[1] JAGOSE: On the pink-jacketed cover of The Trouble with Normal are a rank of plastic male dolls, alternately dressed in a groom’s formal white dinner jacket and black bow tie or a leatherman’s motorcycle cap and bondage chest straps. No one could mistake them for a couple yet, as an iconic pair, they represent oppositions – marriage and public sex – which, collectively if somewhat schizophrenically, characterize contemporary gay male culture. How do the tensions between these two perspectives work themselves out at the level of not just everyday life practices but something we might call an ethics of the everyday?
[2] WARNER: It would be a mistake to read too much into the dust jacket, over which one has little control. The initial design, by the way, had two identical wedding-cake grooms. I objected that this image had been used for other books, that it was in fact a cliche around gay marriage, and that it did nothing at all to suggest the queerness that was so central to my subject. The press obligingly changed the cover. The result, however, is an image that was never quite intended from scratch, and is a bit hard to read. I suppose I like it for that reason. What’s the message? I don’t know, except that it designates a tension between rival typifications of gay male style, of sexuality, of sociability. By implication, it raises the question: whither faggotry? I would hope that the book has a rather different way of raising the same questions, one that is less committed to any single typification of queer experience, or to the sex or sexuality of the movement’s subject, or to the idea that dinner jackets and leather represent wholly distinct kinds of persons, let alone that either kind should be idealized for all. I don’t expect anyone to look at the jacket and take it as a message about how to live. I expect that people might look at it and be bothered, or puzzled, by a field of disputed idealizations. And then there’s that color . . .
[3] JAGOSE: Sure. For me, the cover works as a lure, not a semaphoric shorthand, for the book’s complex arguments about the cultural organization of sexuality. I’m intrigued that the original design for the book involved the by now standard issue pair of grooms, a symbolic formation which, as you objected, is fairly ubiquitous and has come to be read less as a critique of the traditional wedding-cake couple than a naturalization of gay marriage itself. Given the routinized representation of same-sex marriage as an idea whose time has come, your book doesn’t simply contest gay marriage but insists on its contestability. Only a decade ago, in Australia and New Zealand at least, same-sex marriage registered – if it registered at all – at the level of farce or campiness. How is it that marriage has been refashioned as an indisputable and near evolutionary development in anti-homophobic reform? Why has marriage become legible as a gay right?
[4] WARNER: This is an excellent question. What you say of Australia and New Zealand is true in the United States as well; when Paula Ettelbrick and Tom Stoddard had their debate on the subject in Out/Look some ten years ago, it was regarded as a wild flight of theoretical fancy. I don’t think many people took it seriously. But a few lawyers did.1
[5] WARNER: The explosion of the issue teaches us above all that the model of activism by litigation gives enormous agenda-setting power to lawyers, with little or no answerability to a larger public. There was no general debate leading up to the decision to invest in the Hawaii case which was just started by a few legal activists, notably Evan Wolfson. They were then able to draw support from just the kind of donors who had made their entry into gay politics with the 1992 Clinton campaign – mostly rich white men, many of whom had never been active in gay movements before, and for whom this issue (like military service, for David Geffen and others) had a potent appeal. The marriage project at Lambda Legal Defense created a network of support that essentially bypassed dissent. And once the cases began making their way through the courts, Wolfson was able to turn around and say that the time for debate was over, that the only choices were to fight for marriage or join the homophobes. The other national organizations, especially Human Rights Campaign and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, were initially reluctant to make this their issue, but felt they had no choice.2
[6] WARNER: Of course, this alignment of the institutions would not have been possible without a great many other factors. I argue in the book that the language of affirmative identity, which has become the folk theory of the movement, predisposed people to issues like this. Celebrating gay and lesbian identity, or sexual orientation, was already a way to screen non-normative sexuality out of the picture. Marriage is the perfect extension of that politics. It confers status on people by rendering sex invisibly private and presumptively normative. And it gives people that status at the expense of others, while pretending merely to honor their private love and commitment.
