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Anthropological Theory
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On the surprising queerness © The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14634996221117755
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and Butler

Thomas Hendriks
KU Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract
“Norms” seem like a handy concept in the anthropological toolkit for describing, analyz-
ing, and understanding ethnographic data. But contemporary anthropology rarely inves-
tigates the concept of the norm itself. This article critically examines norms as analytical
constructs and argues for a more precise vocabulary that differentiates between related
terms, such as “normality,” “normativity,” or “normalization,” that circulate loosely in
anthropological discourse. To do so, it draws from Georges Canguilhem, Michel
Foucault, and Judith Butler to show the affordances and pitfalls of their analytics for
anthropologists. It particularly reveals the value of Canguilhemian understandings of nor-
mativity to keep us alive to the surprising queerness of norms in action.

Keywords
Norms, normativity, normalization, Canguilhem, Foucault, Butler, queer anthropology

Introduction
Norms are scattered all over anthropology. Sometimes they move to the foreground of
description and analysis. More frequently, they lurk in the background of an implied
culture or society. But even when not directly spelled out in written ethnographies,
they often crop up in debates and discussions, usually alongside other terms, such as
values, rules, beliefs, ideals, or conventions. Yet, as anthropologists, we rarely investigate

Corresponding author:
Thomas Hendriks, KU Leuven University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Email: thomas.hendriks@kuleuven.be
2 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

the concept of the norm itself.1 While often believed to be essential to the operation of
power, norms are––unlike power––rarely attended to as analytical constructs.
Once upon a time, norms were more explicitly theorized. Today, few of us resort to
19th century French sociologists, British structural-functionalists, or American cultural
anthropologists to substantiate the idea of norms in our analyses.2 And yet, despite well-
known criticisms, old paradigms and terminologies continue to circulate as sedimented
vocabularies. As a result, “norms” still come in handy as part of a conceptual toolkit
we have at our disposal for describing and understanding the phenomena we are after.
Unlike other disciplines (such as sociology, psychology, or economics, for instance)
contemporary anthropology no longer searches for grand explanations about where
norms come from, how they operate, or why they change. But we still evoke them as
forces that somehow pattern, regulate, or govern human behavior. Some of us construct
norms from the regularities we think to see in the field. Others infer them from our inter-
locutors’ motivations, evaluations, and expectations. Sometimes we focus on transgres-
sions and reversals to understand how norms are changed or reconfirmed. But whether
we take them as conscious rules or unconscious regulations, we often find ourselves in
the business of extracting a wide range of norms from our material: social norms, cultural
norms, political norms, religious norms, gender norms, sexual norms, moral norms, aes-
thetic norms, institutional norms, legal norms, professional norms, technical norms, and
even practical norms (Olivier de Sardan, 2015).
For some, norms constitute the “grammar of society” and make for a social order that
formats practices, desires, and intentions (Bicchieri, 2006). For others, ideas of order,
structure, and system occlude more than they reveal. But even when turning from
society at large to individual practices and experiences, or from culture to multiple pro-
cesses of meaning making, we cannot avoid at least a loose reference to norms. In several
ways, they have become part of our common sense and seem indispensable to account for
the social. Although sometimes covered behind fancier vocabulary (such as hegemony or
habitus), norms effectively appear everywhere as words for realities we seem to face.
And yet, norms are rarely defined as a concept. Whereas, over the last decade, norma-
tive questions have regained attention in anthropology’s turn to ethics, critical engage-
ments with the concept of norms remain surprisingly scarce. Moreover, derivative terms
like “normality,” “normativity,” or “normalization” are often used so loosely and inter-
changeably in anthropological discourse that they blur and inflate the underlying concept
of norms. A more rigorous understanding of norms is therefore needed. Not to return to
grand theorizations, but to slow down our habit of resorting to an implicit but all too
easy idea of norms. The common inferring of “a” norm indeed (involuntarily) reifies, sim-
plifies, and assimilates more complex, heterogeneous, and open processes. As soon as these
processes drop from our analyses, norm speak quickly becomes reductive.
To avoid such reifications and reductions, this article calls for a more precise vocabu-
lary and conceptual apparatus. To do so, it primarily turns to philosophy and critical
theory, fields that––unlike anthropology––have conceptualized norms more explicitly,
and in ways that can help us sharpen our analytical tools. Yet this turn to philosophy
does not come from nowhere. It is grounded in concrete ethnographic observations
that urged me to rethink my acquired conceptual language. The overall need to think
Hendriks 3

