This discussion will explore how living a non-normative life comes with the burden of living with doubt. Unlike the comforting certainties of being on the narrow path of normalcy, when you live a queer or alternative life, there is a costly burden of having to consider your ethics, values and goals all the time, and wondering whether you are choosing correctly. We will discuss this norm-reinforcing doubt, and what it means to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
1) Comfort in queer theory
Overarching idea: the quest for comfort leads us to live conventional lives. People follow norms because doing so offers a clear pathway towards comfort: the world literally becomes easier to inhabit.
Because of this, queer theorists and other thinkers who work on social and cultural politics have become increasingly interested in comfort.
Intellectual development: ideology/false consciousness > normativity > affects
This parallels Foucault’s registers or modalities of power: Sovereignty > discipline > governmentality
Sara Ahmed’s work on happiness (and comfort?): Comfort is not neutral; it is an effect of being oriented toward a world already shaped for certain bodies. Norms “fit” some subjects, allowing them to relax into the world. Discomfort signals misalignment with dominant arrangements (heteronormativity, whiteness, middle-class domesticity). To “be comfortable” often means aligning yourself with these arrangements rather than challenging them.
Judith Butler: Living a conventional life confers recognizability, which functions as a form of social comfort. If you are legible, you are less likely to be punished. The world is organized to reward recognizable gender and family formations with safety, ease, and intelligibility. Following norms makes us legible—to others and to ourselves.
Lauren Berlant: seeking the comforts of conventionality and being “in proximity” to plots that make us feel grounded in who we are—our identities are largely about our fantasies. People remain attached to life scripts (such as upward mobility, stable coupledom, job security, and heteronormative visions of the “good life”) even when these scripts fail them, because they promise affective comfort—coherence, ease, futurity.
Lauren Berlant is interested in why, despite the breakdown of these conventional life scripts, people still cling to the fantasy of them. We live in a time in which homeownership, social solidarity and commitment, gender roles, and many other staples of normative life paths are breaking down. Yet, in spite of this, people continue to cling onto the fantasy of normal life. The implication is that normativity continues to captivate us--not because it actually works for us by delivering on its promises, but because its fantasies—particularly the fantasy of conventionality—bring comfort to us. Comfort, in Berlant’s formulation, is not about achieving the conventional life, but about fantasizing about it.
On definitions of queerness: There’s a debate within queer theory about whether the “queer project” is about forever destabilizing norms, deconstructing definitions, defying essentialisms. Or is it about realizing some alternative political, social or cultural reality? In other words, is it fundamentally an anti-social project, or a utopian one? And within that: is it about sexual orientation, or something else? In period of neoliberal identity politics and so-called “homonormativity,” are same-sex relationships really the thing that shatters norms? Or is it about how we live our lives and love and orient our time and space? Should we be seeking ways to live with uncertainty or building new forms of (sort of “neo-normative” or “alt-normative”) certainty and clarity?
2) The discomforts of uncertainty
Our brains are constantly seeking to predict the future
There is a high cognitive load to questioning everything and having to invent/create your own bespoke pathway through life.
We all have a social and psychological need for legibility.
3) Why ambiguity hurts
Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity: This book has a lot to say about the pains and burdens of living with ambiguity:
Ambiguity generates:
-Anguish – I’m responsible, but I can’t know or control everything.
-Risk – Every choice forecloses others; there’s no “safe” way to live.
-Uncertainty – No meta-judge to tell me I chose correctly.
However, de Beauvoir insists that this discomfort is the price of real freedom.
For de Beauvoir, you will never “keep your hands clean” if you are truly acting in the world.
Ethics is not about staying pure; it’s about:
-taking responsibility for the risks and harms your choices involve
-remaining open to revising yourself and your projects
-refusing to deny or mystify the costs
People are responsible for their choices—even if they do the normal thing. It can feel extremely heavy and cumbersome to bear this responsibility for your choices. But de Beauvoir is clear that there is no escape from responsibility. Even choosing a ready-made framework (such as religion, ideology, or a conventional lifestyle) is still your choice. You’re on the hook for it. The people living in suburbia, extracting wealth and consuming resources on an unsustainable level are all on the hook for their moral choices—even if they do not feel the moral weight or consequences of them.
4) Anomie
“Anomie” is a sociological term that generally describes a breakdown in cultural norms, social bonds, or moral frameworks. Émile Durkheim introduced the term to describe a state in which social norms no longer regulate individuals’ desires and expectations. It emerges during rapid social change, economic crises, or booms, when the rules governing desire and satisfaction lose coherence. (So basically think of a situation in which the world is changing rapidly and people are struggling to keep up—effectively losing their moral compasses)
A clarifying thinker around this is the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who writes about the concept of “liquid modernity”: Modernity replaces stable norms with liquidity—constant change, flexibility, and precarity. Under these circumstances, traditional anchors (such as career tracks, communities, and moral codes) melt away. Individuals, in this situation, must continually self-narrate their identities and reinvent their relationships under conditions of uncertainty.
One could theorize that we are living through a period of “semi-anomie”: a strange blend of conventional fantasies about the good life, and the simultaneous breakdown of the social contract and norms around social and cultural solidarity. Institutions are breaking down and failing to deliver. Conventions that many (at least within the middle class) used to take for granted, such as full employment, mass upward mobility, homeownership, careers and relationships—are far less stable than they used to be. The result is a loss of trust—not only in institutions but also in other people. Many people are still entertaining and pursuing fantasies of status, romance and middle-class stability, but they are also skeptical that investing in relationships, careers, eduction, etc. will actually pan out for them. Interpersonally, people want sincerity and devotion from others but assess that it is too risky and unwise to provide those things to others. We are all allured by sincerity and authenticity when it is on display from others, but we ourselves struggle to be sincere or authentic. <<See Robert K. Merton’s “strain theory,” which explores how, when a society strongly emphasizes the goals but restricts access to the means, people experience strain>>
5) Solutions:
Jack Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure): queer life often involves choosing discomfort or uncertainty to escape normative constraints. Halberstam reframes discomfort not as a deficit but as a resource for alternative world-making. The lure of comfort maintains capitalism and heteronormativity; embracing discomfort can be a queer political act.
New life paths and templates; new configurations of comfort.
Not everyone is going to be able to do the processing around designing ways to exist in this world.