[7] JAGOSE: Yes, one of your book’s strongest arguments against the extension of marriage to lesbians and gay men as a right, or even an option, rests on the little acknowledged fact that the indisputable privileges of marriage – social, economic, legal – are always secured at the expense of those sexual/social formations that fall outside the normalizing architectures of marriagability. Whatever the motivations of the individuals concerned (as you note, most frequently couched in the discourses of love and privacy), the prospect of lesbian and gay marriage must be foundationally implicated in the production of new horizons of sexual pathologization. I guess this is the major force of your title – The Trouble with Normal – but can you talk a little about the discourse of normativity and the politics of sexuality?
[8] WARNER: Some of the advocates of same-sex marriage are now using very extreme language, even speaking of “Vermont apartheid” because the Vermont legislature is considering a sweeping domestic partnership bill that would give same-sex couples all the legal benefits of marriage under another name. This rhetoric trivializes apartheid, of course, but it also fails to recognize that the current system of marriage will continue to be one of privilege even if same-sex couples are admitted. The line will be drawn at marital status, rather than sexual orientation, but is that really the ideal we’re fighting for? Because marriage has become the vehicle for a great load of privileges, and because it confers status that has a great deal of normative force, it is an inherently discriminatory system. Many conservatives will have the courage to say that frankly. To them, it’s the good thing about marriage. What seems less defensible to me is the position of so may gay marriage advocates, who still pretend that marriage is just a private choice, or a personal right, as though participating in this institution has no consequence for others.
[9] WARNER: The strong version of a pro-marriage position would have to be that it is merely one step toward a much less discriminatory program of marital and family law. But I don’t see that position being articulated in the U.S. right now. (Things are very different in other countries, but American gay rights advocates seldom think they have to learn from other countries.) If you seriously wanted to advocate same-sex marriage without merely embracing its bundling of privilege and status, you would have to say from the beginning what your further goals are. Instead, the lawyers and advocates are saying that they want marriage, period. You would also have to couch your position in language that didn’t naturalize marriage as unalterable. Instead, the lawyers and advocates are saying, “Marriage is a right.” You would have to make sure that your rhetoric did not contribute to the stigmatization of the unmarried. Instead, same-sex marriage advocates continually appeal to the ideal of the long-term married couple as a shared norm. On a recent debate on the showPolitically Incorrect, Bruce Vilanch made clear what seems to be the dominant thinking on the issue: gay marriage proves that gay people can be just ordinary people, “like we see in West Hollywood.” And finally, if you thought your campaign for marriage were going to lead to a broader reform movement, you would have to be careful to prevent what is actually happening: a systematic realignment of the resources and power base of the movement toward the people who see themselves in this issue shutting out dissent.3
[10] JAGOSE: You write briefly in your book about some different approaches to marriage reform that have been made outside the United States, notably in France and Scandinavia. What are some of the political implications of other marriage reform projects and, ideally, how might they inform the American campaign for same-sex marriage?
[11] WARNER: Every setting has its own politics and its own limitations, so I don’t propose anything as an ideal. But the French case is an interesting contrast. There, for purely cynical political reasons, the Socialist government decided to broaden what was basically a domestic partnership status to cover any intimate household, whether sexual or not. In theory, a pair of elderly sisters or ex-boyfriends would be equally eligible for the benefits, which extend to everything except parental rights. I say this was cynical because it was done so that Lionel Jospin’s government could claim not to be giving a special privilege to homosexuals. Many gay activists are unhappy with it, both because it is perceived as a second-class status and because they want parenting rights. So they are now pushing for marriage as well. And in that context the politics of marriage would be very different. You would have at least three statuses that any couple could choose, each with a different set of benefits and exit requirements: marriage, concubinage, and pacte civil de solidarité. France is also a country with a social-democratic approach to health care, unlike the United States. So they are now a long way toward uncoupling the benefits and status that make marriage so discriminatory. In the United States, by contrast, the special privileges of marriage have been retrenched, and new proposals would heighten them even more. The gay marriage advocates are playing right into the hands of this conservative trend by idealizing marriage as the end-all and be-all of the movement.4
[12] JAGOSE: I want to ask you a few questions about sex. The discourses of sex might seem a long remove from the discourses of marriage but they are fundamentally intertwined. In the recent debates, for example, gay marriage comes to function as the violently normalizing frame for gay sex. The Trouble with Normalfrequently returns to the flurry of contradictory energies that animate sex. On the one hand, sex is highly regulated both by the state and disciplinary productions of the self; on the other, it figures a loss of control. You describe it as “a kind of experience in which we are supposed to be most ourselves, while at the same time least in control of ourselves.” How does this divided experience or characterization of sex play itself out in the struggle for what we might still refer to as sexual liberation?
