“Deviant” Pasts, Subversive Futures?

In a sociological tradition, deviance describes nonnormative actions and performances by individuals. Queerness is one such form of deviance, as it describes counter-hegemonic sexual preferences, gender performances, and community formations. However, deviance can also be understood as a mobilized politic, one that necessarily resists a reductive social order (Cohen 2004).

Once a pejorative, queer as a politic or label has been embraced as a way to fight homogenization, exclusion, limitation and binaries. Queer signals a political presentation that seeks to undermine dominant ideologies – those which seek to correct, control and punish difference – and instead offers a way of “becoming undone with and through one another” (Bey 2019). Through histories of resistance, indefinability, and innovation, queerness and queer people have offered their futures – our presents – layers of richness that otherwise may not have been afforded.

Yet, in addition to acknowledgment and celebration of such deviant pasts, we must confront the current representational realities that flatten queerness into congealed identities, conditionally accepted into “the norm.” This strikes many as particularly pressing when such norms involve participating in or bolstering regimes of violence, such as (neo)imperialism (Massad 2002; Puar 2007), criminalization and militarization (Conrad 2012, Gossett 2013).

Therefore, in a moment when normativizing discourse, legislation and media popularize particular images of LGBT identities, histories and journeys, this symposium questions the future of queerness. In growingly assimilatory political paradigms, does a collective power remain for queer identities to subvert, challenge or destabilize the hegemon?