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Title: The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life by Michael Warner ISBN: 0-674-00441-8 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (13 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: rethink your politics
Comment: This is a book that could serve as a wake-up call. ... . Warner grounds his arguments in contemporary politics and offers an intervention worth reading. Even if he doesn't change your views, you will look a little more carefully at fund-raising mail from mainstream gay organizations. It would be nice to see this analysis extended to other issues, but the marriage debate serves as a boiler plate for other arguments.
Rating: 1
Summary: Hypocritical and Polemical
Comment: Warner starts off well and almost had me convinced for a while, until he becomes an obvious hypocrite. He claims that he wants homosexuals to be accepted, but in reality, he is just an ancient relic of the old struggle for gay rights and refuses to accept that perhaps homosexuals will have little more to struggle for when they are allowed to marry and given other rights.
He trashes Andrew Sullivan, the author of "The Politics of Homosexuality" - published in the New Republic in 1993, for claiming that homosexuals will no longer need to be political once they are allowed to marry and given the same rights as everyone else. So what's wrong with that? Sullivan seems to think that homosexuals should not "conform" with society and marry. He essentially says to all those homosexuals who want to marry that they are sellouts to the movement. However, he fails to recognize that indeed that is what most hetrosexuals and homosexuals want. We want our society to be more cohesive. By allowing homosexuals to marry, we are not making them hetrosexual in any way.
One could defend Warner by saying that he is actually criticizing the institution of marriage. However, his criticism is weak and unfounded. He claims that people get married because they want to change their name, get huge benefits, and engage in confidential conversations with their spouse. No one says to their future spouse, "Marry me so you can change your name and we can have confidential conversations." That's just silly, and with regards to the issue of "significant" benefits, there is not a particularly significant advantage, economically speaking, for married people. In many instances, it is actually a disadvantage. Also, he completely ignores the importance of marriage as an institution that is so crucial to the survival of our society. A state and society's goal is to recreate itself, to go on, and without marriage, there is no foundation to provide support for children (whether they be living with hetrosexual parents or adopted by homosexual couples). Warner just sounds like a libidinous man who wishes to remove marraige as an institution because he does not see the value in state-sanctified bonds. Why? He doesn't really say.
Also, he completely overestimates the power of sexuality in our everyday lives. He claims that we are all governed by our sexual shame. However, this is not really the case. Most of us do not spend our entire lives worrying about that relationship we had with someone back in college or something else like that. His trouble with the normal is that it's just not palatable to him. His goal is to remove all norms essentially (although he claims that this is not it) so that nothing will be abnormal.
One can make a Millisian argument against such a trivial idea and say that norms are necessary to each society. Without norms there is no society, no culture, no identity. Warner's vision of the world is a world where you can't group any two people together. In the great succession of sad, dead-end thinkers such as Foucault and Geertz, he does not believe in any classification or generalizations. Why is he even an academic then? OK, so perhaps that is getting away from his argument a little, but nonetheless, Warner fails to provide a convincing vision of his ideal world and why it would work. He's just disappointed that the rest of the world doesn't agree with him and blames it on the state and society for enforcing rigid conformity and punishing all of those who do not comply. I guess he didn't read Mill - society must have some way of establishing itself and its members should be able to hold their own opinions, and if a certain set of opinions create a norm or standard, than that is how it should be. However in a Millisian spirit, we should probably still read Warner, realize he's full of it, and move on.
If you want a true argument for homosexual rights, read Andrew Sullivan - he's a far better writer and far more convincing. Sullivan's goal is unity and cohesiveness, not war of all against all as Warner would hope for.
Rating: 5
Summary: amazing
Comment: a very insightful book, it should be read by all. it explores issues of marriage, sexual shame, the politics of shame, sexual autonomy, and hierarchies of power relations.
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Title: Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone by Martin P. Levine, Michael S. Kimmel ISBN: 0814746950 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Series Q) by Amber L. Hollibaugh, Dorothy Allison ISBN: 0822326191 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Berube ISBN: 0743210719 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Cultural Politics, Vol 6) by Michael Warner, Social Text Collective ISBN: 0816623341 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity by Lisa Duggan ISBN: 0822326175 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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