[13] WARNER: Again, a question that calls for a more complex answer than any of us currently know how to give. Many people want us to pursue, as the inner goal of gay politics, one or the other of these poles of tension. There are some who see sex as authentic expression, and would like to integrate sex more with identity, to be fully out of the closet and to have sex lives that we can affirm in the broad daylight of moral discourse. This is the position, more or less, not only of some conservatives but also of many movement progressives such as Urvashi Vaid. On the other hand, there are people who think that the only sufficiently honest and radical move is to acknowledge all the ways that sex can never be assimilated to identity, pride, or perhaps even politics at all. It is loss of control, abjection, and perversity, and can never be recuperated. Here I am thinking especially of Leo Bersani, who stresses the self-shattering impulse in sexuality and all the ways it resists the stories that we like to tell of politics and sociability. Others in queer theory share this general line of thinking, even if their starting points are somewhat different. And it could also be said to be the sensibility in some nonacademic scenes of radical queer culture.
[14] WARNER: The contradiction between these, I think, is not going to go away. We are going to see this tension for some time to come. Its sources, I think, are in the basic modern background against which sex is intelligible to us as sexuality.
[15] WARNER: For reasons that are not hard to see, it’s the first option that seems to prevail in most contexts of movement politics. Those contexts come to seem pretty unsexy as a result, and for a lot of queers remain deeply alienating. I think we will have to push pretty hard to get people in movement politics to be more alert to non-normative sexuality and the tendency to clean it up or shove it out of sight. That should be one of the principal political tasks of queer theory now.5
[16] WARNER: But I also feel that something is missing in the opposite understanding of so much queer theory, that although it addresses some of the inassimilable character of sex in a way that seems suitably radical, what it doesn’t capture is why it feels right to be radical that way. That is, there is a counternormative impulse even behind the spirited rejection of all pastoralizing restraints on sexuality in the queerest of queer culture. We could argue over how to characterize that impulse or the norms that might be inarticulately emergent in it. I’ve advanced a couple of suggestions: I see in queer culture an unforeseen and unpredictable radicalization of what autonomy and dignity can mean, and it seems to me as well that there is something irreducibly counterpublic about sex in many of the most experimental scenes. I don’t think this is the only possible way to describe what is happening, but I do think that our account should do justice to that feeling of necessity that leads people to think that the queerest dimensions of sex are not just there, but important, compelling, in need of exploration, and better than the alternatives at the moment.
[17] JAGOSE: Can I ask you to clarify how you are using “counternormative” here? Does it reference an anti-normativity or is it a normativity raised to the second power?
[18] WARNER: Yes, it’s worth clarifying this point. Counternormative doesn’t mean against norms. Queer culture only has the force of critique or resistance insofar as it has its own normative impulses, which it develops in ways that conflict with the dominant norms. This is not entirely unusual, because in an overdetermined history norms are always practically conflicting, but it is also not simply a struggle of norm versus norm. Some norms are deeply embedded in the social imaginary, in law and other institutions, in habitus, and (for mass society) in the process that Foucault called normalization. Heteronormativity has a very deep hold, so that a real challenge to it can often seem like a rejection of norms and even sociability itself. Yet what intrigues me about even the most extreme formulations, such as those that Bersani finds in Genet, is that feeling of rightness that makes them compelling – or, if the example is an especially raw scene of queer culture, that which makes them feel not like a collective breakdown, but like an inhabitable world.6
[19] JAGOSE: The question of norms is key to some of the debates about the political efficacy of same-sex marriage. Simply put, a persistent question is whether gay marriage is a normalizing strategy which situates homosexuals within heteronormative frames of meaning or whether gay men and lesbians, by being brought inside its dispensations, can resignify the institution of marriage. You identify Judith Butler’s much-cited argument about the normative production of the subject, in which she describes the processes of normalization as containing the possibility of their own reversal, as potentially shoring up a complacency about the lesbian and gay resignification of marriage. How do your understandings of norms and normalization differ from Butler’s?
