Today’s Go-To Piece of Criticism comes from Bridget Kies, one of the chairs of the OTW’s journal committee, author of Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025) and co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Her choice: the wildly influential Lisa Duggan. –FC
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Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism”, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 175-194.
Almost everyone who references this work or tries to define “homonormativity” uses the exact same quote from the chapter. (Really, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use a different quote!) The line is that homonormativity is “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them” (p. 179). Why so many fan studies scholars go to this work is because many of us approach fan studies from a gender/sexuality viewpoint, and Duggan’s idea of “homonormativity” explains shifts in LGBTQ activism toward things like marriage equality and adoption laws and in LGBTQ identities toward assimilation over radical queerness or transness — and that normative politics and identities are the better understood and respected in society. As fan studies scholars, it’s interesting to see when fan works resist homonormativity that is present in so many source texts with LGBTQ characters (offering up other vibrant queer and trans possibilities) or when fan works turn straight characters from the canon into LGBTQ people but from a homonormative prespective (so, for example, slashing characters but not really changing values of marriage and monogamy). Because fan works are a place where so many possible pushbacks to culture can happen, looking for examples of homonormativity and rejection of it can be really fruitful to show us fans’ sexual politics, values, and aspirations.
–Bridget Kies, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Production, Oakland University