More troubles with Normal
So I was woken out of bed at 11pm by a plot bunny, and in my search for a bit of paper found the rest of my notes for The Trouble with Normal.
And here they are:
There is no sex/love dichotomy. Pretty much everyone is in favour of both sex and love, under the right circumstances. Yes, even fundamentalist christians and prostitutes (respectively).
Members of oppressed groups are divided into "good" and "bad".
Good: conventional, don't rock the boat, polite, asks for small easy changes, express appreciation for status quo
Bad: unconventional, make people uncomfortable
The subtext is: Being in group X is inherently bad, but some members manange to transcend this by being good in all other ways. EDIT: Obviously this is only bad if being in group X is not inherently bad eg as in the original example of queerness. See comments.
It's important to distinguish this from simply dividing people up into good and bad people by a measure genuinely unrelated to Xness. (Assuming you do so objectively and fairly)
Normally I don't post at such an absurd hour, but it's just typing stuff I wrote up already.
And here they are:
There is no sex/love dichotomy. Pretty much everyone is in favour of both sex and love, under the right circumstances. Yes, even fundamentalist christians and prostitutes (respectively).
Members of oppressed groups are divided into "good" and "bad".
Good: conventional, don't rock the boat, polite, asks for small easy changes, express appreciation for status quo
Bad: unconventional, make people uncomfortable
The subtext is: Being in group X is inherently bad, but some members manange to transcend this by being good in all other ways. EDIT: Obviously this is only bad if being in group X is not inherently bad eg as in the original example of queerness. See comments.
It's important to distinguish this from simply dividing people up into good and bad people by a measure genuinely unrelated to Xness. (Assuming you do so objectively and fairly)
Normally I don't post at such an absurd hour, but it's just typing stuff I wrote up already.