[20] WARNER: This is an enormous question, and one on which I will probably have to write an essay soon. The passage you refer to is not in the book version; it appears only in an essay version published in GLQbecause it’s mainly an issue in queer theory, and because I don’t want to add to the hostility that so many people show toward queer theorists in nonacademic publics.7
[21] WARNER: The words norm, normal, and normalization have a tendency to be confusing, in part because they have different but overlapping senses. In some queer theory, the idea of the norm is thought to be synonymous with law, rule, authority, power, and even ego structures. Queerness, in this thinking, is what troubles all of these. Queerness is understood as instability in identity, transgression against law, resistance to power. Now I don’t wish to minimize the force of this understanding; there are reasons for it, and it has an undeniable imaginative power. But as a theoretical account I think it involves confusion.
[22] WARNER: First, the categories need to be distinguished. Norm is a broad concept, quite different from law or power. To resist or critique law, rule, authority, or power is not the same as to resist norms. In fact, doing so presupposes or implies an opposing norm. There is also a tendency to conflate ethical, practical, and social norms, which might be different in kind and valence. And normalization is something else altogether: a phenomenon characteristic of modern, mass-mediated society. Foucault inDiscipline and Punish draws the term from Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. As I try to show in the second chapter of my book, normalization results from the way modern society is organized around distributional norms that are silently understood as evaluative norms. Just because something is statistically normal doesn’t mean it should be normative, but that’s the way much modern culture works.8
[23] WARNER: The point of making such distinctions is to suggest that queerness might resist normalization, or a social category of the normal, without suggesting that queerness resists all norms. The latter, in my view, is a self-contradictory and politically hopeless position. And if you think about it, you might wonder why we tend to speak of power, rule, law, authority, or even police as necessarily bad things. Certainly when it comes to constraining violence, most people who in theory seem to be committed to resistance per se find that some kinds of power are necessary conditions of justice. Concepts like power, authority and law do not themselves tell us anything about their desirability or undesirability in practical contexts. To think that we could theorize political commitments or the nature of queerness at such a level of abstraction is to be derailed. I would go so far as to say the same about normative structures of personality, such as ego development, which I think are quite necessary to anything that will count as resistance; and here at least I can expect spirited disagreement from many of the theorists I most admire, such as Bersani and Butler.
[24] WARNER: If we were to make the distinctions I’m urging, and reexamine the category of queerness in relation to each of them, we might find that our theoretical understanding of queerness might be more in sync with its historical context. We might also find it easier to connect with a politics. I think that the world in general has much to learn from the normative insights of queer culture, and we need to be articulating those insights rather than pretending to do without any.
[25] JAGOSE: The Trouble with Normal opens with the suggestion that the drive for sexual normalization, evident in the urge to regulate other people’s sex lives, is founded in our propensity to lose control of our own. You work through the implications of sex as a contested site not by turning to the vernacular of pride but revitalizing the dynamics of sexual shame. What does shame offer us as a rubric under which to think about queer sex?
[26] WARNER: First, let me say again that this is not original with me. I stole it, shamelessly, from Eve Sedgwick, who has made some extremely brilliant remarks on the subject. It seemed to me not just an accurate observation about what is already the prevailing form of queer politics (even the pastoralizing notion of gay pride acknowledges the reality of shame) but a way to integrate the visceral and aversive dimensions of sex with something that might be visible as a politics. There are a lot of efforts to imagine gay politics without shame. There is even a psychology/self-help book called Coming Out of Shame. That approach seems to me deeply flawed and counterproductive. An understanding of sex as inextricably linked to shame and visceral aversion, in a context where shame takes on a politics and becomes a hierarchy of respectability, seems to me necessary to any politics that won’t contribute to the stigmatization of non-normative sex. And it is necessary to understand why our politics must continue to find ways to be sexy, to risk aversion, to confront the reality of shame and its politics.9
[27] JAGOSE: “Shame and its politics” is a resonant phrase, almost an oxymoron. Maybe it’s possible to say that, for the gay and lesbian movements, “shame” and “politics” have been frequently taken as each other’s opposites; the latter, the former’s corrective. Where the cheek-burning flush of shame speaks to the loss of control over the public meanings that attach to oneself, lesbian and gay politics has often understood itself to be the resignification of those meanings, their transubstantiation as pride. Given this, can you expand a little on your description of the lesbian and gay movement as articulating “a queer ethic of dignity in shame”?
