis, I will suggest a radical reconsideration of the
preconditions of contestability, which will allow for a critical reformulation of the
notion of queer as not reducible to a negative reference to a particular norm and
also as not reducible to a negative reference to normativity. Examining different
examples of public discourse, I will develop my arguments along three main
lines, referring to the three terms that jointly configure the title of this text:
1. Signifying […] In order to reinforce a notion of hegemony that focuses on the

category of articulation, before proceeding to analyse specific signification(s) of
notions (e.g. queer) I want to attend to the question of how exactly signification/
signifying works and which theoretical_political conclusions are to be drawn
from a respective understanding of its functionality. In order to specify and
radicalize definitions of signification as constitutive for producing reality, I will
clarify the structural preconditions of signifying processes. On this basis, I will
suggest to change the starting point for a critique of representation as a critique
of hegemonic constructions of reality from the level of articulation to the level
of the logic of articulation. This shift will provide the epistemologically and
politically pivotal basis for arguing and exemplifying the analysis, critique and
intervention in the frames of the intelligible.
2. […] theory_politics […] In order to elucidate in what way theory and politics
must be understood as articulation/signification (i.e. as signifying practices) and
why they must also be understood as inevitably intertwined (as indicated by my
formulation of ‘theory_politics’ with an underscore), I will draw on Laclau/
Mouffe’s notion of the political as differentiated from politics. With respect
to questioning the notion of difference (for example sexual difference) as a
binary opposition of positively defined entities, I want to further suggest an
anti-essentialist, radical redefinition of the term ‘sex’ as a category that is closely
related to the notion of the political and that is not reducible to a discursive
construction (that is, ‘some-thing’) but rather represents a logical impossibility.
3. […]/queer? Thus challenging the very advantage and purpose of signification

as such – that is, the production of ‘some-thing’ (supposedly unambiguous
145
‘entities’ as opposed to ‘no-thing’) by distinction – this redefinition of the term

‘sex’ not only allows for contesting any particular hegemonic construction of
meaning/reality. In fact, it allows for contesting the idea of (meaning/reality’s)
potential disambiguation and fixation itself by indicating the very precondition
of any discursive construction without having to draw upon notions of a
reference ostensibly ‘prior to’ or ‘outside’ discourse. Interrelating the concept of
overdetermination to Lacan’s concept of excess allows for explaining why there
is no non-signifying articulation/perception. The notion of ambiguity therefore
cannot be equivalent to denoting non-significance. Rather, it indicates the non-
reducibility to one discrete meaning. Queer as an analytical concept fostering
practices/theory_politics critical not only of norms but in fact of identitarian
logics therefore cannot but be considered contestable itself. In the following,
I will attempt to bring into focus precisely the preconditions on which this
analytical concept can function as an incitement to incessantly open up and keep
open (necessarily antagonistic) spaces of negotiation/agonism.
Signifying […]
‘Inside the Mind of a Terrorist’ reads the bold headline of an article by Sarah
Kershaw published on page 1 of the New York Times International Weekly Supplement
in (among others) the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 18 January 2010.
The article professes to shed light on the ‘inside’ of ‘the mind of a terrorist’,
i.e. on the motives for ‘kill[ing] themselves and innocent bystanders’, and is
accompanied by illustrations by Matt Dorfman (Figure 6.1). The illustration
shows three images side-by-side of black facemasks. There is no indication of
any faces behind the masks. Instead, the masks are each furnished with a different
addendum and different captions from the text. The mask on the far left of
Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonism (which substantially differs from Hannah

Arendt’s notion of agonism in that it focuses not on consent but rather on dissent) takes
into consideration the dimension of the political. Thus, it acknowledges the inevitable
contingency and inconsistency of any possible articulation and the responsibility resulting
thereof for any particular articulation – ‘extradiscursive’ guarantees or securitizations
being unavailable. An agonistic approach acknowledges antagonism without putting into
question the right of adversary positions as part of hegemonic struggle and radically
fosters dissent instead of seeking for ideals of harmony (Mouffe 2000: 80–107).
Sarah Kershaw, ‘Inside the mind of a terrorist,’ Der Standard (New York Times
supplement), January 18, 2010, illustrations by Matt Dorfman, photograph by Karl
Pani. A version of the article appeared online on January 9, 2010: New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10kershaw.html?scp=2&sq=sa
rah%20kershaw&st=cse (accessed January 19, 2010). A version also appeared in print
on January 10, 2010, in the New York edition of the New York Times.
146
the illustration is captioned by the line, ‘As the group becomes more radical,
so does the individual’, and shows a grid of coloured dots interconnected by
straight lines that might be read as ‘social atoms’ but rather seem to allude to the
electrodes of an EEG (electroencephalography) recording cap that is used in
brain wave studies. The mask in the centre is captioned by the line, ‘Their beliefs
may be more subject to change than previously thought’ and is crisscrossed by
x-shaped strokes drawn with red ‘paint’ or ‘blood’ that enter through the mouth
hole and resurface through the eye holes. Finally, the line that captions the mask
on the right reads, ‘They inherently believe that violence against an enemy is not
immoral.’ Across this mask’s eye holes lies a white bar that alludes to some sort
of vision slit or else a censorship bar shaped like a stick of dynamite; it has a
fuse cord that protrudes beyond the contour of the mask/head in the form of
a burning flame (see Fig. 6.1).
Captions aside, the illustrated masks are anything but ‘empty’. It is dubious,
to say the least, to assume one could read these images without being implicated
in dominant discourses of nation, securitization and terrorist profiling, as well
as established iconographic and perceptional conventions indicating ‘crime’,
‘pathologic deviance’ and ‘threat’ – even though a heterogeneous multiplicity
of possible readings cannot be reduced to a singularity or exclusivity. The
black facemasks, due to their iconographic/discursive framing, allude less to
police SWAT teams but rather to criminals and burglars or, more saliently, to
Hamas members known to Western TV audiences via reports featuring Hamas
manifestations or activity in training camps. The dots interconnected by lines
might allude to conventional iconography representing social networks and
unambiguously distinguishable and detectable social ‘atoms’. Yet at the same
time, the electrode-like grid invokes representations of ‘precise’ measurement
of physical/neuronal ‘facts’, seeming to provide ‘evidence’ about the assertions
of headlines and the ‘scientific expertise’ offered by the text. Even if, on the
one hand, the crossed red strokes could be read as refuting this very idea of
a precise recording or capturing of a transient subject, on the other hand, the
red strokes (which also invoke blood marks at a crime scene as conveyed by
cinematic and televisual iconographic conventions) may (as a conventional
icon for erasure) also be read as the ‘pathologic’ erasure of the ‘subject’/‘mind’
assumed behind the mask. The bar across the third mask, finally, alluding to
blindness and ‘brainlessness’, as well as to blasting agents and bomb attacks,
invokes insanity, destruction, imminent danger and threat.
The text quotes several ‘experts’ (introduced as professors of psychology,
professors of psychiatry and former C.I.A. operations officers) to categorize
different ‘types’ of terrorists (e.g. ‘idealists’, ‘respondents’ and ‘lost souls’),
thereby individualizing and pathologizing the question of terrorism and drawing
on discourses of scientific and visual/typological detection of ‘criminality’ and
‘pathologic evil’ that have been circulating since the 19th century. Simultaneously,
147
148
Figure 6.1 Illustrations (by Matt Dorfman) on the cover of The New York Times International Weekly Supplement
on 18 January 2010
the article makes assertions about how ‘the terrorist’ contains specific ‘attributes’
that allegedly are held exclusively by ‘terrorists’, allowing them to be distinguished
from ‘proper citizens’. This in turn, not least, prompts the question: which
other constructions of subjects and social formations (generally marked as ‘non-
terrorist’) does this distinctive construct of exclusivity push out of the spotlight
or mask as allegedly less or not ‘deviant’, ‘problematic’ or ‘threatening’? The
following assertion of a specifically ‘terrorist trait’ may give an example: Kershaw
writes, ‘With a charismatic leader, an individual’s identity and morality will be
subordinated to that of the group’ (2010: 1). In one of her closing citations, one
professor of psychology contends that the ‘quest for personal significance’ is the
‘overarching motivation of suicide bombers’ and this results from ‘unconscious
fear of mortality, of leaving no legacy’ (Kershaw 2010: 1). Learning in this
manner about ‘the terrorist mind’, readers undoubtedly are invited to read the
illustrations accordingly. They are asked to read them in line with racializing,
sexualizing and normalizing discourses of nation, militarism and securitization
that have been dominating public and official discourse far longer than the 9/11
attacks and which continue to increase in importance. Even though assertions
like ‘They inherently believe that violence against an enemy is not immoral’
may conceivably be applicable for ‘anti-terrorist’ special forces as well, they
establish a (textual as well as visual) rigid demarcation between ‘them’ and ‘us’
that primarily serves the purpose of securitizing the construct of a coherent
‘self ’ by positing alterity. In many ways, this construction/distinction works –
and does so by drawing on a number of specific iconographic and perceptional
conventions and discursive genealogies. At the same time, as a production of
meaning, it most notably corresponds to a constitutive logic. Narrowing down
Even though the masks do not appear to be gendered or racialized, or marked by

other geographic, social, confessional or other attributions, representations/perceptions
of terrorists are inextricably interrelated to segregations of social and global formations
or ‘space’ along differentiations of for example public/private, aggressive/peaceful,
civilized/primitive and others attributed to constructions of sexual, racial, cultural,
religious or other differences. The primary function of all these constructions is to ensure
a distinct and stable construction of ‘self ’ and ‘self ’ versus ‘other’. This on the one hand
explains the specific relevance of representations/perceptions of female terrorists with
regard to notions of the social, the nation and stability/continuity, as Dominique Grisard
(2008) or Jasbir K. Puar (2007: 220) have pointed out. On the other hand, it exemplifies
the dimension of inevitable overdetermination – of a going-beyond-one-particular-meaning
– that by no means is ever tantamount to randomness or non-significance.
These are conveyed, as in this case, by various media formats like movies or
television series that show normative heroes defending a community against some
threatening ‘other’ in the form of intruders/terrorists/disease/aliens. But equally
they are conveyed by various imageries that symbolize, for example, ‘evil’, ‘deviance’,
‘danger’ and other qualities (with their respective opposites) with various conventions
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available positions to an either-or operation, this representational procedure

aims at producing unambiguousness, for example unambiguous constructions
of identity. Yet, this attempt at unambiguity paradigmatically highlights in a
very bold manner that identity, rather than representing the solid basis of a
differentiation, much to the contrary is the consequence of a differentiation, i.e. of
a signifying process. The point is that this holds for any construction of identity/
reality, without exception. Taking into account the constitutive function and
the functionality of differentiation in turn offers a pivotal basis for contesting
any specific formation (of identity/reality/sociality), inasmuch as it allows for
stating a rationale for the fundamental contestability of any specific formation
(as articulatory and thus hegemonic) that is not restricted to replacing one
specific formation (and legitimatory construction) with another one.
That is to say, to produce a critique that does not just reference constructedness
(merely state its fact) but instead reasons the fundamental contestability of any
formation of reality, requires analysing the structural/logic preconditions of
producing meaning as such (not just of concrete formations of reality). This in
turn entails analysing the reasons why differentiation is a logical requirement
in the first place. It also entails understanding representation and perception
not as merely reproductive but as a constitutive process of producing reality.
Hence representational critique that aims to transform not merely the form
or the order of existing (i.e. intelligible) formations of reality but in fact aims
to transform the dominant parameters of intelligibility itself, requires to
analytically distinguish between the level of articulation and the logic of
articulation. It is only on this basis that it is possible to take into consideration
not only specific (thus exchangeable) contingencies on a sociosymbolic level of
articulation, but especially the fundamental (and thus inevitable) contingency
that is a logical one and as such provides the grounds for a decisively more
radical rationale of contestability. Analysis operating on the level of articulation
focuses on the specific contingency of concrete constructions of meaning
and reality on heterogeneous and contradictory interests, discourses and
hegemonic negotiations that are classified as either more or less legitimate.
Analysis that at the same time takes into consideration the logic of articulation,
however, allows for considering the decidedly fundamental contingency (which
forecloses unconditioned legitimacy) that results from language’s constitutive
aspect of excess. This aspect of excess is constitutive inasmuch as it entails
the impossibility to close/fix meaning and precisely thereby constitutes the
grounds for producing meaning (identity, intelligibility, reality) as such. It is only
by incessantly constructing an alterity (an ‘other’, i.e. by differentiation), that
meaning (identity, reality) as ‘some-thing’ provisionally can be construed. Here,
of colour and light, veiling/masking, danger signs or warning labels and numerous
others methods that work neither exclusively nor unequivocally.
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Laclau/Mouffe’s reference to theories of language/psychoanalysis, especially

their notion of overdetermination as a going-beyond of meaning/language, proves
crucial. This is particularly because it allows for thinking a notion of desire that
does not refer to particular objects but rather to a logic of language that induces
the need to produce meaning in the first place (and to seek its – impossible
– completion as a stable totality). On this basis, it allows for reconsidering not
only the notion of hegemony but also the notion of queer.
The inevitable dimension of a going-beyond-a-specific-meaning that – as a radical
irretrievability – creates and sustains the movement of desire and prevents
meaning from being fixed does not refer to positively definable entities but has to
be understood as a logical one (Lacan 1977: 67–122; Lummerding 2005: 114–16,
258–64; Lummerding 2009). Hence, with respect to a critical conception of
queer, the language-based concept of desire connected with the concept of
going-beyond is of multiple interest. For, in contrast to an understanding of desire
that is based on the logic of identity – an understanding that connects desire
with a specific, predefined (e.g. sexually defined) object and hence allows for a
distinction between ‘same’ and ‘other’ or ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’ (see for example
Judith Butler 1997) – a concept of desire based on the logic of language makes
it possible to offer argumentation explaining the fundamental impossibility of
identity as a coherent, positively definable entity (or totality). Above all, however,
to take into account the logic of language makes the enabling function of this
impossibility – which is constitutive of each specific identity construction –
something that can be formulated. And this, in turn, provides a basis for not
only an anti-heteronormative decoupling of sexuality and sexual categorization
but also for a more complex understanding of heteronormativity that is not
reduced only to sexual differentiation. Regarding this going beyond, Jacques Lacan
chooses the term of the ‘real’ so as to be able to specify identity as language-
based and to specify the impossibility of ‘completing’ and ‘fixing’ identity or
meaning in what is simultaneously its enabling dimension. He also uses this
The notion of overdetermination is related to Lacan’s idea of excess or surplus

