Fictions of the Normal

Abstract

The body is a material, tangible, solid, concrete, substantial fact. It is a truly fascinating mechanism—it feels things, makes things, thinks things, sees things, tastes things, imagines things, moves about, gets sick, heals itself, gives life. However, the most interesting feature about bodies is why and how they become categorized in the ways they do. The shape and form of this categorizing is an intriguing phenomenon, and has been the focus of enormous interest during the late twentieth century and now into the twenty-first (Holmes 2007; Jackson and Scott 2010). Just as intriguing, and related to processes of categorization, is the intense visibility of sex and sexuality in contemporary cultural life. Images and “talk of it” pervade contemporary Western societies. An ever increasing array of sexual identities and formations are available to us, and these sexual identities and choices are discussed ad nauseam, in schools, on morning talk shows, in “smutty” late night documentaries, in doctor’s surgeries. Everywhere we look, from advertisements, clothing, magazines and music, food, medicine, and holiday packages, the charms and pleasures of sex are displayed, solidifying its supposed necessity in our lives. As a package, the cultural message seems to be: sex and sexuality are absolutely central to who we are as individuals, and as a society.

The culture has thousands of ways for people to govern the sex of others—and not just harmful coercive sex, like rape, but the most personal dimensions of pleasure, identity and practice. We do this directly, through prohibition and regulation, and indirectly, by embracing one identity or set of tastes as though they were universally shared, or should be. Not only do we do this, we congratulate ourselves for doing it.

—Warner 1999, 1