[43] The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life - Michael Warner

Warner's argument is a punch in the face of many gay activists. He deftly argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are egregious and bad not just for gays but for everyone. First he rebuffs and discredits the notion of normality, which is merely a statistical range that should not be given social credibility. He retaliates at the drive to same-sex marriage and the assimilation to normality are founded on a phony (manipulated) morality that contrives to validate heterosexuality at the expense of queers, because conservative ideology behind the institution of marriage uses a behavioral argument that aims mostly at modifying sexual culture of the gays. When the issue becomes a presumption that morality is concomitant to marriage, arguments in favor of gay marriage are most likely powered by homophobic assumptions.

Warner delineates the problems of the cultural constructions of the normal: the use of politics of shame to reward some identities and punish others. He explains how normality uses disgust and embarrassment to restrict sexual autonomy of variant identities. Using the fact that publicity given to sex is itself punitive and gays' sexual noticeability, the antigays successfully impute shame and self-disgust on the gays who then hurl all the blame and become prime target of hatred, due to the difference, the "abnormality." Homosexuality becomes the aspect of sex that garners general loathing. Gays know too well how difficult it is in this paradoxical culture (prefers private pleasure and public moralistic aversion) to assert any dignity when one stands exposed as a sexual being. To have dignity, gay people must be seen as normal: to engage in normalization to win acceptance from dominant culture.

Warner reviles the set of norms that measure the worth of relations and ways of life. Not only that normalcy has no room for visible difference and conflict, it consigns what could have been a healthy variation to the margin and deems it deviant. The rhetoric of normalization, Warner contends, dictates that the taken-for-granted straight norms are the only criteria of value. Marriage therefore should not be the highest goal of gay politics because it is a public institution that spawns from heterosexuality and rewards only those who are inside it.

Warner instead advocates a politics that embraces queer sex in all its apparent indignity, together with a frank challenge to the hierarchies of respectability. This is significant because scenes of queer culture have been freed from any attempt at respectability or dignity. This culture has seldom been regarded as a source of ethic insight if not a gutter zone of the absence of ethics. The drive to marriage without making recognition of the norms of queer culture will only further stigmatize the queer community which is already denounced as self-indulgent and libertine. This new paradigm should recognize queer culture's own norms, which contribute to an ethic with the openness, accessibility, and volatility. It should neither patronize nor exclude, but to extirpate massive repudiation of queer culture's best insights on intimate relations and restore an accessible culture of sex that has been imputed with shame.