enjoyment but can also be compared to what Derrida addresses with his concept of
différance (which relates to deferral/deferment as well as to difference and espacement
(‘spacing’)). With différance, Derrida indicates that meaning cannot ever be complete or
total but is inevitably deferred or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers in
processes of differentiation (1978: 75; 1982: 3–27; see also Laclau/Mouffe 1985: 97–8 for
their concept of overdetermination as indicating a surplus of meaning of ‘the social’).
Butler, in her account of the foundations of gender – which according to Butler
can be traced to the ‘loss’ of a specific relation to an object, a ‘foreclosed desire’ or a
repudiated ‘passionate attachment’ to the ‘same sex’ – presupposes an already defined
identity in order to be able to categorize an object as ‘same’/‘homo’ or ‘other’/‘hetero’
(see Butler 1997: 132–50, 160–66, 180–81; for a critical analysis of this see Lummerding
2005: 165–71; see also Lummerding 2009).
151
term to explain why each construction of identity or meaning is simultaneously

and necessarily marked by a going beyond (Lacan 2007: 412–43; 1977: 167; 1990:
3–47; see Lummerding 2005: 100–104, 116–17, 166–74). Hence this real (as
impossibility), which he calls one of the three dimensions of language and
which he distinguishes from the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘imaginary’, should in no
way be equated with ‘reality’. Quite to the contrary, as the impossibility of
fixing meaning, the real is what makes the perpetual rearticulation of ever-new
constructions of reality necessary in the first place. For this impossibility must be
obscured each time again and again in order to maintain the constitutive fantasy
of the possibility of fixation, that is, of certainty. (In other words, in order to
replace ‘no-thing’ with ‘some-thing’). It is precisely due to this impossibility
of totality that the process of generating meaning is constitutive, and hence
produces reality (see Lummerding 2005: 126, 155–8, 265–74). Furthermore, due
to the differential functioning of signification, existence/intelligibility is only
available as distinguished existence. Contrary to all biological explanations, this
means that existence is always the result of a differentiation that cannot draw
on any biological or otherwise defined a priori. The construction of alterity
(whatever the particular form of construction) thus represents an indispensable
constitutive to establishing existence. In this sense, the language-based process
of differentiation (rather than any identities or materialities ostensibly prior to
this process) is constitutive also to subject-positions.
In order to highlight the extent to which any form of identity is hence the
consequence rather than the basis of a differentiation, i.e. of a linguistic process
(and precisely in this sense, reality), I have elsewhere suggested, in accordance
with Joan Copjec (1994: 201–36), to rethink sex as a category. Rather than a mere
equation of sex with specific discursive constructions of identity (for instance
gender constructions) – i.e. ’some-thing’ – I have suggested a more radically
anti-essentialist redefinition of precisely that category traditionally associated
with essentialism. In this new conception, sex shall be defined as a linguistically
determined (which is not equatable to discursively determined) logical moment of
impossibility. This does not denote a ‘falling short’ of an allegedly given referent
by a particular articulation but rather indicates a fundamental impossibility of
closing or fixing meaning. This impossibility applies by no means exclusively
to gender constructions but rather has to be argued for any construction of
meaning. Thus, what this redefinition of sex allows is the precondition of
any discursive construction to be grasped analytically without having to draw
upon notions of ostensibly prediscursive priorisms (see Lummerding 2005:
97–148, 265–75). This impossibility of a closure or fixation of meaning not
only reveals that every construction of identity is inevitably phantasmatic but
also accounts for why any translation into ‘binary terms’ and opposing socio-
symbolic inscriptions is bound to fail. For binarism implies two unequivocally
delineated totalities and these, as expounded above, are impossible by definition.
152
This ‘failure’ – this going-beyond-a-specific-meaning – is therefore not only highly

productive, it is the only form of productivity available (Lummerding 2005:
126, 155–8, 265–75; Lummerding 2007a, 2007b). Thus rather than by any
chance privileging, say, one tenaciously essentialized and essentializing category
of differentiation to others, rethinking sex (by way of example) exactly not
as signifying (i.e. signifying/positing ‘some-thing’) but as signifying’s intrinsic
impossibility, allows for two theoretically_politically crucial moves. For one
thing, it allows for and induces undermining the conventionally naturalizing
function of the notion of sex. And for another thing, this revised conception of
sex allows for explaining why any construction of identity can never be anything
else other than the provisional result of signifying processes, interdependent
with and thus by no means unequivocally dissociable from other hegemonic
differentiations. The reason is not located on the level of articulation (i.e., in
specific positings which would fall short or miss some allegedly given reality)
but precisely in the fundamental impossibility of coherent meaning/identity.
Shifting the starting point for a critique of representation as a critique of
hegemonic constructions of reality from the level of articulation to the level
of the logic of articulation consequently proves useful – both to analyse the
interrelation between heteronormativity and hegemony and also to revise these
notions in terms of their theoretical premises and to reason critique of and
intervention in the frames of the intelligible.
[…] Theory_Politics […]
The fact that the logical necessity for differentiation does not predefine or
specifically legitimize any specific form of differential inscription means that
no one construction of identity or reality and no one socio-symbolic ‘norm’
can lay claim to a privileged legitimacy over any another. And here is exactly
where the dimension of the political can be located. This is to say that the
political must be assigned to the dimension of the real (at the level of logic)
and, in accordance with Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau, distinguished from
politics, which belongs to the dimension of the socio-symbolic (i.e., the level of
articulation). Laclau’s notion of the political thus substantially relies on Lacan’s
notion of the real. While the political (le politique) refers to a confrontation with
radical incoherence (i.e., the impossibility of fixation), politics (la politique) refers
to its specific inscriptions in the symbolic as attempts to come to terms with
and temporarily cover up this incoherence with phantasmatic constructions of
coherence (see Lefort 1986; Laclau 1990). Hence, it is a decidedly political
Analytically distinguishing politics from the political thus is by no means to

be compared with distinctions that contrast institutionalized politics with non-
153
consideration that speaks for using and redefining precisely the term sex as an
analytical concept that paradigmatically designates not ‘some-thing’ (allegedly
existing prior to language, as it were) but instead stresses the dimension of the
real – and thus the language-based necessity of a differentiation as such – in
its constitutive function for what is always merely a temporary production of
‘subject’/meaning in the sense of an identity position. This permits us to use
precisely the concept of sex, which is traditionally associated with essentialism,
to demonstrate the absolute unavailability of any a priori ‘fact’. Thus sex as
logical impossibility cannot be equated with socio-symbolic articulations of
difference (for instance, gender constructions) but must rather be understood
as their linguistic-logical precondition on the level of the real, which at the same
time makes their closure or fixation impossible. The dimension of the real does
not determine what is articulated or what ‘inscribes’ itself at the level of the
socio-symbolic and hence of politics. Rather, the dimension of the real refers to
the reason why that which inscribes itself at this level, and is hence produced as
‘reality’, can never be anything else but the preliminary outcome of conflicting
negotiation processes (and as such is hegemonic) – and for this very reason is
contestable (see Lummerding 2005: 159–65, 265–75).
This is why any articulation as a production of meaning and identity is
political. It is so precisely to the extent that it cannot draw on some ‘guarantee’
or legitimacy but, as a signifying process, inevitably performs a positing.
Signifying as a positing thus entails responsibility. There is no non-discursive,
non-hegemonic reference available that would represent a guarantee or could
possibly suspend responsibility. What is decisive is to recognize and connect
two issues, namely, the inevitability of differentiation and the necessarily
phantasmatic nature of each specific construction of difference – i.e. the
impossibility of authenticity and an a priori as an ostensibly extralinguistic
reference, and then to assume the responsibility that ensues. Regarding the
illustrations in the New York Times supplement (Figure 6.1), this amounts to an
analysis not limited to examining their determination and interconnectedness
with specific discourses (i.e., hegemonic negotiations) but in fact subjecting to
the analysis itself to critical analysis. That is, to its own involvement in these
very discourses, as well as to its own pursuit and construal of securities/
certitudes that is undertaken in the very process of reading/perception. The
precariousness, in fact unavailability, of any such security and unambiguousness
that make it impossible to absolutely distinguish ‘subversive’ from ‘affirmative’
practices however, is not to be misread as exceptional or as accruing from
institutionalized politics. Rather, what thereby is formulated is the constitutive

impossibility of closure/fixation of meaning that also prevents formations of
community (of Polis) from ever becoming a discrete entity or totality but instead
necessitates and allows for ongoing processes of articulation and negotiation.
154
specific articulations on the level of politics. It is not to be misread in this way

even though an effect of this unavailability of absolutely distinct and discrete
identities or positions may be palpable on the level of politics (i.e., on the level
of specific articulations) in phenomena like a neoliberal normalization of queer
culture and politics sustaining dominant heteronormative assumptions and
institutions instead of contesting them, that has been much discussed in recent
years and labelled as ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan 2002). Rather, as an underlying
logic of a particular articulation/politics, it is a constitutive unavailability that is
inevitable and indicates the logically determined moment of the political which
necessitates/enables articulation/politics as it is simultaneously preventing any
closure or unambiguous totality.
In order to reinforce queer as an analytical concept adequate to deal with the
inevitability of differentiation without reproducing a logic of identity, I want to
consider Jasbir K. Puar’s attempt to conceptualize an anti-identitarian critique
of hegemonic formations and suggest to critically interrelate her proposition
of ‘terrorist/queer assemblage’ to the aforementioned concept of the political.
To interrelate these concepts will also facilitate a critical redefinition of the
notion of hegemony in terms of its theoretical premises. Lisa Duggan’s concept
of ‘homonormativity’, which describes queer contribution to heteronormative
ideals of citizenship that are pivotal to nation-state formation, enables her to
designate the complicity of queer cultures in neoliberal sexual politics (2002).
Following Duggan, Puar carries this proposition a step further by introducing
the term ‘homonationalism’ (short for ‘homonormative nationalism’) in
order to point out the interdependency of neoliberal homonormativity and
configurations of nation, race,10 ethnicity, class and gender (2007: 38). Arguing
that these configurations are realigning in relation to contemporary forces
of securitization, counterterrorism and nationalism, she contends that by
incorporating certain ‘queer subjects’ into the fold of the nation-state (through
legal and representational consolidation of normative homosexuality cut along
lines of race, class and citizenship in order to cultivate support for (inter)national
imperial projects, most notably those of the US) homonational liberal discourses
and politics produce, besides upright ‘properly hetero,’ now ‘properly homo,’
10 Here, I refer to Puar who uses the term race. However I want to point out that
in German, the use of the term does not have a comparable history of political and
theoretical appropriation and redefinition effected by racialized speakers but instead
inevitably alludes to the holocaust and to fascist ideology. Thus, in order to point
out the process of constructing and to allow for a denaturalization of classifications,
German speaking authors and translators that are critical of racism suggest using the
term Rassisierung or Rassifizierung (instead of Rasse). See the translation collective gender
et alia and their annotation in Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2001, Secession, Vienna, 15, http://
genderetalia.sil.at/diskussionspraxis.html (accessed May 22, 2010).
155
US-American patriots as distinguished from perversely racialized and racially

perverse ‘terrorist bodies’ – represented especially by ‘Arabs’/‘Muslims’/‘Sikhs’
– who are cordoned off for detention (Puar 2007; see also Puar 2002). On the one
hand, Puar in her concept highlights queer as functioning as a particular mode of
racialization, a dichotomizing regulatory norm that draws on dominant Orientalist
imaginings. On the other hand, Puar also draws on Deleuze/Guattari to suggest
the term ‘assemblage’ and designate ‘terrorist/queer bodies’ as having a subversive
potential that could be qualified to challenge homonationalism (2007: 204–27).11
‘Body’ here refers to a logic indebted to visual representations of corporeality
that is adopted, for example, by specific positions of the queer diasporic and Sikh
American discourse. With this, Puar seeks to challenge the limits of identity-based
narratives of queerness (2007: xxvii). Before addressing specific problems of
Puar’s concept, at this point I want to outline the aspiration and potentials of her
concept. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s conception (2003) of ‘necropolitics’ (as
associated with biopolitics) and referring to his account of the representational
and informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber (conflating,
in the blasting operation, ultimate (self)annihilation and resistance), Puar defines
assemblage as ‘the inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or
molecular distinction between a discrete biological body and technology’, all
particles being defined through their continual interface, i.e., as ‘multiplicities
emerging from interactions’ (2007: 217). She suggests a ‘queer rereading’ of these
‘terrorist bodies’ that, according to Puar, through their transience blur the inside
and the outside and denaturalize race and sexuality as ‘assemblages’ (2007: 217–18).
In the upheaval of the ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric, she argues, these ‘terrorist
bodies’ as ‘assemblages’ allow for ‘a scrambling of sides that is illegible to state
practices of surveillance, control, banishment, and extermination’ (2007: 221).
As an example of ‘terrorist/queer assemblage’, Puar offers the 2004 cover
illustration of a Brooklyn-based magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent (Figure
6.2), which she attributes to an unnamed ‘group of counterculture artists and
writers’ (2007: 218–22).12 According to Puar, this image performs ‘the full force
11 According to Deleuze/Guattari (1987: 88), an assemblage is the dynamic

interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the subject/object interface yet
retain elements of specificity. The human assemblage is a multiplicity that forms new
assemblages with existing social and cultural assemblages of material movement, force
and intensity.
12 Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, November/December 2004. (See www.jest.com; the
magazine has closed down and the site is now defunct). The image closely resembles the
anti-war posters designed and distributed by Forkscrew Graphics since 2004. However,
Puar does not comment on these anti-war posters, although two are actually included in
a different chapter. Since they are included without being addressed, these two images
apparently slipped into print by accident (Puar 2007: 205, 206, 219; see Forkscrew
Graphics, http://www.forkscrew.com/ (accessed January 26, 2010).
156
of the mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile,
harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari
Sikh male (i.e., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered
(mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with dynamite through the
vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad’ (2007: 220). According to Puar, the figure of
the male turbaned Sikh body here provocatively alludes to the troubling and
simultaneously constitutive role this figure plays for the formation of ‘South
Asian queer diasporic subjects’ in the US. In the course of this formation,
according to Puar, male turbaned Sikh bodies are read as patriarchal by queer
diasporic logics and placed within heteronormative victimology narratives of
Sikh advocacy groups focused on redressing the phenomenon of ‘mistaken
identity’.13 For Puar, the mingling exposure of ‘the flawed temporal, spatial,
and ontological presumptions upon which such distinctions [of self and other,
always diverse and conflicting] flourish’ (2007: 218) works as queer/terrorist
assemblage in that it forces ‘a chaotic challenge to conventions of gender,
sexuality, and race, disobeying normative conventions of “appropriate” bodily
practices and the sanctity of the able body’ (221). It produces, she continues, a
‘cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices
that undermine coherent identity and even queer anti-identity narratives’
(2007: 222). While in some ways, Puar formulates a comprehensible critique
of identitarian logics and politics, in contradiction to this critique she also
stresses the ‘illegibility’ of assemblages. She remarks: ‘Fully modern, animated
through technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not solely or
even primarily operate on the level of metaphor.… Contagion, infection, and
transmission reign, not meaning’ (2007: 220). Yet, provided that the case at
issue is not determining a ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ reading (e.g., with regard to
authorial intention or political interest), it will be important to take into account
that ‘non-signifying’ perception is something inherently impossible. That is to
say, assemblages, too, are always inevitably being read (perceived as some-thing as
opposed to no-thing). Moreover, by the same token, overdetermination – going-
beyond-one-specific-meaning – applies not exclusively to ‘assemblages’ but rather to any
13 As Puar extensively and critically elaborates, after many attacks on Sikhs in
the aftermath of 9/11, Sikh American organizations launched numerous awareness
campaigns about Sikh culture and identity to ‘enlighten’ the American public that they
were neither Arabs nor Muslims and thereby not connected to the bombings. (For one
of numerous sites of Sikh American organizations cited by Puar see: Sikh Council
on Religion and Education, http://www.sikhwomen.com/Community/EastCoast/
SikhCouncil.htm (accessed April 15, 2010). Puar criticizes these campaigns as seizing
identitarian victimologies predating 9/11. However she also offers a seminal account
of the complexity of the representation of the Sikh diaspora and how it interlocks
multiple representational and political aspects of colonial, postcolonial and diasporic
normative processes of (dis)identification (Puar 2007: 166–202, 275–80).
157
articulation/representation. Any particular articulation always inevitably refers

to multiple other signifiers that are equally overdetermined and constantly
shifting along interminable signifying processes (and are equally interdependent
upon hegemonic discourses and perceptional conventions) – as for example
also a range of representational practices display to which the Jest cover relates
in several ways. Thus assemblages, as any other articulation, by definition must
be considered as readable. It may be important to note that in the French edition
of their book Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, Deleuze/Guattari (1980)
instead of using the French word ‘assemblage’ use the French word ‘agencement’,
which connotes meanings like arrangement, fitting or fixing and indicates a
formation assembled out of diverse objects (e.g., machine-like, artistic or other).
Agencement, denoting even more than assemblage a combination of (discrete)
elements, reveals that the concept of agencement or assemblage does not seem to
prove helpful for a radically anti-identitarian project. It even seems to critically
sap Deleuze/Guattari’s project of a ‘becoming imperceptible, indiscernible and
impersonal’, i.e. nonsignifying – ‘imperceptibility’ being described as ‘the state
of a body able to enter into becomings with other bodies and form assemblages’
(Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 279–80) – but certainly counteracts Puar’s own anti-
identitarian aspirations (see Fig. 6.2).
As a reaction to the Third Gulf War (the US occupation of Iraq) and to the
public debate on the photographs of torture practices from Abu Ghraib prison
that were published in 2004, a number of anti-war initiatives like Forkscrew
Graphics took Apple’s iPod ads as a template to be redesigned into anti-war images.
Forkscrew’s images interrelated questions of imperialism, nationalism, sexuality,
gender, technology, economy, citizenship and human rights – thereby highlighting
the inextricable interdependence of these categories (see Figs 6.3 and 6.4).14 Also
in 2004, for his ‘Ipod Ghraib’ limited edition (ten sets) of four digital images on
canvas, the Californian artist Trek Thunder Kelly played with the iconic iPod ads.
His images featured white iPods and earphones but replaced the silhouettes of
dancers with those of torturers and tortured (Private First Class Lynndie England
treating a detainee with ‘iPod+iTunes’ and the ‘hooded man’)15 from the by then
14 Since 2001, Apple has used a variety of advertising campaigns to promote
its iPod portable digital media player including television commercials, print ads,
posters in public places and wrap advertising campaigns. These campaigns are unified
by a distinctive, consistent style that differs from Apple’s other ads, and feature dark
silhouetted characters against brightly coloured backgrounds. The silhouettes are
usually dancing and holding iPods attached to earphones; the iPods, earphones and
cables appear in white so that they stand out against the coloured background and
from black silhouettes (see, e.g., Apple Store (Austria), http://store.apple.com/at-edu/
browse/home/giftcards/itunes_cards (accessed April 26, 2010)).
15 This fast-selling denotation – which indicates the outstanding iconic status that
this image in particular, for multiple reasons, has obtained – refers to six photographs
158
Figure 6.2 Cover of the November/December 2004 issue of Jest: Humor

for the Irreverent
showing a hooded detainee with wires attached and forced to stand on a box. Notably,
this image has also been adapted in murals in Baghdad (e.g. by Sallah Edine Sallat in
2004). The photographs were first published by the television news-magazine 60 Minutes
II (CBS, April 2004) and were printed along with an article by Seymour M. Hersh in The
New Yorker (May 2004).
159
publicly renowned Abu Ghraib torture photographs.16 Forkscrew Graphics’s

‘iRaq’ series of guerrilla posters, by contrast, appeared all over Los Angeles in
2004 and were designed to blend into Apple Computer’s own viral postering
efforts. The four iPDF17 posters – one of them also featuring the ‘hooded
man’ and the three others showing armed combatants – are still available on
several anti-war websites like www.forkscrew.com or www.bloodforoil.org. The
posters are automatically generated using the latest casualty statistics (which
appear at the bottom edge of the posters) from www.iraqbodycount.org and
www.icasualty.org and can be downloaded for free.18 Thus, while Trek Kelly’s
‘Ipod Ghraib’ series fully relies on the iconic status the Abu Ghraib torture
photographs obtained in the course of debates and wide dissemination, and
does not trouble the function these icons assumed in order to re-establish an
allegedly clear distinction between ‘good’ (US army and official politics) and
‘bad’ (individual exception), Forkscrew’s posters, by contrast, seem to impede
this easy polarization both by interfering in the photographs’ iconic status by
supplementing their use with additional topics and by distributing their posters
freely and openly. Hence, iconization, as a reduction of complexity comparable
to strategies of stereotyping, is used and operates in many different ways.
Despite of significant differences in emphasis and politics – regarding their
respective choice of references, details like logos and captions, distribution,
addressed audiences, claims to authorship and other things19 – none of these
examples can unambiguously be read as either affirmative of or as undermining
dominant discourse. This ambiguity, however, is not a trait of the pictures (or
these particular pictures) but must be understood produced by a fundamental,
logical unavailability of an ultimate fixed meaning/identity of unambiguousness
(and thus of absolute control over possible readings/interpretations/effects).
16 Trek Thunder Kelly, http://www.trekkelly.com/art/digital/ (accessed January

26, 2010). While the two images showing Private First Class Lynndie England with a
detainee are branded with the logo ‘iPod+iTunes’, the two others, which show another
specialist treating a detainee with an iPod, read ‘iPod The best just got better.’
17 iPDF allows for an interactive combination of PDF documents and the Internet.
18 Forkscrew Graphics, http://www.forkscrew.com/ (accessed January 26, 2010);
see also Blood for Oil, http://www.bloodforoil.org/ (accessed January 26, 2010). In
contrast to Trek Kelly’s images, Forkscrew’s feature only the ‘hooded man’ of the
torture photographs. The other three Forkscrew images show armed combatants and
instead of the iPod logo they feature, next to a hand grenade, the logo ‘iRaq’. On 26
January 2010, the casualty statistics at the bottom edge (updated continually via iPDF)
read: ‘10,000 Iraqis killed. 773 US soldiers dead.’
19 While Trek Kelly launches authorized art works in a limited edition, Forkscrew
writes they ‘don’t give a fuck’ about copyright (see Forkscrew Graphics, http://www.
forkscrew.com/main.html (accessed April 10, 2010)).
160
Figure 6.3 1 of 4 iPDF Posters from the iRaq series by Forkscrew

Graphics 2004
Ambiguity therefore by no means denotes the opposite of signifying but, on the
contrary, is an intrinsic aspect of signifying/signification.
What I want to point out is that it is not only due to concrete socio-symbolic
determinations that every representation/articulation as a construction of
meaning must be considered as contingent. Rather, it is a contingency constituted
on a different logic level that proves pivotal for the formulation of critique. It is
the fundamental and inevitable contingency resulting from the very impossibility
of unambiguously defining and closing/fixing meaning which is constitutive of
any (always provisional) constructions of a particular meaning/identity/reality.
It thus functions not only as a moment of impossibility but simultaneously as a
161
Figure 6.4 1 of 4 iPDF Posters from the iRaq series by Forkscrew

Graphics 2004
fundamentally enabling moment, i.e., as a condition of possibility. To analytically

distinguish the logic of articulation (from articulation) does by no means refer to
a notion of articulation (or language) reduced to speech, writing or text. Rather,
it highlights the unavailability of unambiguous and discrete meaning/identity
and simultaneously points out that, and why perception cannot be anything
else but signifying (‘non-signifying’ perception or ‘immediacy’ being inherently
impossible). Thus, the unavailability of an extralinguistic certainty – that is the very
condition of possibility for re-articulation, as necessitating and simultaneously
enabling the process of articulation – links all production of meaning and
162
reality (as decisions/positings which cannot rely on extralinguistic legitimations

or guarantees but on hegemonic negotiation only) to responsibility. Responsibility
here does not refer to any specific moral imperative and can therefore no longer be
founded on morals, i.e. on an ideal of the good, but quite to the contrary must be
founded on the very unavailability of any such guarantee (see Lummerding 2005:
151–8, 265–75). This unavailability (or enabling impossibility of ultimate closure)
from which, as I have argued, the dimension of the political accrues, does not
determine or legitimize any particular form of articulation/representation. This,
in turn, makes it even more exigent to critically analyse the divergent hegemonic
functions and multiple interrelations of concrete articulations/representations as
constructions of realities, as I have exemplified in my readings of the images.
For ambiguity is by no means tantamount to ‘non-signifying’ signification.20 At
the same time, this means to assume responsibility for one’s own articulations
which, like any other, cannot rely on any extralinguistic legitimation but in fact
represent temporary results of hegemonic negotiations and hence are subject to
renegotiation. To write theory_politics with an underscore may serve as a means to
mark the interdependence of notions that are generally conceived of as separate
and to point out that theory and politics must be understood as articulation/
signification, i.e. as signifying practices which, by definition (as producing reality),
never remain without consequences. These consequences, further, always imply
material dimensions and may, at their extreme, be fatal. Signifying theory_politics
thus bears a meaning that is twofold: to signify (theory_politics) and simultaneously
to understand/signify theory_politics as (always already and inevitably) signifying.
[…]/Queer?
Accepting the supposition that identitarian logic is in contradiction with

practices of representation that are labelled ‘queer’, we are confronted with
the question of how the claim to critique the logic of identity can be identified
20 This problem is also conveyed with Laclau’s notion of an ‘empty signifier’ when
he defines ‘hegemonic identity’ as ‘an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an
unavailable fullness’ (2005: 70–71). For it is precisely a signifier (thus signifying, not non-
signifying) which must be emptied in order to be disengaged from a particular signified
and to come to symbolize a long chain of equivalent signifieds. Thus the term signifies,
in Laclau’s notion of politics, the inevitable requirement that the emptiness (of the
‘discursive centre’) be filled by a given content. This struggle to fill emptiness with a given
content, in turn, as a struggle of identification, is a political struggle of obtaining a full/
complete/positive identity that is a project as impossible as it is inevitable. The ‘empty
signifier’ thus functions not to undermine but, on the contrary, to ensure coherence (of
a particular discursive formation). As Laclau/Mouffe state: ‘Even in order to differ, to
subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning’ (1985: 112).
163
without undermining the claim itself by such labelling. David L. Eng, Judith
Halberstam and José Muñoz’s definition of queer as a ‘political metaphor
without a stable referent’ (2005: 1), for instance, can be seen as an attempt
in this direction.21 To extend this move in a more radical direction, however,
appears all the more exigent, inasmuch as a notion of queer that implies the
possibility of queerness offers little to counter the currently dominating politics_
theories that are indebted (however variously) to the tradition of liberalism.
For liberal principles – such as liberal definitions of citizenship and freedom,
the liberal ideal of system stabilization and the demand for distributive justice
– draw on a logic of identity. And to this extent, they assume (and posit)
privileged as well as deprived members of a society as ‘given’ identities. It is this
problem that Puar, too, addresses when discussing the critical issue of defining
a ‘legitimate’ referent for and of queer theory, analysis and activism; as she puts
it, the problem of ‘[formalizing] a proper object of analysis, a properly queer
body, in the first instance’ (2008). Puar’s notion of ‘assemblage’ is designed
precisely to challenge the idea of discrete identity and of a discrete organic
body as a supposed totality.22 However, while Puar’s approach while drawing on
the notion of ‘assemblage’ may serve to point out the problems of identitarian
logics and of a ‘complicity-versus-resistance binary’, this approach nevertheless
falls short of its intention to conceptually subvert identitarian logics. Remaining
focused on and limited to the level of articulation, i.e. to the level of politics,
the notion of ‘assemblage’ does not offer adequate instruments to prevent this
very notion itself from positing ‘some-thing’ (assembled), thereby undermining
its very purpose. What this quandary, however, exposes is that attempts to denote
what anti-identitarian approaches intend to address, are – as articulations – by
definition attempts to ‘get hold’ of ‘some-thing’ by signifying (i.e. by producing
‘some-thing’ in the place of ‘no-thing’). To coin new terms like ‘assemblage’
– to replace a particular term with some other term – does not necessarily mean
to abandon the very logic the respective terms are supposed to challenge. (Even
if the new term has the benefit of signalling a particular problem).
In order to address this problem as a problem of signification it is necessary
to shift the level of analysis and argumentation and bring into focus the
dimension of the logic of articulation. As a consequence, I suggest relinquishing
21 Refer to Antke Engel’s notion of un-disambiguation (VerUneindeutigung) (Engel