more carefully about norms indeed first arose during intensive research on queer mascu-
linities and urban culture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.3
This article therefore develops a theoretical argument that has been crafted ethno-
graphically elsewhere (Hendriks, 2019, 2021). Sexually dissident young men in
Kinshasa and Kisangani effectively suggested that “norms” were more ambiguous,
reversible, multiple, and open-ended than I had unwittingly assumed. Self-identified
fioto (a relatively recent Lingala term for “effeminate”) men not only emphasized their
sexual and emotional desire for (what they considered) “normal” men, whose involve-
ment in same-sex erotic practices and relationships did not destabilize their gender conform-
ity (and whose role and reputation as “penetrator” could even boost their masculinity). They
also revealed a surprising queerness at the very heart of everyday city life where transgres-
sion, deviation, and improvisation were already “the norm.” Moreover, they claimed to
possess carefully developed skills of provocation and seduction to deploy, extend, and
further stimulate the potential for queerness suffusing Congolese urbanity––thereby
pushing the limits of heterosexist (and sometimes homophobic) norms from within. As
such, their practices contradicted the usual opposition between “queerness” and “normality.”
While I had learnt to situate queerness at the other side of norms (as what is excluded by, and
thus opposes, “the norm”), fioto men and boys indeed hinted at a more complex politics of
complicity that revealed several social and cultural norms as already queer.
To unpack this seemingly counterintuitive claim and situate the remarkable queerness
of norms in relation to canonical reflections on normativity, normalization, and normality,
this article journeys into philosophy. It primarily draws from Georges Canguilhem,
Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, as well as several of their commentators. Over the
last decades, these authors have all influenced anthropological understandings of
norms, albeit to different degrees. But their analyses merit renewed attention for fine-
tuning our analytical vocabularies. This paper therefore draws out the continuities and
discontinuities between their theorizations of norms and highlights the affordances and
pitfalls of their analytics for contemporary anthropology.
The following sections consecutively look at Canguilhem’s approach to life as an
always already normative process, Foucault’s understanding of discipline, regulation,
and norma(liza)tion, and Butler’s theorization of the inherent violence of gender norms.
Although this article thus ventures beyond the norms of gender and sexuality to get a
clearer view on the operation of norms in general, it nevertheless stays close to the ethno-
graphic material that inspired it and shows how the practical queering of gender and sexual
norms resonates with a much broader “queerness” of norms in action. The conclusion
indeed argues for a queer reading of Canguilhemian analytics that enables anthropologists
to (re)introduce a degree of flexibility and surprise to widely used Foucauldian and
Butlerian frameworks, by (re)connecting to a more immanent perspective on norms that
acknowledges their often overlooked (and perhaps inherent) queerness.

Canguilhem: The normativity of life

While, for anthropologists, the concept of norms might immediately evoke the widely
cited writings of Michel Foucault, this article first engages the work of one of
4 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

