Strange Sexual Encounters: Homonormativity as a Micropolitical Practice in Queer Sex

The concept of homonormativity has been widely successful in queer theory ever since its academic popularization by Lisa Duggan. When Duggan brought up what she named ‘the new homonormativity’, she was addressing a macropolitical reconfiguration of gay and lesbian movements and their alignment with the neoliberal asset. Homonormativity, however, is also to be tracked down in biopolitics, a form of disciplinary power that acts through regulation and includes micropolitical practices. The research question of this article originates from this latter dimension of the concept: how does homonormativity as a biopolitical disciplinary tool act on the bodies? Are sexual encounters, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, always ‘strange encounters’? The article analyzes how the notion of love as an uncontaminated dimension – springing from the heterosexual script of the couple – and the privatization of sexual encounters in hook-up culture both take part in the discursive regulation of queer sexual practices, with influence on the bodies, their actions, and their presence or absence. Homonormative narrations ultimately cast sexual partners as fundamentally Other and reinforce the neoliberal atomization and isolation of the Self. The privatization of sexual life thus not only erases the political aspect of queerness, but it also conceals embodied dynamics of power taking place within the sphere of the private.