2002).
22 Consequently, Puar points out the ‘limitations of feminist and queer (and
queer of color) theories of intersectionality [that] are indebted … to the taken-for-
granted presence of the subject … rather than an investigation of the predominance of
subjecthood itself ’ (2007: 206). Despite the anti-identitarian critique that queer theory
launches, Puar contends, it reproduces ‘the queer subject’, even though this subject is
understood as transgressive rather than liberatory (2007: 206).
164
an understanding of queer as a component of a dichotomic construction in

which queer figures as ‘counterpart’ to norm.23 Instead, I suggest a revised notion
of queer as an analytical category addressing a constitutive logic. I also suggest to
interrelate it with a redefined notion of hegemony as relational processuality of
power, both derived from a linguistically/psychoanalytically informed analysis
of signification – an analysis that understands signification as contingent and
interminable yet constitutive processes fundamentally defined by excess. On this
basis, it becomes possible to develop a notion of desire that is not reducible
to a (‘subversive’ or ‘affirmative’) reference to (and effect of) norms but rather
functions as a motion initiated and perpetuated by a logical impossibility. It is
this impossibility – inherent to the logic of language – that induces the need to
produce meaning in the first place and to incessantly seek for its (impossible)
completion as a stable totality. And it is precisely this impossibility of closure,
this going-beyond, which relates desire to the dimension of the political. Considering
this, the claims and consequences of practices designated by the term queer
must not be considered as reducible to questions of sexual identity, sexuality
or a critique of heteronormativity in terms of sexuality and gender. Even more
importantly, it is critical to note that taking the logic of articulation/language
into account provides a rationale to explain the reason why not least the coupling
of sexuality and ‘sexual identity’ (like any other kinds of articulation) can only
be a hegemonic construct, i.e. a temporary result of hegemonic negotiation
processes. It is precisely the unavailability of an extralinguistic referent, which
inevitably induces overdetermination (a going-beyond), that needs to be recognized
and seized as a moment of the political – i.e. as providing the grounds for
contestability. Deprived of any extralinguistic guarantee for its legitimacy, any
construction of reality as a contingent and inconsistent hegemonic construct
can, on this very basis, be put up for debate.
What is decisive here is that the unavailability of an extralinguistic referent
can be brought to bear not only with regard to the formation of subject-
positions but also with regard to the formation of sociality (‘collective identities’,
a ‘society’ or a ‘community’ being equally indefinable as a totality) as with
any other construction of reality. Thus, in contrast to a logic of identity and
quantification that presupposes not only subject-identities but also the existence
of a specific (and hence limited) amount of defined resources (including
rights) as the basis of societal conceptions, a definition of hegemony that is
critical of identity cannot comply with the identitarian logic of distributive
justice or minority politics. Instead, such a definition must take into account
the relationality and processuality of the social/social formations that draw/s
23 As I have explained above, the respective ‘counterpart’ is always interdependent

with and determined by the ‘part’ it refers to, thus remaining within the very logic it
attempts to challenge.
165
on the language-based impossibility of a particular (‘legitimate’) ideal of

‘community’ and allows to seize this constitutive impossibility as a condition of
possibility. Thus, hegemony, no more than the notion queer, is not attributable
to a position (as opposed to other positions that would be defined as ‘non-
hegemonic’). For attributing power to allegedly discrete positions or identities
assumed as unambiguously discernable entities ignores that there is no space
‘beyond’ or ‘free’ of power relations and that, on the contrary, identities are
perpetually generated and rearticulated in interminable and conflicting processes
of negotiation. In contrast, to extend the analytical focus beyond the level of
politics/articulation, taking into account the dimension of the political (indicating
a logically determined fundamental contingency), allows to analyse not only
how identity is constructed by differentiation but, most of all, why identity
cannot be anything else other than the result of a differentiation – and as such
cannot attain coherence as a totality. Thus, taking into account the dimension
of the political does by no means amount to advocating for a disregarding of
politics but, on the contrary, provides the argumentative grounds to intervene
in and to contest concrete politics in a far more radical and fundamental way:
by taking into account its very condition of possibility, i.e. the preconditions
for intelligibility.
On the basis of these considerations, queer as an analytical category, rather
than being attributable to a position or to a technique, can thus be conceived
as pointing out the irresolvable tension between the necessary striving for
disambiguation (necessitated by logic requiring to posit ‘some-thing’ instead
of ‘no-thing’) and the inevitable ambiguity; it explains why, for example,
complicities are multifarious and just as unstable as resistances. This concept
allows to make productive the irrevocable going-beyond, i.e. the inconsistency of
meaning/identity/reality and the theoretical_political consequences resulting
thereof. Identity-critical discourse cannot be understood as unequivocally
oppositional – as a distinct ‘other’ to dominant discourse. Rather, it must be
seen as constitutively entangled in hegemonic relations, necessarily involved in
their formation (always also defined by the respective alterity it critically refers
to), and in itself productive. It signifies – and as such is part of the processes of
hegemonic negotiation. To conceptualize queer as an analytical category thus
means to extend its relevance beyond a limited function as a combat term,
inasmuch as it is precisely as an analytical category as elaborated above that
queer attains political relevance. Signifying theory_politics/queer could, in this
sense, provisionally be understood as seizing and reinforcing the inextricable
paradox of signification as such – incessantly seizing and reinforcing, ‘against/
by all odds’, this paradox (as necessarily antagonistic and hegemonic) – and as
radically opening agonistic dynamics of negotiation.
[...]
166
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168
Chapter 7
The Pleasures of Compliance:
Domination and Compromise
Within BDSM Practice
Volker Woltersdorff
The Figure of the Complicit Slave
One of the leading questions that theories of hegemony try to solve is why
people comply with their domination. Their compliance may seem odd at a
first glance, as it is commonly assumed that resistance against domination lies
in a supposed human ‘nature’. In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the
libidinous dimension of compliance and explore how the pleasure of complying
in BDSM practice can be reworked as a tool for disobedience. Unlike many
critics who interpret BDSM practice as a mere reproduction or, even worse, as
a reinforcement of hegemony, I wish to highlight instead its potential to undo
our compliance with hegemony.
Drawing on earlier Marxist theories of ideology as a ‘false consciousness’
that prevents people from realizing their domination, Antonio Gramsci’s
approach tried to differentiate between the different ways ideology is produced.
He stressed the active participation of the dominated in the production of
hegemonic relations of domination. Marx’s false consciousness was thus
modified into a ‘false compromise’ between the dominant and the dominated.
This situation becomes even more complicated when the dominated
passionately and libidinously invest in their domination. Psychoanalysis has
spotted the phenomenon of ‘sadomasochism’ for explaining such affects,
which contradict the allegedly ‘natural’ logics of the ego drives. Feminist
psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (1988: 52) assumes a dialectics between ‘the
desire for independence and the desire for recognition’ that generates the desire
for domination and submission. In making her argument, she scrutinizes the
‘BDSM’ is an acronym that stands for ‘Bondage & Discipline’, ‘Dominance &
Submission’ and ‘Sado-Masochism’. It aims at covering the broad variety of practices
that may be involved, either in combination or not. However, the term SM (or S/M) is
also common as an umbrella term.
well-known erotic novel Story of O by Anne Desclos, published in 1954 under

the pseudonym Pauline Réage. In the book, Desclos deploys a fantasy of erotic
submission that winds up in the female protagonist’s total self-abandonment.
In his foreword to the novel, French writer and Desclos’s lover Jean Paulhan
ties the plot of a woman’s masochistic love for her master to the scandal of
slaves’ love for slavery. He reminds readers of the exceptional historic incident
of the ex-slaveholder Glenelg who, in 1838, was killed by his former slaves
after he set them free under the pressure of new laws. Glenelg was supposedly
murdered because he refused to reaccept them as his slaves. Paulhan suggests
one reason behind the former slaves’ actions: ‘I suspect … that Glenelg’s slaves
were in love with their master, that they couldn’t bear to be without him’ (1954:
xxvii). Of course, this argument is obscene and provocative, as it cynically
charges the dominated for their own lot. Amartya Sen (1999: 29) reminds us
that numerous slaves did in fact run away from their plantations in the US and,
after slavery’s abolition, refused to return to their former masters, even when
they were offered much higher wages than they could have earned as wage
labourers. In the overwhelming majority of cases, slaves’ resistance against their
slavery clearly outweighs its acceptance. Nonetheless, theories of hegemony
point precisely at the dominated’s contribution in their own domination. And, I
would like to add, this involvement may even be libidinously laden.
Informed and Uninformed Consent
How can a study of the BDSM scene then inform analyses of hegemony,
and in particular of the hegemony of heteronormativity? I argue that BDSM
dissociates and isolates one singular affect from the social setting of hegemony
– the passionate attachment to domination – and in doing so alienates and
reworks it.
At a first glance, theories on hegemony and those on codes of conduct
in the BDSM scene show striking similarities. Both streams of theory stress
the importance of ‘active consent’ that brokers a compromise between two
opposing partners. Both perspectives also question the clear-cut distinction
between victim and perpetrator and highlight the fact that social positioning
implies consent to and complicity in relations of domination. Yet, while
Antonio Gramsci in the 14th and 15th Prison Notebooks defines hegemony as
‘[C]’est que les esclaves de Glenelg étaient amoureux de leur maître, c’est qu’ils
ne pouvaient se passer de lui, ni de leur esclavage’ (Paulhan 1954: xxvii). Inspired by
Paulhan’s foreword, filmmaker Lars von Trier recently portrayed the same events in his
film Manderlay (DK/S/NL/D/F/USA 2005), telling a very similar story.
I am grateful to the editors for this hint.
170
The Pleasures of Compliance
‘spontaneous consent’ between the dominant and the subordinate class, codes
of conduct in the BDSM scene claim ‘informed consent’ of equal partners
who engage in unequal interaction. In a well-known guidebook, Dossie Easton
and Janet Hardy affirm: ‘Respect for consent is mandatory’ (2003: 72). Within
the BDSM scene, the slogans ‘safe, sane and consensual’ (SSC) and ‘risk-aware
consensual kink’ (RACK), which aim at condensing codes of conduct, stand for
the centrality of the principle of consent to BDSM practice. The SSC slogan
was coined by leather activist david stein in 1983 as a shibboleth of BDSM’s
ethical basis. Later, Gary Switch suggested replacing SSC with another acronym,
RACK, as he wanted to avoid the disputable notion of sanity and the illusion
of total safety by stressing the importance of responsible risk management. At
present, both versions circulate within BDSM discourses.
All codes of conduct of the BDSM scene unanimously stress the importance
of negotiation and verbalization, which is also the reason why they speak of
‘informed’ consent. In Gramsci, though, consent remains ‘spontaneous’, and
thus not reflected upon and somehow ‘uninformed’. It is precisely the role of
the so-called ‘organic intellectual’ to articulate the feelings and experiences that
the dominated masses cannot express for themselves so that this spontaneous
consent becomes explicit, while at the same time it is unmasked as unfair.
See david stein, ‘“Safe sane and consensual”: The making of a Shibboleth’,
National Leather Association – Oklahoma City Chapter, http://www.nla-okc.com/
Files/SSC.pdf (accessed December 1, 2009).
See Vancouver Leather, http://www.vancouverleather.com/bdsm/ssc_rack.
html (accessed December 1, 2009).
‘The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical
consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless is an understanding of the
world in so far as it transforms it’ (Gramsci and Forgacs 2000: 333). ‘L’uomo attivo di
massa opera praticamente, ma non ha una chiara coscienza teorica di questo suo operare
che pure è un conoscere il mondo in quanto lo trasforma’ (Gramsci 1975: 1385).
‘The same must be said of every form of so-called “organic centralism”, which
is founded upon the presupposition – true only at exceptional moments, when the
passions of the people reach fever pitch – that the relation between governors and
governed is given by the fact that the governors carry out the interests of the governed
and therefore “must” enjoy the latters’ consent, in other words there must be an
identification between the individual and the whole, the whole (whatever organism it is)
being represented by the leaders’ (Gramsci and Forgacs 2000: 244). ‘Cosí è da dire di ogni
forma del cosí detto ‘centralismo organico’, il quale si fonda sul presupposto, che è vero
solo in momenti eccezionali, di arroventatura delle passioni popolari, che il rapporto tra
governanti e governati sia dato dal fatto che i governanti fanno gli interessi dei governati
e pertanto ‘devono’ averne il consenso, cioè deve verificarsi l’identificazione del singolo
col tutto, il tutto (qualunque organismo esso sia) essendo rappresentato dai dirigenti’
(Gramsci 1975: 1771).
171
Furthermore, unlike Gramscian class compromise, the ethical standards of