[28] WARNER: Certainly many people take shame and politics to be opposites. I think this is wrong, because it commits us to the unrealizable utopia of a world without shame. And I think that whenever that becomes people’s ideal, they begin to want to clean up sex, if not to eliminate it or make it invisible. Let’s face it: shame isn’t going to go away, where the life of the body or of sex is concerned. And that isn’t the problem in the first place. The problem is the hierarchy of respectability that makes some pleasures or ways of living normative, and others either forbidden or just inarticulate. Through that hierarchy, some people (that is queers) are made to pay the price for everyone else’s shame. If people were better about acknowledging and living with shame, they wouldn’t be so eager to abject others. In many contexts of queer culture, I find just this ability. In such scenes, people have gotten used to the idea that we can all be abject, that everything you thought was beneath you in fact turns out to be something you can learn from, and that the most compelling form of dignity is not that which requires you to clean up your act but rather that which comes from recognizing that we’re all capable of abjection. Queer culture at its best deals with intensities of shame without simply trying to climb up in the hierarchy of respectability.
[29] JAGOSE: The frequent calls to clean up sex inevitably take as their target public sex. For many people, I suspect, public sex functions, almost fantastically, as a counterweight to gay marriage and the latter’s claim on what you describe as “a postpolitical privacy.” In that imagined opposition, public sex comes to seem dangerous, immoral, anachronistic or, at least, unreconstructed. Can you say a little about how “public sex” functions as a concept or a category?10
[30] WARNER: Few terms have more ability to confuse discussion than “public sex.” Even quite educated people seem to find it difficult to see how it could mean anything other than sex in plain view, and therefore exhibitionism. The first thing to understand is why that’s wrong. Sex can be public in many ways, all of which might still be private in some significant way. You can have sex in a quite private place that is publicly accessible; this is true anytime people meet in bars or clubs or bathhouses or chat rooms, even if they go home or to a hotel or to a locked cubicle. The question of access is crucial for queers, who rely on places to encounter each other among strangers. Sex is also public in the sense of being learned, or shared. Our most intimate pleasures and sensations are public in this sense. Public sex in the usual sense of the term also retains an important kind of privacy. People who seek out sex in the parks or in toilets or in bathhouses do not usually do so indiscriminately and for the whole world’s involvement. There is a presumption of consent, and a reasonable presumption of the exclusion of anyone who does not consent. That’s one reason why people seek out secluded and dark places; for all their publicness, people in those places can reasonably expect privacy. Implicit in such practices is a challenge to the dominant segregation of spaces, which allows a tacit heterosexuality to be endlessly visible and publicly supported, while non-normative sexualities must be privatized to the point of invisibility and inaccessibility. Until that surrounding politics of visibility and access changes – and as long as queer children grow up in presumptively straight families it will not change completely – that challenge will remain necessary and worthwhile.
[31] JAGOSE: You note in your book that the imagined sexual organization of lesbians – cosily domestic and serially monogamous – has been used in the same-sex marriage debates as a rhetorical counter to the fantasized sexual organization of gay men – emotionally uncommitted and recklessly promiscuous. While unconvinced by the representation of lesbians as happy stay-at-homes, it seems to me that a different sort of rhetorical license has us acculturated alongside gay men in networks of publicly accessible sexual exchange (“When gay men and lesbians cruise …”). Given your argument’s reliance on the multiple senses of public sex – in particular, given the way you argue that public sex in its more usual sense of, say, beat sex underwrites in part the development and maintenance of a public sex culture – I wonder how you might imagine gender as inflecting queer counterpublics.
[32] WARNER: Well, there’s no question that the occupation of public space has meant different things for men and for women, for many reasons, and there are feminists who are very eloquent about this. I have tried to be alert to the full range of meanings of publicness, many of which are less aligned with masculinity–for example, the shared culture of the body that is made possible through talk–but I am also impressed by the much more confidently public sexual culture being developed by lesbians, mostly of the younger generation. I don’t know if this is true outside of New York and Seattle, but these girls rock.
