Norms and Normalization Page 1 of 15 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2015 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior Online Publication Date: Apr 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.29 Norms and Normalization Dean Spade and Craig Willse The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Forthcoming) Edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords The following chapter charts critical encounters with norms and normalization in feminist analysis and praxis. We pay particular attention to how anticapitalist, critical race, and decolonial feminist methodologies interrogate norm production and maintenance across a range of social, cultural, and economic heteropatriarchal formations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault, we consider norms and normativity in terms of both disciplinary subjection of individuals and their bodies and minds as well as biopolitical regulation of population dynamics. Feminist and queer critiques of same-sex marriage offers a case study of how critiques of norms and normalization have unfolded. Finally, we reflect on work of contemporary social movements, especially antiviolence and prison abolition, to see how critique of heteropatriarchal norms both animates such work and provides an opportunity for critical self-reflection of our own political formations. Keywords: discipline, biopolitics, marriage, eugenics, women of color feminism, prison abolition The concepts of the “norm,” and processes of “normalization” are significant for feminist theory and activism. Feminist theories and activisms seek to dismantle conditions of heteropatriarchy, and to do so they provide an analysis of those conditions and the logics that sustain them. Feminisms approach cultural “common sense” about gender and sexuality critically, exposing how the putative facts about gender, bodies, family structures, and work roles are historically contingent and culturally constructed, as well as both harmful and open to transformation. Much of what feminists challenge are arrangements that have been deemed “natural,” such as gender role assignments supposedly rooted in immutable bodily difference. Feminist methodologies and interventions vary with regard to which norms they interrogate. For example, liberal feminisms have taken aim at workplace inequality, examining normalized practices of labor division within families and wage labor systems to propose methods of increasing women’s access to participation in wage labor systems. Meanwhile, anticapitalist feminists have argued that such interventions are not enough, and feminists must interrogate and dismantle patriarchal norms that structure the entire framework of racialized-gendered wage labor system rather than just seeking participation in them. Regardless of these differences among feminist interventions, the concept of the norm is crucial to a broad range of feminist inquiries and challenges, including inclusion and equality-seeking models and radical transformative approaches. Where heteropatriarchal conditions (such as women doing the bulk of unpaid domestic labor) are cast as “natural” preferences or capacities, feminists argue that coercive racialized gender norms about motherhood, rather than anyone’s fundamental nature, disproportionately force women into that work. Where rigid standards of body and appearance endanger health, feminists identify “beauty norms” as a serious concern, shifting attention to studying the enforcement of such norms and dismantling them rather than trying to get women to meet them or blaming women for being concerned with them. Understanding the ways that ideas and rules about gender structure the world as norms allows feminists to study how these norms are invented, enforced, and lived; how processes of normalization work. It facilitates inquiries into how norms are internalized, so that we enforce them on ourselves