BDSM imply the use of a so-called ‘safeword’ that ends the validity of the
compromise and therefore stops any BDSM interaction.
BDSM Groups as Organic Intellectuals
Although Gramsci concedes at the beginning of his 12th Prison Notebook that
everyone can be an intellectual to some degree, he nevertheless decisively
demarcates intellectuals as a special social group that is set apart from the ruling
and subordinate classes – although they descend from and are still in touch with
either one of the classes or the other. Gramsci’s categorization was perhaps
influenced by the interwar Italian society he was a part of. Yet, given the rise of a
‘general mass intellect’ since then, the hierarchical distinction between ‘popular
class’ and ‘organic intellectual’ seems outdated and, at worst, anti-emancipatory.
Self-reflection has become a salient feature of neoliberal societies. Nowadays,
we are all organic intellectuals if we have access to education and invest in
(counter)hegemonic struggle.
It was out of an interest in this rise of critical self-reflection that I recently
invited practitioners of BDSM to reflect on their practice of consensual sexual
domination, developing what Gramsci would have called a ‘philosophy of
praxis’. Over the course of three years, I organized, recorded and transcribed
20 group discussions among BDSM practitioners in several major cities
throughout Germany, Austria and France, using the methodological approach
of Loos and Schäffer (2001). I found these groups via the Internet, on sites
where the members were self-described BDSM practitioners. The groups
had varying founding principles that differed by sexual orientation and
preferences, age, gender and social purpose. Still, in all groups the majority
of members were white, able-bodied and well-educated, which conforms
to how the BDSM community is perceived in general.10 Some groups were
‘Since we all agree (we hope!) that BDSM should be consensual, we need ways
to ascertain that everybody involved is still consenting once the scene is under way. One
of the easiest and most flexible ways to do so is with a safeword’ (Easton and Hardy
2001: 44).
The terms they use are either SM or BDSM, depending on the preferences of
the respective scenes’s jargon.
10 In the following, I avoid categorizing the people whom I quote in order not
to reify social categories, like gender and sexual identity, class, race, able-bodiedness
and religion. On the one hand, this may seem questionable, for it leaves important
power differences unmarked. On the other hand, labelling the speakers may re-enact
stereotypes and reduce them merely to their social categories (see Gildemeister and
Wetterer 1992; Hagemann-White 1995). Moreover, it necessarily focuses on one or
172
organized by associations or clubs and functioned as open contact points.

Others were just circles of friends or lovers. I always opened the discussions
with the question: what does it mean for you to practise SM or BDSM? After,
the groups talked openly for one to three hours. The approach of analysis
focussed on a selective coding of repeated arguments, discursive patterns,
lines of conflict and opposition-building, which I oriented both on minimal
and maximal contrast.11
My theoretical sampling is therefore likely to be characteristic of the
scene’s current discourse. It is a common feature of discussions with ‘naturally
occurring groups of like-minded people’ (Livingstone and Lunt 1996: 82) that
their members want to demonstrate a coherent group identity and highlight
what distinguishes them either from other BDSM groups or from society in
general. However, the conversational constraints of a discussion also favour
controversies within the group as the following example may illustrate:
A: A short while ago somebody just said that SM has somehow …

B: … become mainstream.
A: No, exactly not! Yes, maybe mainstream … but SM as lived experience
or so … no!12
The groups repeatedly debated the significance and value of their practices,
both with respect to their personal identities and to their group identities.
They also expressed their ideas on the local and global specificities of BDSM
communities, the limits of consent and the normalcy of BDSM sexuality, as
well as their opinions on ‘other’ BDSM practitioners. Finally, many groups also
represented themselves in relation to the authority of the social sciences, upon
which they might have projected various assumptions. Hegemony thus operated
on two levels: the groups both negotiated group consent and negotiated their
symbolic position within society. These are all qualities of ‘organic intellectuals’,
as group consent might tend to insert itself into hegemony but can also establish
a counter-hegemony that defies hegemony.
two particular social features where one could mention a variety of other qualities as
well. As I am interested in uncovering the queer potential of the group discussions, I
therefore prefer taking the risk of leaving the question of potential identification open,
as long as it is not addressed by the speakers’ own words.
11 I rely on Sabine Maasen’s (2008) exemplification of the discourse analysis of
sexual selves.
12 All translations of the discussions are mine.
173
Sexuality, Domination and Heteronormativity’s Symbolic Violence
A study of BDSM may help to discern two interrelated dimensions of

domination. In German, there are two words for domination, each of which
differs subtly in its connotations. Domination as Unterwerfung (‘submission’ or
‘repression’) describes the act of open coercion by the dominant. Domination
as Herrschaft (‘dominion’ or ‘regime’) meanwhile refers to a society’s sustained
hierarchical structure, which both the dominant and the dominated contribute
to. As a staging of domination, BDSM can surface how both of these dimensions
of domination are interdependent and how hegemony necessarily relies on the
performance of repeated acts of submission.
How does heteronormativity interfere in all this? Unlike most of the
theory on hegemony, BDSM takes up the sexual dimension of hegemonic
domination, which is easily overlooked in other contexts, as sexual activity
conventionally implies mutual consent.13 In crimes of rape and sexual abuse,
the sexual dimension of physical violence becomes more evident. However,
these occurrences belong to another domain that differs fundamentally from
both hegemony and BDSM. Hegemony’s dominance operates more subtly than
brutal violence, functioning instead through mechanisms such as persuasion,
coercion or threat. It relies both on active and passive consent. BDSM, in turn,
operates by seduction and relies solely on active consent.
There is a libidinous aspect in any relation of domination. It is as social bodies
that we experience domination and therefore we cannot avoid getting involved
affectively and sexually. In his book Masculine Domination, Pierre Bourdieu (2001)
describes the libidinal investment in domination with the Latin terms libido
dominandi (‘the pleasure of dominating’) and amor fati (‘love of one’s fate’). As the
coercive aspect of domination often goes unnoticed with the everyday bodily
practice of (gendered) social roles, he speaks of ‘symbolic violence’:
One of the effects of symbolic violence is the transfiguration of relations

of domination and submission into affective relations, the transformation of
power into charisma or into the charm suited to evoke affective enchantment
(for example in relations between bosses and secretaries). The acknowledgement
of the debt becomes recognition, a durable feeling toward the author of the
generous act, which can extend to affection or love …. (Bourdieu 1998: 102)
13 Of course, BDSM does more than this. It is not completely taken up with
sexual dimensions and should not be reduced to the sexualization of practices of
domination. For instance, bodily stimulation in pain play or sensual deprivation plays an
equally important role in many BDSM interactions. However, all these techniques can
indeed, in other social contexts, be (mis)used for purposes of domination, too.
174
Hence, in order to understand why hegemony has a sexual dimension, one

must combine the analysis of hegemony with an analysis of heteronormativity.
Rosemary Pringle (1989) has investigated the importance of (hetero)sexuality
within the hierarchical work relations between secretaries and their bosses. By
stressing that hegemony is rooted sexually within embodied subjectivities, I
would like to point toward the importance of the analysis of heteronormativity
to the study of hegemony. As a form of symbolic violence, heteronormativity
naturalizes the arbitrariness of its acts of domination – in a manner similar
to the way that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe conceive of hegemony
as the universalization of a ‘particular social force’ (1985: xi). Sexualization is,
however, central to the naturalization of the (hetero)normal. By implementing
hegemonic consent on which particular sexuality is to be considered normal,
deviance is produced at the same time. According to Gayle Rubin (1993), any
BDSM sexuality is marginalized as ‘bad sex’ and therefore, like (other) queer
sexualities, it conflicts with heteronormativity in one or several regards.
Due to the sexual dimension of domination, Lynn Chancer (1992) quite
bluntly observes a ‘sadomasochism in everyday life’, which she distinguishes
from its specific processing in BDSM practice.14 In the following, I explore
this aspect of BDSM practice in contrast to the everyday compliance with
domination. I argue that BDSM exploits the libidinous strategies, which
mobilize consent to (heteronormative) domination and which guarantee a
certain libidinous gratification for all participants. BDSM practice exposes and
cultivates the various sexual and emotional investments in the reproduction of
the existing order. However, it also eroticizes the resistance against it. Darren
Langdridge and Trevor Butt therefore conclude: ‘Sadomasochistic sex play may
therefore highlight and challenge structural inequalities based on dominance and
submission. The story of S/M produces resistance as it makes visible previously
invisible institutionalized power inequalities’ (2004: 48). Thus, a closer look at
BDSM can help to interrogate the links between sexuality, heteronormativity
and hegemony.
In Gramsci’s understanding, hegemonic compromise only works because
both dimensions interact: ‘The “normal” exercise of hegemony in what
became the classic terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by the
combination of force and consent variously balancing one another, without
force exceeding consent too much. Indeed one tries to make it appear that
force is supported by the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called
14 ‘In fact, practitioners of S/M sex sometimes see themselves as challenging and
subverting sadomasochism in the more rigid and encompassing social sense to which
this book refers. As elaborated in chapter 1, theoretical precision requires recognizing
that playing with sadomasochism is not identical with, even though it may deeply relate
to, sadomasochism itself ’ (Chancer 1992: 2).
175
organs of public opinion – newspapers and associations – which are therefore,

in certain situations, artificially increased in number’ (Gramsci and Forgacs
2000: 261).15
An assertion like ‘I want to submit/dominate because it feels good’ may
be considered as belonging to the register of hegemony because it expresses
a spontaneous consent to domination that is somehow naturalized by the
subject’s desire. In turn, those practices of dominance that consist of bare
coercion are rather held to belong to the register of open power struggles. It
may be characteristic of BDSM practice that it sustains the tension between
these two dimensions of domination, uncovering again and again the coercive
and arbitrary nature of domination that hegemony aims at occluding.
Although quoting from the imaginary of physical violation and assault, BDSM
is clearly situated on the side of hegemonic domination through consent and
compromise. Nevertheless, BDSM does not simply replicate the mechanisms
of the false compromise between the dominant and the subordinate, as I would
like to argue in the following. Rather, it restages this dynamic and renegotiates
its inherent hierarchies.
Hegemony and BDSM as Forms of Compromise
Can BDSM practice be viewed as a compromise between the interest of

the dominant and the dominated, drawing an analogy to hegemony’s social
mechanism? Can it be compared to hegemony’s class compromise that Gramsci
had in mind? What kind of compromise would then be enacted within a
BDSM setting? Between Gramscian and BDSM discourses, there is one major
difference in how compromise is conceived: in BDSM, compromises function
because all participants experience it as somehow pleasurable. To this extent,
compromise seems fair and equitable. It suggests that all participants are equal
in power. Distinct classes are set aside in favour of fluid hierarchical positions.
In contrast, the Gramscian notion of compromise departs from the vision of
two opposed and essentially uneven classes without considering the pleasure
that might be involved or not.
Thus, compromise in BDSM happens on another level. For instance, one
group I talked with described their engagement with erotic dominance and
15 ‘L’esercizio “normale” dell’egemonia nel terreno divenuto classico del regime
parlamentare, è caratterizzato dalla combinazione della forza e del consenso che si
equilibrano variamente, senza che la forza soverchi di troppo il consenso, anzi cercando
di ottenere che la forza appaia appoggiata sul consenso della maggioranza, espresso dai
cosí detti organi dell’opinione pubblica – giornali e associazioni – i quali perciò, in certe
situazioni, vengono moltiplicati artificiosamente’ (Gramsci 1975: 1638).
176
submission as a compromise between two competing desires: independence

and intimacy. In doing so, they echoed Jessica Benjamin’s thoughts on
sadomasochism’s dialectics between a desire for omnipotence and a desire for
contact with the other through acts of recognition:
C: But in a moment of crisis, you won’t just run for the hills – you’ll be there
for each other.
D: Now you have to explain that further, because that “being there for each
other” is also …
E: … is not a one-way street.
D: No, what I was going to say is, if you talk to a happy vanilla couple, they feel
just the same. The question is, what has dominance and submission got to do
with it?
F: I think it has already become clear to some of us that there is a kind of
dissonance between the wish for intimacy and the ability to actually allow for
that very intimacy. Personally, I find this is a crucial point with people who
are practising dominance and submission …
In another group, a practitioner addressed one further kind of compromise: the

