Homonormativity names the process by which queer politics is reorganized around inclusion within — rather than critique of — existing normative structures. The term was coined by Lisa Duggan in “The New Homonormativity” (2002) to describe a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.
Homonormativity is the recuperation of queer politics. Where earlier queer movements challenged the institution of marriage, the nuclear family, the military, and the carceral state, homonormative politics seeks access to these institutions on their existing terms: marriage equality, military service, adoption rights, hate-crime legislation. The demand shifts from “abolish the institution” to “include us within it.” This inclusion requires the production of a respectable queer subject — monogamous, propertied, gender-conforming, patriotic — and the simultaneous disavowal of those queers who cannot or will not conform: the poor, the promiscuous, the gender-nonconforming, the incarcerated, the undocumented.
Queer-of-color critique has shown that homonormativity is not merely a political strategy but a racial project. The respectable queer subject produced by homonormative politics is overwhelmingly white, and the gains of “gay rights” — marriage, military inclusion, anti-discrimination law — have disproportionately benefited white queers while leaving queers of color, trans people, and poor queers exposed to the same structures of organized abandonment and state violence.
Related terms
- Heteronormativity — the normative framework homonormativity upholds
- Recuperation — the general process of absorbing radical demands
- Cruel optimism — attachment to the promise of inclusion that obstructs flourishing
- Settler moves to innocence — a parallel structure of performing inclusion to evade structural critique