I’m using Berlant and Warner’s definition of “heteronormativity” here: “A complex cluster of sexual practices gets confused, in heterosexual culture, with the love plot of intimacy and familialism that signifies belonging to society in a deep and normal way. Community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling and kinship; a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction. A whole field of social relations becomes intelligible as heterosexuality, and this privatized sexual culture bestows on its sexual practices a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy. This sense of rightness—embedded in things and not just sex—is what we call heteronormativity.” Though crtically understood as a “cluster” itself, the important result is that unifying “sense of rightness.” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex In Public,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter 1998): 59.
José Muñoz, discussing part of this work, wrote: “This performance imagines a time and place outside the stultifying hold of the present by calling on a mythical past where we can indeed imagine the defying of Christian totalitarianism, where we spin in concentric circles that defy linear logic, where one’s own ego is sacrificed for a collective dignity, where queer bodies receive divine anointment, where the future is actively imagined, where our dying natural world can be revivied, and once again, where collectively we follow our spirits.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York Univ. Press 2009), 179.
Gregg Bordowitz, “Picture a Coalition,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 183.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 352.