compromise between what is normatively admissible and what is transgressive.
This is where society enters the psychosocial setting:
For me, the surplus value of pleasure is created behind my back. In the
foreground, I define it as punishment. But in the [BDSM] play, I am cheating
myself and thereby producing pleasure. Still, in the play, I am defining it as
punishment for myself…. Maybe education plays a role in all that. Pleasure
must not be defined as pleasure, and therefore can basically only enter through
the backdoor. It is forbidden and evil – sexual. Only when you define it as
punishment can you experience it as pleasure.
This statement describes a way of creating forbidden pleasure out of the realm of
the Law. In psychoanalytic terms, this establishes a compromise between the Id
and the Super-Ego. The Super-Ego is cheated under the mask of its being over-
affirmed. A similar tactical compromise is manifested in the paradoxical desire
for constraint, which delegates the responsibility for one’s desires to another’s
authority. In the course of one group discussion, a practitioner illustrated this
with the example of a desire that is likely to transgress heteronormativity, which
is quite common within the heterosexual BDSM community:
G: If you get a buzz from your will being broken, then I find that exciting, too.
But then I still have your consent that I am allowed to break your will. It is not
like there is the general social rule for it – that you haven’t got a free will.
177
Instead, you voluntarily agree that I may go beyond your will. That’s something
different from slaveholding society or lack of emancipation.
H: That also plays a role in the wish to wear women’s clothes, which men can
actually have. It is as if they have the wish for forced feminization, which is
in fact quite a contradiction. I have the desire for something but I also want
to be forced to do it. That’s true. The coercion is intended.
I: Schizophrenic!
H: Yes, somehow, yet there is a wish for coercion.
All these different kinds of compromises are situated within the individual and
between two individuals or groups of individuals. On the level of compromise,
there is a compromise between intrasubjective and intersubjective wishes, to
use Jessica Benjamin’s terms. Play partners mutually delegate their wishes and
super-ego projections to each other. And society comes into play as an abstract,
lawgiving authority. However, this authority is parodied rather than revered; it is
undermined by its very over-affirmation. In the first instance, these compromises
increase agency on an individual level and therefore can be regarded as queer
‘tactics’ (de Certeau 1984: 29–42). In addition, broader collective political
transformation can result from such a parodic reproduction of the law. BDSM
has a potential to denormalize and renegotiate hegemony precisely because it
links intersubjective dominance to a societal domination, while at the same time
denaturalizing this very connection (Lorenz 2009: 133–41).
Under this aspect, BDSM can then constitute another level of compromise:
a compromise between hegemonic heteronormative interpellations and queer
resistance to them. Ambivalence lies in the nature of compromise. On the one
hand, BDSM practice can be viewed as a mere assimilation to the demands
of a hegemonic heteronormative order, because it remains passionately
attached to it. However on the other hand, these practices may be regarded as
a strategy to extend the reach of queer space from within because it enjoys the
constructedness and malleability of that very order. Ann McClintock, in this
vein, interprets BDSM as paradoxical practice. ‘Hence the paradox of S/M,’
she writes. ‘On the one hand, S/M parades a slavish obedience to conventions
of power…. At the same time … S/M reveals that social order is unnatural,
scripted and invented’ (McClintock 1995: 143).
And this queer potential may arise as much in mixed or heterosexual BDSM
scenes as in LGBT BDSM scenes, although it is usually more strongly present in
the latter. Both scenes reproduce and question gender clichés, and both scenes
can reproduce and undermine heteronormativity. One queer-identified group
member felt there was a critical potential to the hetero scene, although they
generally experience more of it in the queer/lesbian/trans scene:
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To me, the queer/lesbian/trans BDSM scene, and maybe somehow also the
gay BDSM scene, actively questions gender norms. There is generally a basic
questioning of these constructs – of the binary conception of gender, man/
woman and so on …. Of course, you have this in the hetero BDSM scene as
well. One partially plays with such things. But maybe one does not question
stuff that much …
BDSM practice can therefore revoke the hegemonic consent to heteronormativity.

In the following section, I would like to consider how the figure of the norm
is mobilized, both by disidentifying from the norm and by reidentifying with
the norm.
Negotiating Normalcy
Heteronormativity paradoxically mobilizes embodied subjects through increasing

the contradictions and precariousness of gendered norms. These norms may
be regarded as a ‘dominant fiction’ (Silverman 1996) of how sexuality is ideally
supposed to be lived. By negotiating their social and sexual position within the
hegemonic order, individuals invest in the regime of heteronormativity. How
was heteronormativity then articulated within the 20 group discussions? To
what degree did the participants defy or comply with the hegemonic gender
order? And going forward, how can BDSM practice be a way to disidentify with
heteronormativity’s hegemony and its ‘hegemonic fictions’?
My discourse analysis shows how the debaters renegotiate normalcy. While
they frequently tried to reinscribe themselves within hegemonic normalcy, their
BDSM practice constantly provokes denormalization. The result is a radical
ambivalence that lies between the pleasures of transgression and resistance on
the one side, and the pleasures of conformity and submission on the other.
The group members prefer to stay in-between and to employ strategies
of both normalization and denormalization, as well as of identification and
disidentification.16 They repeatedly affirmed that they are ‘totally normal
average people’, while at the same time they indiscriminately referred to non-
SM sexuality as ‘normal’, speaking about ‘normal life’, ‘normal relationships’
and ‘normal people’.
16 The notion of disidentification is a term I borrow from José Esteban Muñoz

(1999). According to Muñoz, disidentification is a survival strategy of minoritarian
subjects that consists of a dissident relation to the hegemonic symbolic categories by
which these subjects are rejected. Minoritarian subjects refer to these categories while
at the same time aiming to undo them.
179
The group discussion method highlights the inconsistencies in the shared

usage of the notion of normalcy because the conversational dynamics provoke
a questioning of its attribution to either the inside or the outside. As soon as
somebody referred to the ‘outside’ world as ‘normal’, this was usually contested
by another debater – sometimes by the very person who uttered it. For instance,
in one discussion when somebody referred to the ‘inside’ world as ‘normal’, a peer
objected: ‘It [SM] is unconventional. But it is not about being unconventional
for its own sake. This is accidental.’ Others do however claim that they enjoy
acting outside normalcy. Still others eventually take an ironic approach to their
and society’s longing for normalcy. Said one participant: ‘Everybody wants to
be normal. It is somehow more attractive. Anyway, it’s normal that everybody
is normal.’
While the groups and group members differ in their self-positioning towards
normalcy – some reclaiming and others rejecting it – they all have in common
a radical ambivalence towards complying with or defying a norm. Instead, they
opt for a self-reflexive questioning and therefore can be regarded as organic
intellectuals in their own right. Thus, they remain in a deregulated space where
adherence to a norm is precarious but this very precariousness is at the same
time desired and enjoyed. The participants claimed to enjoy the power that
is conferred both by conforming and by transgressing, and sometimes they
enjoyed precisely the ambivalence of its being conformed or transgressed.
In her interpretation of BDSM practice, Judith Butler (2000: 33) notes: ‘It
[sadomasochism] exposes a vexed relation to a set of norms, ones that not
only call into question the fixity of the norm, but underscore the difficulty
of working it, rendering it malleable, and working it through, turning it into
something else.’
This is exactly how a member of a gay BDSM discussion group depicted his
relation to the norm of hegemonic masculinity and to the potential of sexually
negotiating gendered norms by valorising images that differ from these (cf.
Silverman 1996: 37):
J: I have the idea that for me, SM is a possibility to express certain contradictions
that I have with beauty, masculinity and being gay. On the one hand, I’ve got
certain ideals of masculinity. On the other, I express troubles with them
or put myself in situations that haven’t got anything to do with the ideal of
masculinity. For example, contexts where I am vulnerable, have no autonomy
or sovereignty, or where I show my feelings.
K: In that sense, SM broadens the notion of beauty. Being tear-stained and
bloated from crying can look gorgeous, whereas normally it doesn’t register
this way. And there is so much courage to look ugly in SM, which …
J: … is beautiful …
180
K: … enormously extends the possibility of being beautiful. Definitely. For

example that being bloated.
INTERVIEWER: That does not exist outside of SM?
J: I think that SM provides a space for it. I wouldn’t say that SM is the only
possibility to find this space but for me, SM is a possibility to live such a
thing, which other people may also find elsewhere. That moment of showing
your wounds and yet of being able to find yourself beautiful.
Practitioners predominantly regard the ‘vexed relation’ to norms as wresting

new ways of agency from the hegemonic order. Some relish the empowerment
they experience through their BDSM practice in view of the norm (although
the following quotation seems to overestimate its impact):
That [SM] has made me super powerful in regards to the norm – to society
– because suddenly I achieved power over all relations of domination, of force
and so on. Even if I could be totally bottom and totally crap in a humiliation
scene, it was because I decided it. I decided I was in a safe space for doing it and
for playing it.
The empowerment this person has in mind probably comes out of an undoing
of the performative power of certain rituals of degradation. This effect
can indeed be compared to the embracing of the term ‘queer’ within queer
politics, which also deliberately takes up an abject position and thus defies the
performative power of this utterance. But here, the pleasure in pursuing such a
strategy is also stressed.
The two quotations illustrate how heteronormativity is phantasmatically
reproduced and therefore functions hegemonically. At the same time, the norm
is exceeded by this very reproduction.17 This excess causes frictions with the
norm, which both creates a potential for renegotiation and is also evidence of
the norm’s very limits.18
17 It may be interesting to note that it was precisely the incongruity with the
hegemonic gender order that led Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1978: 86–143) to
the coining of the psychiatric terms ‘sadistic’ and ‘masochistic’ perversion. He was
attempting to name submissive behaviour in men and dominant behaviour in women,
while he considered some sort of sadism in men and masochism in women as ‘sane’.
18 Laclau and Mouffe (1985) suggest in their work on hegemony the notion of
‘articulation’ for the process of establishing hegemony within specific and contingent
contexts.
181
Playing with Hegemony
We have now seen that it would be premature to draw a simple analogy between
informed consent in BDSM and the dominated’s complicity in hegemony. Can
BDSM practice be viewed as a practice of domination at all? Is it not rather a
kind of mockery of these very practices? This would mean that BDSM ‘plays’
domination and thus restages the everyday spectacle of hegemony without
being a practice of domination in and of itself.
The idea of seeing BDSM as a sort of play is very common among
practitioners and is reflected by the scene’s own jargon, which mostly uses
‘play’ for designating BDSM interaction, although this usage is often contested
(Woltersdorff, forthcoming). One participant advocated the term ‘play’ by
highlighting its theatrical dimension: ‘I like the notion of play a lot because it
is not a “play” like in “games” but a play like re-enacting, like you can play in
theatre … and eventually like re-enacting the mechanisms of power, the norms
and so on.’ BDSM’s allowance for a renegotiation, a re- and denormalization
of the hegemonic heteronormative order, would then arise precisely from its
restaging or re-enacting of everyday hegemonic practice. In contrast, hegemony
in Gramsci relies on its being taken seriously and on the unspoken nature of its
practices of domination that focus on their performative effects rather than on
their performance.
The ludic interpretation of ‘play’ does not however reflect the self-image of
at least some practitioners, who consider their BDSM lifestyle as utterly real,
although they would call their lifestyle a practice of freedom rather than one
of domination.19 Distancing himself from the term of ‘play’, Thomas Magister
reports that half a century ago, it was the notion of ‘work’ rather than the
notion of ‘play’ that was in common use in the US leather scene:
It might be interesting at [this] point to note one glaring difference between

leathermen in the 1950s and the leathermen of today. What S/M men now call
play we called work. And when I am inclined to criticize the current style of S/M
I have made the observation that children play and men work. (2004: 98; italics
in the original)
Over the course of the group discussions, the participants very often connected
to this controversy. Remarked one:
Well, that’s such a long lasting discussion whether one lives SM or whether one
plays SM. You have … the SM “livers” and the SM “players”. The first say:
19 See for example the eloquent title of an ethnographic study like Bound to be free
(Moser and Madeson 2005).
182
“Those ones only play.” And the others say: “You cannot live it.” According to
those who plead for the latter, the view of BDSM as “play” opens up space for
agency: when you have realized that it is playing, then you also know that you
can and must create your own rules of the game. When you are saying that you
are “living” SM, then it sounds as if everything was already carved in stone and
that it is already clear who wants what and who must do what.
It may be characteristic of BDSM performance that it is situated precisely at the

border between lived experience and fiction. As Lynda Hart (1998: 68) argues:
‘It is, if you will, both performance and reality, and neither of them. Or more
precisely, s/m conjures up the contradictory nature of all performance, which
strives both to create the truth of illusion and unmask the illusion of truth.’ I
would suggest that this very ambivalence creates the pleasure and sexiness of
SM. This constitutive ambivalence might also be responsible for the above-
mentioned unresolved dispute but it is equally reminiscent of the performative
status of hegemonic ideology between dominant fiction and reality. Could it
be that contemporary neoliberal hegemony works precisely through its ludic
character as ‘play’?
In this context, we have to distinguish between two levels of ‘working’ or
‘playing’ with hegemony, which interconnect: BDSM practice as an intervention
into existing hegemonic orders and BDSM practice as dramatizing the libidinal
mechanisms of hegemony. This double function is reflected in a statement
by one of the participants: ‘My BDSM practice is not only about re-enacting
reality, it’s also about imagining another reality.’ Jacob Hale (1997) and Robin
Bauer (2005) have elaborated on how queer SM communities enable people to
live multi-gendered statuses that do not at all match heteronormative settings
of identifiable ‘men’ or ‘women’.
The Power of Fantasy and the Fantasy of Power
In conclusion, BDSM renegotiates the hegemonic border between what counts

as ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. Regarding the fantasy of heterosexuality, this politics
consists in going through our own libidinal attachments to the dominant
fictions of heteronormativity, which however exclude us from getting what we
‘really’ are. Such a conception is echoed by Lynda Hart’s definition of queer
BDSM as something that is ‘neither real nor phantasmatic, but a sexuality that is
self-conscious about the ways in which fantasy constructs the real’ (1998: 165).
Some members of the discussion asserted that the phantasmatic investment
into hegemony can even undo dominant relations. Other BDSM practitioners
explicitly stressed that inventing a fantasy of a ‘Master’ can provide them with
a sense of agency and power:
183
The power to fantasize, to play, to re-enact, to sexualize the questions of power

