Non-normative Sexuality Studies by Ahonaa RoyISBN: 9780199756384
Publication Date: 2020
Sexual non-normativity in the early-21st-century social sciences not only describes the cultural, social, and political needs, interests, experiences, and struggles of nonheterosexual desires and representations, but it also includes an array of identity formations. What does it mean to be “non-normative”? Ideally speaking, this connotation structures around a political claiming, a subversive metaphor that does not adhere to the standard gender(ed) expressions. That said, these gender traits challenge the cultural norms, or the dominant languages as historically coined within the medical dictionary. In order to address this, the politics further renders a non-foundationalist approach to gender, as making an attempt to de-objectify any sort of typification of classification. In addition, the diversity and fluidity of it aims to install de-pathologization of identity category, and further, to pacify the rigid gender traits that could potentially make gender more discrete. Thus, its very fluidity establishes an unsettling position of gender and sexual choices, as further to establish anti-imperial, non-hegemonic claim in the US-centric gender positions and theorizations. In lines to this argument, non-normative sexuality studies are an attempt to collate interdisciplinary and non–Euro-American modes of texts, theories, and approaches from the domains of culture, desire, beauty, aging, legalities, medicine, and health, complemented with several dimensions of these disciplines to create a bibliographical space addressing the several bodies, identities, and experiences of these representations. Furthermore, it maps the various changes in the lives, personal experiences, forms of discrimination faced in the past or present, needs, interests, and perspectives of these individuals in varied geopolitics, contexts, and cultures—modeling approaches that might be seen as alternatives to the dominant queer studies. My heartfelt thanks to Professor Raewyn Connell for introducing me to the Oxford Bibliographies series, Ms. Neha Pande as my research assistant who enabled me to complete this important piece of work, and Ms. Jennifer Pierce from Oxford University Press.