Friday, July 8, 2011

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life for $23.00

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"The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life" Overview


Is gay marriage good for gays? Are queer people better off when they see themselves as "normal" Americans? What is lost when gays go mainstream? What, after all, is The Trouble With Normal? Here, Michael Warner, one of our most brilliant social critics, argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are bad not just for gays but for everyone. In place of the sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.

With this lively and surprising exploration of the dangers of normalcy, Warner sends a warning shot to the gay rights movement, which has cleaned up its image in order to blend in with an imaginary main-stream. Now taking as its raison d'etre the fight for gay marriage, gay politics has abandoned its historic fight against the stigmatization of sex. But, as Warner shows, when gays agree to separate their "sex" from their "identity," they are only rewarded with oppressive trends like stricter zoning of gay clubs and businesses, the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy in the military, and, ironically, the "Defense of Marriage" act. Warner examines the debate over gay marriage through a completely original lens, and also assesses laws governing sexual activity, cohabitation, bar and club zoning, trends in political activism, and HIV prevention. The result is a piercing and cogent analysis of the politics of shame and the stigma of sexual identity.

Sexual shame and stigma can be found across the full spectrum of contemporary life. From the Oval Office to the back room, sex remains something that we think needs to be controlled. Michael Warner cuts through the confused moralism that surrounds sex, and offers in its place an ethics that requires freedom of choice, tolerance, and, most important, access to pleasures and possibilities. On this score, he points out, we have a lot to learn from the "disreputable" queers, prostitutes, trannies, and club crawlers whose point of view about morality, sex, and shame can be transformative. Warner's bold defense of queer ethics and his powerful indictment of all that's wrong with the trend to "normalize" give us a vision of sexual ethics that proclaims sex to be as varied as the people who have it, and holds that honesty and morality are not limited to those with a marriage license. His lucid and lively argument will spark heated debate among all readers who are troubled by the unhappy tension between sex and dignity.


"The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life" Specifications


The Trouble with Normal argues passionately against same-sex marriage, but here's the twist: not because it denigrates the institution of marriage, but because it perpetuates the cultural shame attached to sex between consenting but unmarried adults. When gay men and lesbians try to claim that they're just like "normal folk," Michael Warner writes, they do a profound disservice to other queer folk who choose not to live in monogamous or matrimonial bliss and who believe that the solution to being stigmatized for your sexuality is not to pretend it doesn't exist. Same-sex marriage advocates, he continues, often seem to be willfully blind to the cultural ramifications of their position, viewing marriage as "an intensified and deindividuated form of coming out." They don't seem to realize that if society validates their relationships, other types of relationships will by necessity be invalidated. (He also makes a strong case for the fight against sexual shame's being more than a queer issue, citing 1998's presidential impeachment crisis: "[Bill] Clinton, certainly, was not the first to discover how hard it is in this culture to assert any dignity when you stand exposed as a sexual being.") Extending his analysis, Warner shows how the championing of married gays and lesbians as "normal" is part of the same cultural climate that leads to "quality of life" crackdowns against queercentric businesses--as is already underway in New York City--and a deliberate sabotage of safer-sex education that puts millions of Americans at continued risk of exposure to HIV. Warner's precise, straightforward argument is enlivened by numerous sharp zingers, as when he accuses Andrew Sullivan of "breath[ing] new and bitchy life into Jesuitical pieties" about sexual morality. The Trouble with Normal is a bold, provocative book that forces readers to reconsider what sexual liberation really means. --Ron Hogan






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