Final Post: Summation and Explanation

For my final post I'd like to identify what I meant in my last post by excess. I had a couple comments inquiring if I could be a little more in depth and I think it is worthwhile because it is a great summation of what I take from the course.

To make it simple, let's look at excess, which is just the term I have chose to use for this idea, in terms of what we have come to know throughout this course as "perversion," especially in the Foucaultian, repressive sense. In the notion of perversion we have to take into account that which is the negation of perversion, hence "normal." In a heteronormative society (i.e. ours), anything deviating from strict, reproductive heterosexual monogamy legally qualified as marriage is not the expected behavior (norm) and thus is "perverse."

Excess is the theoretical distance from this normative behavior, and the assimilation of excess comes to have a normalizing effect on recognition. Norms are literally expanded to absorb the accepted excess. This usually results in a sliding scale, as the extremity of any excess is not usually fully acknowledged. A great example of this is the social and cultural revolution that was sparked in 1970-80s London through the punk scene created by the band The Sex Pistols. The band's frayed, unwholesome, noisy and unrefined aesthetic was a challenge to classical etiquette and established a growth in an extremely conservative society that established a renewed form of acceptance.

Now combine this excess with the ideas of the theorists we have read, espeically Butler's poststructural intersubjectivity. The difference in excess reveals the ability to assimilate it. For instance, in that couples (heterosexual) are meant to reproduce in order to supply the labor force, a heterosexual marriage that does not yield children (by choice) would be perverse. This is a very small stretch from the normative behavior and thus was not very difficult to gain normal status. Now look at the example i gave in the last post of the Kiss-in protests. This is a public display of (tame) sexual intimacy between two members of the same sex. The level of excess, or distance from the norm, is much greater here, hence the problems in assimilation.

As one final point, and the penultimate notion, is the teleology (or end goal) behind any display of excess. If it were the goal of kiss-in protests to make other people uncomfortable as some sort of humorous display, it would have little legitimacy and little chance of becoming normalized. However, as the goal behind it is to force a sort of desensitization towards the hegemony (read heteronormativity) it becomes a plea for recognition that has been forced to excess. The goal being (presumably) that if people are forced to encounter the private lives of people who identify as queer then an acceptance can be established. Perhaps that acceptance will never mean specific individuals feeling comfortable with the action of two men kissing, but somewhere in the gradient of the normalizing shift toward the excess a legal barrier can be reached that allows for equality.

In this sense, there is a moral prerogative behind normalizing excesses that embody the recognition of non-destructive ways of life. Obviously, there is never going to be a normalizing shift towards people who feel that they just need to kill people for fun now and then. However, it does hold that with growth of tolerance over time and allowance for acceptance, normalizing shifts can be accomplished (e.g. same sex marriage) to allow for what Butler calls a livable life.