– that has given me more distance and more power on … how shall I say?
Because I can decide to allow myself to have a fantasy or a BDSM scenario with
a cop – whether they are a false or real cop, they are at least somebody who
represents all the things I’m against – that gives me power over cops in the real
world. I can persuade myself of this power because he’s gone through my own
machine, my mental machine, my fantasy machine and so on.
This phantasmatic scenario tries to regain agency in a scene of ideological

interpellation that is similar to the one Althusser sketches in his theory of
ideological state apparatuses: the call from the policeman is re-enacted as a
sexual fantasy that is now enjoyed and controlled by the passer-by. The function
of this BDSM fantasy is to transform or subvert relations of domination.
Slaves become the creators of their masters and masters serve their slaves. It is
precisely this ambivalence or precariousness of power hierarchies that is crucial
to BDSM interaction. Conversely, the practitioners highlight the phantasmatic,
ideological dimension of social reality. Social reality brings about sexual fantasies
of power and domination. However, these very fantasies become performative
and retroact on the ‘real’, as we see in this exchange:
L: After seven years in a queer-feminist squatters’ environment – in hyper-

protected spaces, so to say – I’ve now been working for almost two years
in an environment with super macho, super masculine men. At the beginning,
there was a clash for me. I was suddenly a “boy”. This experience referred
me back to all the questions of gender and norms and to my place as a man.
It was very difficult. But at the same time, when I spend a day at [my
workplace] with ten machinists like that, who are really heavy and who, in
terms of gender, act in super violent ways, well, in the evening, I get back to
my hotel room and I masturbate imagining an SM scene with them. I do this
both as a bottom and a top. And all of a sudden … damn! There’s a transition
from the real world to BDSM practice. For me, both …
M: … feed each other.
L: … they feed each other permanently, don’t they? This means, I can walk
in the street and see somebody or a situation, and then it goes off, doesn’t it?
And indeed, what I live in the real world will feed what I will be able to
practise in BDSM. That means, well, it will, it will … the fantasies are not the
same according to what I am experiencing socially.
N: It’s the same with me.
[agreement]
O: I think if we were actually not living in this particular world, where we have
to undergo so much social pressure and so on, we would have a lot less
BDSM fantasies, wouldn’t we?
184
[laughter, agreement]
N: Yes, that’s clear, that’s clear.
O: That’s obvious, isn’t it?
M: Our fantasies would have to be nourished differently.
O: Yeah, they would have to be nourished differently. However, we’d then have
lots of fantasies that do not yet exist.
M: Yes, it is all … well, it’s all very much influenced by society’s framework.
If sexualization was just a flight from domination, it would not change the
objective reality of domination, and BDSM would not change anything on a
political level. However, fantasies are both individual and collective and thus
combine psychic and political dimensions. They negotiate their symbolic
position within society. Hence, BDSM practice opens up a space for political
intervention and change.
The reach of its political agency is, however, complicated by the substantial
difference between the conditions that enforce consent in everyday life and
interfere with the BDSM subculture and the conditions that establish consent
within the BDSM scene. Moreover, the various BDSM scenes tend to create
their own norms, which of course, are still dependent on broader societal
norms. This is the reason why practitioners, at least some, judge fantasies that
cite heteronormative settings differently from those who trouble or queer them.
As one participant said:
I have a problem when [in consensual BDSM] women are beaten instead of
men …. This is because [in mainstream society] you are probably more used
to women being beaten against their will than men. Maybe because of this …
because you have experienced it more often or heard about it or seen it, this is
why you have developed a dislike to it.
Finally, the BDSM space of intervention can only count as political if we

thoroughly modify the concept of the political. A similar modification is at
the heart of the concept of hegemony. This means we must extend the notion
of ‘the political’ itself in such a way that it encompasses the space of bodily
practice and incorporated knowledge, which Pierre Bourdieu has called the
‘habitus’. In order to resist domination, he calls for work on the body, as well
as for people to realize the limits of a ‘raising of consciousness’ that confines
itself to intellectual explications of domination: ‘While making things explicit
can help, only a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated
exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus’ (Bourdieu
2000: 172).
Queer BDSM can thus function as a way to bodily undo the incorporated
hegemonic order. BDSM often involves bodily modifications and transformations,
185
temporary and definite ones, and practices of bodily training that aim at
unlearning what prevents the individual from enjoying something as pleasurable
and at learning to intensify existing pleasure. Queer feminist activist Pat(rick)
Califia (1997: 94) remembers: ‘The leather they wore and the metal and ink they
put in their bodies were not fashion statements, they were brave declarations of
difference and affirmations of a passion for pain, power, and extreme degrees
of penetration. Some of these signals and tokens were fated to become clichés,
but that was hardly apparent then.’ Maybe the most sustainable political effect
of BDSM practice consists in the fact that, among other things, it is capable of
changing bodily dispositions.
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188
Index
Abu Ghraib 111, 158, 160 Carver, Terrell xx–xxiv, 25, 30, 38,
affect 99, 170 69, 76, 92, 94–7, 108, 116–17
agency 9, 11, 13, 17, 69, 70, 72, 81, Castro Varela, María do Mar xiv,
95–7, 104, 108, 111–12, 115, xxvii, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 20
178, 181, 183–5 chain of equivalence xvii, xxii, 6, 64,
agonism xxiv, 146 81
alliance 4, 20, 64, 73, 87, 91, 109 Chambers, Samuel A. xvi, xix–xxiv,
alterity 149–50, 152, 166 25, 30, 38, 44, 69, 76, 92, 94–7,
ambiguity 68, 70, 87, 146, 160–61, 108, 116–17
163, 166 child also childhood 124, 127–30,
ambivalence 39, 80, 178–80, 183–4 134–5, 138
antagonism xvi–xviii, xxii, 1, 28–9, child of futurity also child of the
33, 35, 77, 79–81, 146 future 128, 134, 138–9
articulation xvi–xix, 2, 6–7, 17–18, choice 122, 123
20, 33, 39, 52, 64, 70–71, ideology of choice 137
83, 143–6, 150, 152–5, 158, ‘this is a wonderful choice’ 136,
161–6, 181 138
assemblage 82, 155–8, 164 citizenship xxvii, 16, 44, 57, 101,
105, 110–11, 116, 123, 125–8,
BDSM xxvii, 169–85 132–4, 136, 138, 155, 158, 164
Benjamin, Jessica 170, 177–8 infantile citizenship 126
Berlant, Lauren xiii–xv, 126 citizen 9, 124–7, 129, 133–7
Bhabha, Homi K. xxvi–xxvii, 103–4, civil citizen 136
108–9, 116 economic citizen 133, 136
binary 2, 10, 11, 15, 18, 26, 45, 48, model neoliberal citizen 137
57, 63, 69, 71, 94, 124, 127, neoliberal citizen 133, 137
145, 152, 164, 179 private citizen 136
body 6, 25, 44–6, 54–5, 58, 85, 95, civil society xxv–xxvi, 9–10, 50–54,
109, 141, 156–8, 164, 185, 187 57–9, 74, 93, 94, 98, 106, 112,
embody 64, 68, 81, 143, 163 113
Bourdieu, Pierre xxvi, 174, 185 civil union 91, 102
Butler, Judith xv, xx–xxvi, 13, 15–16, classifications 5, 29, 34, 37, 131, 155
25–32, 34–9, 43–50, 52–7, 69, coercion xxvi, 3, 8, 15, 50, 59, 93,
76, 92, 95–8, 103, 108, 115, 174, 176, 178
122, 151, 180 Cohen, Phil 135
coherence xiii, 11, 15, 18, 37, 46, 69,
Campbell, Kumari Fiona 131 85, 153, 163, 166
collective 8, 74, 82, 155, 165, 178, 185 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 68, 72, 80, 85,
common sense 4, 55, 93, 98, 104 156, 158
community 15, 82, 114, 123, 125, 127, Derrida, Jacques xiv, xx, 151
137, 139, 149, 165–6, 172, 177 desire xiv, 2, 11, 15, 17–19, 44–5, 63,
compliance xxvii, 33, 95, 96, 169, 175 68–9, 71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82,
complicity xviii, 3, 7, 11, 59, 65, 111, 84, 86–7, 92, 94, 101, 108–10,
155, 164, 170, 182 122, 126, 137–8, 144, 151, 165,
compromise 104, 169, 170, 172, 175–8 169, 176–8
compulsory Dhawan, Nikita xiv, xxvii, 9, 10, 13,
able-bodiedness xxiii, 123–4, 126, 14, 19, 20
128, 135 difference xvii, xx, 18–19, 27–39,
heterosexuality 3, 14, 19, 103, 123 45–6, 65, 68–75, 78, 80, 83,
condition of possibility xx, 29, 34, 85–6, 111, 115, 121–2, 124–7,
162, 166 128–31, 137–9, 151, 154, 186
consent xxvi, 4, 7, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, differentiation xv, xx, xxii, 2, 12, 27–8,
74, 85, 91–6, 98, 109, 113, 31, 45, 69, 144, 150–55, 166
146, 171–7, 179, 182, 185 disability 14, 114, 121–39
consensual 171–2, 185 as difference 125
spontaneous 93, 171, 176 as masquerade 124
constitutive xvi, xviii, xxi–xxiii, 2, 7, as sameness 122, 127
9, 17–18, 26–9, 32–4, 36–9, cognitive disability 124, 126,
47, 56, 69, 71, 76, 85–7, 95, 98, 134–5, 138
144–5, 149–52, 154–5, 157, intellectual disability 126, 127, 135
161, 165–6, 183 in relation to parenting 125, 127,
contestability 18, 143, 145, 150, 165 130, 132, 134–5
contingency xvii, xxii, 6–7, 25–7, 29, Disability Studies 14
32–5, 37, 39, 64, 87, 97, 114, disambiguation 70, 78, 146, 164, 166
122, 146, 150, 161, 166 dominance xxvi–xxvii, 3, 5, 8, 15, 92,
Copjec, Joan 28, 152 143–4, 169, 174–8
counter-hegemony xxvii, 9–11, 91, domination xxvii, 1–9, 11, 14–17, 51,
94, 98, 108, 112–13, 116, 173 54–5, 63–4, 68, 70, 81, 93–4,
counterpart 45, 106, 143, 165 109, 115, 122, 169–72, 174–8,
crip xxvii, 2, 10, 14, 121–5, 128–9, 181–2, 184–5
131–2, 134, 136–7 Duggan, Lisa xv, xviii, 19, 74, 85,
Crip Theory also crip theory 10, 115, 136, 155
14, 123
inspiring crip 129 Eliot, George 129
critique xix, xx, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 2, 9, 10, empowerment 49, 55–6, 181,
12, 14–17, 19, 25, 29, 32, 37, empty place xx, 30–31
39, 43, 47, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, Eng, David L. 121, 123,
65, 68–9, 72, 76, 80, 83, 95–7, Engel, Antke xiv, xviii, xxii, xxiii, xxvi,
111, 121, 123–4, 136, 144–5, 10, 13, 18, 19, 78, 137, 164
150, 153, 155, 157, 161, 163–5 England, Lynndie 8, 158, 160
equality xxv, 27, 48, 96, 105–6
190
INDEX
excess xix, xxiii–xxiv, 85, 104, 136, Halberstam, Judith J. xxv, 121, 123,
144, 146, 150–51, 165, 181 164
extralinguistic reference also Hall, Stuart 4, 52, 116, 122
extralinguistic referent 154, 165 Hart, Lynda 183
Hartmann, Jutta 16, 122
failure 30, 39, 47, 153 healthy corporeality 122
family xxvii, 31, 44, 51, 53, 71, 73, 99– hegemony xiv–xxiv, xxvi–xxvii, 1–17,
101, 106–7, 109, 113, 116–17, 19–20, 25–6, 28, 31, 35, 37,
123, 125, 130–32, 134–9 39–40, 44, 48–59, 63–6, 71,
abled family 135 74–5, 79–80, 84–5, 91–5, 98,
crip family 132, 134 101, 103, 106, 109, 113–17,
fantasy 13, 44, 68, 84, 96, 128, 134, 122, 124–5, 135–7, 139, 143–5,
152, 170, 183–4 151, 153, 155, 165–6, 169–70,
force xiii, xiv, xxvi, 11, 25, 43–4, 173–6, 178–9, 181–3, 185
55–6, 70, 76, 81, 86, 91, 98, hegemonial heterosexuality 122
113, 136, 139, 143, 156, 175, magical resolution 135, 138
181 moving equilibrium of 122, 125,
Foucault, Michel xxvi, 3, 9, 16, 47, 129, 139
52, 54–5, 95–7, 133 heterogeneity 6–7, 10, 31, 43, 85–7,
Foundationalism 34, 38 114
freedom xxvi, 6, 19, 44, 48, 55, 61, 66, heteronormativity xiii–xv, xvii–xxiii,
73, 78, 82–3, 123, 126, 164, 182 xxvii, 1–4, 7, 11–19, 25–6, 32,
34, 37–9, 44, 48–9, 53–5, 57–
Garland Thomson, Rosemary 123 8, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72, 75–6, 79,
gay 19, 25, 43, 48, 101, 105, 106, 91–2, 94–7, 101–4, 106–10,
108–11, 114–15, 121, 179–80 115–16, 121–4, 126, 145, 151,
gender 165, 170, 174–5, 177–9, 181,
as binary order 2, 11, 15, 19, 25, 183
45, 48, 53, 57, 69, 94, 179 reproductive heteronormativity 100
gendered subject 25, 44–7, 49, heterosexual xxv–xxvii, 11, 14–15,
54–6, 58, 139 19, 25, 31, 38, 43, 45–6, 49–50,
Genschel, Corinna 14–15 54–5, 68–9, 71, 91, 94–101,
going-beyond 144, 149, 151, 153, 103–7, 109, 115–16
165–6 hegemony xxi, 39, 53
governance 3, 9, 81, 124, 126, 131, 135 imaginary 91, 116
governmentality 54 matrix xv, xxi, xxvi, 14–15, 38–9,
Gramsci, Antonio xiv, xx–xxi, xxvi, 43–56, 69, 92, 122
2–6, 8–11, 16, 26, 44, 50–59, hierarchy 45, 68, 91, 122, 130 132
63, 74, 92–4, 98, 112–16, 122, home 103, 114, 131–8
143–4, 169–72, 175–6, 182 homo oeconomicus 133
Gressgård, Randi xix–xxii, xxvi, 18 homonationalism 19, 111, 155–6
Grisard, Dominique 149 homonormativity 19, 97, 110, 115, 155
Guattari, Félix 13, 68, 80, 85, 156, 158 homosexuality 46, 48, 53, 97, 105–7,
Guha, Ranajit 8–9 110–11, 130, 155
Honneth, Axel 125
191
identity xviii, xix, xxii, 2, 6, 10, 12, 14, leadership 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 50, 58,
19, 25, 27–8, 31, 37–8, 43–4, 63, 93, 113
46, 68–73, 87, 94, 96, 104, 121, Lefort, Claude 153
125–6, 136–7, 143–5, 149–57, legitimacy xv, 3, 93, 104, 110, 115,
160–66, 172–3 150, 153–4, 165
mistaken identity 157 lesbian 12, 19, 43, 48, 107–9, 114,
ideology 93, 100, 116, 125, 137, 155, 116, 178–9
169, 183 Link, Jürgen 138
illegibility 97, 157 livable life also liveable life 76, 122
impossibility xiv, xvi–xvii, xix, xx, logic
xxii, 7, 18, 29, 34, 36, 79–80, of articulation 145, 150, 153, 165
86–7, 145, 150–54, 161, 163, of language 1, 151, 165
165–6 Lorenz, Renate vii, xxvi, 15, 64, 66,
inclusion 14, 96, 109, 123–6, 129, 73, 178
134, 136 Lummerding, Susanne xiv, xxii–xxvi,
liberal model of 131 18, 28, 86
neoliberal inclusion 123,
institution xiii, xv, xxv–xxvi, 1, 2, McClintock, Anne 5, 109, 178
9, 12–14, 26, 33, 35, 38, 45, McRuer, Robert xxvii, 114, 121, 123
50–51, 53, 63–4, 69, 91–3, 98, Marchart, Oliver xvii, xx, 28–30, 34–8
101–4, 106–9, 113–14, 116, marriage
125, 153–5 gay marriage 108, 111, 113–15
intellectual 4, 8, 10, 50, 93, 94, 113, same-sex marriagexxvii, 91–2, 98,
125, 126, 130, 132, 135, 139, 100, 103–16
171–3, 180, 185 as sham 102
intelligibility 15, 43, 72, 92, 96–7, traditional marriage 115–16
150, 152, 166 masculinity 45, 53, 58, 109
intersectionalityxviii, 5, 7, 164 hegemonic masculinity 180
Irigaray, Luce 108–9 Mbembe, Achille 156
meaning 18, 26–9, 32, 69, 80, 143–6,
Kelly, Trek Thunder 158, 160, 149–54, 157, 160–66
kinship 31, 44, 53, 100, 116, 123, 135 metaphor 36–7, 121, 134, 157, 164
Kittay, Eve 131 migration 6, 44, 80, 101, 116
Klesse, Christian 12, 122 mimesis 104, 108
mimicry xxvii, 91–2, 97, 103–4,
labour 5, 9, 15, 51, 72–4, 78, 117, 108–9, 116
133–4, 138 motherhood 135
Lacan, Jacques 144, 146, 151, 153, distributed mothering 134
Laclau, Ernesto xiv, xvi–xx, xxii–xxiv, Mouffe, Chantal xiv–xviii, xx, xxvi,
xxvi, 6–7, 16–17, 26, 28–30, 1, 6–7, 17, 26, 33–4, 52, 63–5,
33–4, 38, 52, 64, 69–73, 79, 69–72, 79, 114, 143–6, 151, 175
143–5, 151, 153, 175 Muñoz, José E. 121, 123, 164, 179,
language xv, xx, xxiv, 1, 30–31, 144,
150–54, 162, 165–6 nation xviii, xxiv, xxv, 91, 100–103,
117, 126–7, 147, 149, 155
192
INDEX
nationhood 126 registered partnership 48, 91, 100,