[33] JAGOSE: Your insistence on rendering visible the public infrastructures which maintain and support a heterosexuality nevertheless coded as inviolably private is counterweighted by your understanding that public sex cultures – their sexualization of public spaces and their facilitation of sex in public – provide political and affective resources even for those lesbians and gay men who experience their sexuality as insulated from the public cityscapes of queer sex. In excess of enabling sex, what else do public sex cultures make possible?
[34] WARNER: If nothing else, the imagination of an alternative world. Queer kids growing up in isolated places around the country and around the world know, if only vaguely, that somewhere things are different: somewhere they can go and find strangers with whom they can share an intimate world. Even if they never leave their hometowns, the ability to have a horizon of difference, often totemized through images of San Francisco or New York, is a resource of survival.
[35] WARNER: The cityscape also allows people to imagine the insights of queers’ collective culture as an inhabitable world, and not just a private hobby. There is something fundamental about the spatial imagination in convincing people that it would be possible to remake the dominant culture: what if every place were like this?
[36] WARNER: And finally, intimate networks of strangers in a local space allows for mobilization. There is something transformative about those moments of mutual display, like Stonewall, that are not merely corporatized and regimented, like Gay Pride. And although the internet has been a boon for queers, its tendency to privatization is one thing that should be a source of worry.
[37] JAGOSE: The notions of world making and culture making are strong in your writing here and elsewhere. The promise of a transformative agency, grounded in everyday life practices and locations, is implicitly contrasted with the limitations of the official channels of resistance to authority – for example, “the model of activism by litigation” you mention earlier. How does world making work, both as a practice and a conceptual category?
[38] WARNER: The idea comes from Hannah Arendt, though I suspect she would be surprised to find it in this context. She in turn draws it from Heidegger, transforming it by making it a fundamental understanding of publicness and political life. The idea is that the activity we undertake with each other, in a kind of agonistic performance in which what we become depends on the perspectives and interactions of others, brings into being the space of our world, which is then the background against which we understand ourselves and our belonging. I find this a compelling account because it stresses historical activity and human creativity, but without falling into a naive view of individual agency or intentionality. The world made in public action is not an intended or designed world, but one disclosed in practice. It is a background for self-understanding, and therefore something not purely individual. It is also immanent to history and practice, unlike ideas of community or identity, which tend to be naturalized as stable or originary. And it is a language of performativity that is necessarily contextual and multi-perspectival, rather than the somewhat decontextualized picture of performativity that we often find in queer theory, where the only scene of enunciation is the relation between the subject and a norm.11
[39] WARNER: Part of the appeal of using this language for me is that it helps us to see how much our most intimate experience and self-understanding relies on a world that is essentially public, and brought into being by the interactivity of others. At a time when the self-understanding of gays and lesbians is increasingly privatized, I don’t think this can be stressed too much.
[40] WARNER: The conceptual category of world-making, though, is admittedly still underdeveloped. I’m enormously inspired by recent rereadings of Arendt, especially in feminist political philosophy. (I recommend Bonnie Honig’s Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, for example.) I hope this is the beginning of a really vital encounter between queer theory and the tradition she represents.12
Notes
- Thomas B Stoddard, “Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry,” and Paula L. Ettelbrick, “Since When Was Marriage the Path to Liberation?”, Out/Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, no. 6 (Fall 1989): 8-17.
- Evan Wolfson, “Crossing the Threshold: Equal Marriage Rights for Lesbians and Gay Men, and the Intra-Community Critique,”New York University Review of Law and Social Change, vol. 21 (1994): 567-617.
- “Politically Incorrect” aired February 18, 2000 on Fox Network.
- Pacte civil de solidarité ( or civil solidarity pact) refers to the package of legislative reforms concerning the status and rights of households discussed above.
- Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Doubleday Books, 1996); Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum A Grave?” in Douglas Crimp, ed. Aids: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988): 197-222 and Leo Bersani, Homos (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995).
- Bersani, Homos, pp. 151-81.
- Michael Warner, “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1999): 119-71.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977); Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, tr. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York : Zone Books, 1989).
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’sThe Art of the Novel, “GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (1993): 1-16; Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael,Coming Out of Shame : Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives(New York: Main Street Books, 1997).
- Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999): 163.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Martin Heidigger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
- Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).