#normer

Modern scholars of queer, intersex, and transgender studies have produced important scholarship documenting the ways in which "the human" has been deeply inflected by our beliefs about gender and sexuality. As these scholars have shown, gender plays a central role in legitimizing personhood, granting only the full range of human privileges (including those of bodily integrity and self-determination) to individuals who fit into accepted, natural categories, while withholding it from those whose bodies or gendered practices are considered unnatural or unacceptable.

Jag har alltid haft en extremt klar insikt om vad som passar sig, och vad som inte gör det, utan att någon måste tala om det för mig, och jag kände en alldeles omänsklig skam om någon gjorde något opassande.

Jag är inte trasig bara för att jag har en psykisk sjukdom

Den som har privilegiet att tillhöra en given norm och därmed blir tilldelad en självskriven plats i en social gemenskap kan kallas normbärare. Den som inte har det privilegiet kan kallas normbrytare.

[…] we should allow the past and present to resonate productively. In that resonance we might find that our contemporary debates about the body are less new and exceptional than they at first appear. Such resonances may help us pose more critical questions about our own world. What categories are upheld, challenged, or created by our institutions? What cultural demands for activity/passivity, hardness/softness, or beauty/ugliness still, or yet again, animate our bodily choices?

In some cases, to be sure, ancient and medieval ideas about sex and gender are very similar to, and even seem to anticipate, our own. In other cases, however, premodern ideas are starkly different: sometimes they are far more restrictive and derogatory than our current ones, but at other times they are more accepting and can present themselves in rich and imaginative ways. While similarities between past and present speak to the deep roots of our current assumptions about sex and gender, the many differences between them also unsettle those assumptions. Recent scholarship has already taken up this point, suggesting how earlier models of sex and gender might give voice to transgender, intersex, or queer identities in new and unexpected ways, both supporting and challenging the ways in which we talk about sex and gender today.

The idea that God created humans as distinctly binary-sexed was by no means self-evident to all premodern thinkers. On the contrary, theologians felt compelled to repeat this claim over and over again for more than a millennium to secure its acceptance.