nation-state 106, 155 105–6
natural 25, 28, 46, 68, 75, 92, 95, 99, Penn, Sean 122–3, 127
108, 112, 169 perception 8, 55, 58, 78, 80, 93–4,
naturalization 15, 25, 39, 46, 57, 175 128–9, 133, 143, 146, 147,
necessity 12, 29, 32, 33, 69, 78, 135, 153 149–50, 154, 157–8, 162
negotiation xxiv, 6, 104, 109, 125, performative contradiction xx–xxi, 39
131, 143–4, 146, 150, 154, 163, play 175, 177–8, 182–4
165–6, 171 pleasure 84, 95–6, 131, 169, 174,
neoliberal xix, xxii, xxv–xxvii, 6, 19, 176–7, 179, 181, 183,
48, 51, 65–6, 72–5, 78–9, 82, political, the xiv–xx, xxii, xxiv, 1–2, 7,
83, 85, 87, 109, 122–4, 126, 9, 18, 26, 32–9, 64, 70–72, 79,
133, 137, 155, 172, 183 86–7, 145–6, 153, 155, 163,
norm xviii, xxi, xxvii, 1, 14, 18–19, 165–6, 185
39, 45–9, 53–4, 58, 69, 71, 76, politicization xvii, xx, 6, 11, 33,
86, 92, 95–8, 100, 108–9, 111, 35, 64, 77, 79
131, 137, 143, 145, 153, 165, Prison Notebooks 3, 8, 44, 50, 92, 170;
179–81 see also Gramsci, Antonio
colonial norm 104 productivity 12, 153, 156,
disciplinary norm 94, prosthesis
heterosexual norm 11, 38, 71, 94, narrative prosthesis 135
97 prosthetic device 124, 138
normalization 1, 2, 14, 16, 65, 69, 73, psyche 49
94, 129, 131, 155, 179 psychoanalysis 151, 169,
flexible normalization xv, xxvi, 19, Puar, Jasbir K. 19, 111, 149, 155–8,
75, 138 164
normative violence 14, 20, 46, 56–8,
76, 95–7, 116 quantification 165
queer
ontic difference 28–9, 31–2 metaphor without fixed referent
ontological difference 27–8, 31–5, 37–8 121
ontology xx–xxi, 30–31, 35 politics 1–20, 43–4, 48, 59, 65,
oppositional 45, 78, 143, 166 79, 86, 92, 110, 112, 114–17
oppression 2, 4, 7–8, 14, 16–17, 50, queerness xiii, xvii, 2, 114, 124,
112, 143 156, 164
Ostojić, Tanja 101 renewed queer studies 121
overdetermination 144, 146, 149, studies ii, xiii, xv, xxv, 2 ,14, 111, 121
151, 157, 165 theory xii, xiv, xv, xvii, xx, xxv,
xxvii, 1–3, 13–20, 25, 43–4, 57,
parenthood 127, 130, 132–3 63–4, 68–9, 87, 111–12, 164
parody 101, 108
particularity 7, 18, 27, 30, 39, 64, 75, race xviii, xix, xxv–xxvi, 2, 5, 14, 43, 85,
83, 143, 163 102, 109, 112, 136, 155–7, 172
partnership xxv, 91, 99, 105–6, 116 racialization 156
radical difference 18, 29, 34–5, 38
193
Rancière, Jacques xv, 39 Silas Marner 129

reality 31, 111, 143, 145–6, 150, 152–4, Silverman, Kaja 15
161, 163, 165, 166, 183–5 slavery 170
recognition 9, 10, 14, 27, 30, 48, 74, Smith, Anne Marie 7–8, 11, 17
78, 91, 95, 97–8, 100, 102, 105, social, the xviii, xxii–xxiv, 26, 28,
108, 112, 114, 123–5, 136, 169, 33–8, 68, 149, 151, 165
174, 178 socio-symbolic 18, 86, 153–4, 161
liberal ethos of 125 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty xxvi, 9,
representation x, xxv–xxvi, 6–7, 16, 52, 100, 110, 112, 115
64, 69–71, 73–4, 80–81, 84, state xxv–xxvi, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14, 44,
111, 114–15, 124, 143, 145, 50–54, 57–8, 64, 69, 71, 93–4,
147, 149, 150, 153, 157–8, 163 99, 102–3, 107–8, 110, 113,
reproduction 15, 64, 71, 99, 108, 169, 126, 137, 139, 156, 184; see
175, 178, 181 also dominance; hegemony;
resistance xviii, xxiv, xxvii, 9–14, nation-state
16, 47, 65, 81, 93, 96, 103–4, struggle xvi–xxiv, 5–7, 9, 13, 15–20,
108–13, 116, 156, 166, 169–70, 25–6, 31–5, 40, 48–9, 51–4,
175, 178–9 58–9, 64–5, 73, 75–8, 80–81,
responsibility 73, 82, 85, 133, 144, 86–7, 108, 111–16, 122, 132,
154, 163, 177 146, 163, 172
rights xxiii, 9, 27, 72–3, 78, 91, 101– subaltern xviii, 6, 8–11, 51, 59, 109,
6, 108–17, 123, 125, 126–30, 115, 126, 127
132–3, 135–7, 158, 165 sexual subaltern 10, 109
Subaltern Studies 8–9
S&M see BDSM subject
Sadomasochism see BDSM sovereign 95–6
Scott, Joan 27 subject-position 152, 165
securitization 146–7, 149, 155 subjectivity xxiii, xxv, 13–16, 45,
security 93, 154 49, 63, 78, 86–7, 95, 115
Sedgwick, Kosofsky Eve 123 submission xxvii, 69, 169–70, 174–5,
sexuality xviii, xix, xxv–xxvii, 2, 5, 177, 179
11–19, 39, 46, 50, 58, 63, 71, subversion xviii, xxiii, xxvii, 11, 13,
73, 75, 85–6, 97, 101, 102, 29, 38–9, 47, 71, 75–6, 79, 82,
121–2, 136, 145, 151, 156–8, 85–6, 96–7, 104, 108–9
165, 173, 175, 179, 183 suicide bomber 149, 156–7
sexual difference xx, 18, 27–39, survivability 96–7
46, 71, 86, 145
sexualization 174–5, 185 terrorist xxiii, 146–7, 149, 156
Siebers, Tobin 124 terrorist/queer assemblage 155–6
signification xxii–xxiii, 13, 18, 29, theory_politics also theory_politics/
31, 37, 69, 80, 124, 132, 137, queer 145–6, 153, 163, 166
144–5, 152, 161, 163–6 totality xvii, 26, 64 ,79, 151–2, 154–5,
signifying xx, 18, 34, 143, 145–6, 165–6
153, 154, 158, 161–4, 166 transcendental xxii, 28, 31–2, 35–6
system of 29, 31, 37-8 transsexual 106–7
194
INDEX
unambiguousness 150, 154, 160 Wagenknecht, Peter 16

universal, the xviii, xx–xxi, 7, 12, Waldschmidt, Anne 138
25–31, 35–9, 45, 52 Walloch, Greg 135–6
universality xx–xxi, xxiv, 7, 25–7, war xxv, 19
30–31, 39, of manoeuvre 59, 113
universalization 26, 175 of position 113, 116
Warner, Michael xiii–xiv, xxvi, 3,
violence xxiii, xxv, 3, 19, 44, 46, 56–7, 13–5, 44, 92
63, 69, 95, 98, 101, 103–4, Wilkerson, Abby L. 121
110, 116–17, 147, 149; see also Williams, Raymond 93
normative violence
physical 58, 95, 113, 174 Žižek, Slavojxxiv, 16, 26, 31–2, 35–8
symbolic 174–5
195

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Hegemony and Heteronormativity

Founded by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke, Queer Interventions is an

The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of

Titles in this series:

Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory

The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory

María do Mar Castro Varela

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9781409403203 (hbk) IV

List of Figures vii

1 Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality 25

2 From the ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ to a ‘Heteronormative

3 Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming-Bird:

4 Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-

5 How Sam Became a Father, Became a Citizen: Scripts of

6 Signifying Theory_Politics/Queer? 143

7 The Pleasures of Compliance: Domination and Compromise

3.1 Charming for the Revolution. Film by Pauline Boudry and

on the critique of representation. In ‘Wider die Eindeutigkeit: Sexualität und

Kateřina Kolářová is Assistant Professor for Cultural Studies at the

Gundula Ludwig is Researcher at and Coordinator of the Centre for Gender

Susanne Lummerding is visiting professor for media studies and gender

Vienna, at the University of Arts in Linz, at the University of Oldenburg and

Volker Woltersdorff is Research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature

Heteronormativity (which as we have seen is usually attributed to Berlant and

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010)

coming to terms with the paradoxical nature of liberal democracy requires

Laclau and Mouffe together offer important resources for a deconstructive,

Rancière, Dissensus, 36.

Reason – in which he expands various categories he has used elsewhere (logics

Hegemony and Heteronormativity further expands several terms – articulation,

13 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005) ix-x.

here for it is in the mediation between the positions of hegemony and

16 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996) viii.

Queer X the ‘Political’

Gressgård in her chapter intertwines – while retaining the various tensions –

Gressgård concludes that the “politics of performative contradiction is

Engel, like both Gressgård and Ludwig, recognizes how promising it

24 Reinaldo Laddaga in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Reinaldo Laddaga,

Engel’s imperceptible politics introduces two further concepts which are

The commitment to a conception of democracy which is futural, which remains

challenge deterministic understandings of ‘the political’ (Laclau and Mouffe

hand, hegemonic socio-economic and political relations are seen as organized

‘Per vent’anni dobbiamo impedire a questo cervello di funzionare.’

The new German translation of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, edited by

The rethinking of the concept of hegemony in post-Gramscian theories has

Post-Gramscian – including feminist – approaches follow Gramsci’s insight that

historical moment. Rather what is more important is to analyse the competitive

hegemonic articulations enable productive ways of negotiating contingency.

The latter implies a pluralist hegemonic project, wherein ‘the construction of

postcolonial world. Processes of decolonization of the global South as well as

Heteronormativity designates a regime that organizes sex, gender and sexuality

sexuality – in complex interplay with other categories of social differentiation

as an analytical category that is unavoidably entangled and complicit with the

is true particularly since it indicates a conceptual shift from minoritarian and

Why Hegemony and Heteronormativity?

As mentioned previously, a critical perspective is gained through explicitly linking

12 Warner, while insisting on the recognition of complex social differences, avoids

that calls itself ‘normality’ rests upon understanding heterosexual reproduction

movements between categories and social positions, of the ‘strategic polyvalence

Why ‘the political’ in Queer Politics? Or, how to Rethink

sexuality and desire, this is where a concrete socio-historical analysis of power

List of Figures vii

1 Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality 25

6 Signifying Theory_Politics/Queer? 143