Foucault’s mentors: the French medical historian and philosopher of science Georges
Canguilhem.4 Canguilhem’s analytics are not only different in scope and emphasis but
also help separating between terms that, although related, have different meanings and
effects. As we will see, Canguilhem specifically untangles the unhappy knot between
“normality” and “normativity” that persistently muddies conceptual waters. His
broader deconstruction of the binary opposition between the “normal” and the “patho-
logical” (which pervaded medicine, biology, and the social sciences in 19th and 20th
century France) effectively makes him establish a clear separation between the normal
and the normative that is crucial for anthropology.
In The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem (1989) starts by investigating the
double meaning of the word norm. He notes that, etymologically speaking, the term is
derived from norma––the Latin word for T-square, a woodworkers’ tool for checking
right angles and perpendiculars (Canguilhem, 1989: 125). In common language, he
remarks, “normal” has therefore both descriptive meanings––as that which is average,
frequent, and general––and evaluative meanings––as that which is valorized and pre-
scribed as an ideal. Yet he demonstrates that both meanings are intimately related.
While the science of statistics, for instance, presents itself as a seemingly neutral proced-
ure for establishing norms as merely descriptive averages, all quantitative inferences of a
statistical average depend on the simultaneous operation of implicit qualitative criteria.
These criteria, Canguilhem suggests, operate as evaluative (often moral and aesthetic)
ideals that valorize the seemingly descriptive norm and thereby separate the so-called
normal from the abnormal or pathological.
Canguilhem’s critique of the normal/pathological binary does not however collapse
their difference into a mere matter of degree––as if pathologies were only quantitative
variations that either exceed or fall short of a physiological norm. He rather foregrounds
the differences in kind between the normal and the pathological by emphasizing the quali-
tative specificity of sickness and disease as lived experiences of suffering, impotence, and
limitation. Highlighting the existential difference between health and disease––and the
irreducible singularity of individual experiences over and against biomedical reduction-
ism––he therefore concludes that the pathological should be reframed as an other normal
(Canguilhem, 1989: 144, 203). In his view, disease is nothing less than a new vital order:
“another way of life [une autre allure de la vie]” (Canguilhem, 1989: 66).
This description of disease as the creation of an-other-normal is fundamental for
understanding Canguilhem’s wider philosophy of life. Guillaume Le Blanc (2002: 12–
13) emphasizes that, although, for Canguilhem, life is not a transcendental norm, it con-
tains the fundamental capacity to produce norms, as well as the constant possibility to
shift from one norm to another (see also Le Blanc, 1998). All life, whether human or non-
human, is by definition a normative activity, in the sense that it establishes norms
(Canguilhem, 1989: 126). Because life is never indifferent to its conditions but tries to
extend itself in the face of obstacles through spontaneous efforts, it creates norms. As
such, there can be “no life whatsoever without norms of life” (Canguilhem, 1989:
228). And yet, this normativity––this constant installation of new norms and the breaking
of previous ones––does not presuppose a preexisting model or “norm” that would under-
lie life’s multiplicity of norms (Le Blanc, 2002: 14). It is rather the very plasticity proper
Hendriks 5

to life––its lability and capacity to deviate––that enables the production of norms (Le
Blanc, 2002: 90).
The “normative” is therefore not so much what evaluates a fact vis-à-vis a given norm
but what actively institutes the norm itself. Because life is inherently polarizing––as
living always requires preferring X and excluding Y––living beings must produce and
maintain their own norm the best they can to survive (Canguilhem, 1989: 136). For
Canguilhem, life forms can thus be considered “normal” insofar as they successfully
produce norms in a given context (which is always subject to change). By contrast,
they are “pathological” as soon as they find their capacity to impose themselves
reduced (Canguilhem, 1989: 144).
Normality therefore denotes an always temporary stability and precarious equilibrium
between a living being and what Canguilhem calls its “milieu,” which is itself composed
by that organism selectively valorizing, organizing, reworking, and individualizing its
environment (Canguilhem, 2008: 98–120). The pathological, by contrast, is not the
simple absence of a norm but another norm of life: a restricted norm that has lost
some of its normative capacity and is therefore less able to maintain itself
(Canguilhem, 1989: 183). A sick person, in other words, “is not abnormal because of
the absence of a norm but because of his incapacity to be normative” (Canguilhem,
1989: 186). While healthy organisms can easily affront new situations, break existing
norms, and establish new ones––that is, fall sick and get better––sick organisms are
less equipped to face risks because they are reduced in their tolerance toward environ-
mental fluctuations, hampered in structuring their milieu, and restricted in their capacity
to produce norms (Canguilhem, 1989: 199).
For Canguilhem, life itself thus entails the creative, innovative, and flexible production
of situational norms. Thinking norms on a biological rather than juridical model, he
emphasizes that norms do not impose themselves “on” life from the outside but are imma-
nent to life: they emerge from the process of life itself. As Pierre Macherey (2009: 127;
my translation) puts it, Canguilhem “dynamizes the notion of norms from the inside” and
redefines norms as “vital schemes in search of the conditions for their realization.”
Norms, in other words, do not stifle life; they are themselves full of life, they are life.
While Canguilhem primarily develops his reflection on norms from the perspective of
biology, he equally extends his philosophy of life toward “society” and suggests how his
theorization of vital norms can also shed light on social norms. The relationship between
both––and the transition from biology to anthropology––is not, however, unambiguous.
Guillaume Le Blanc (2002: 15) shows how Canguilhem himself shifted from a model of
entrenchment, whereby social norms are rooted in vital norms and human beings simply
extend the dynamics of biological life into social forms, toward a model of production,
whereby human life is original and completely redefines the normativity of life. In this
second model, society is no longer derived from life but itself a new mode of life.
Le Blanc (2002: 193) notes that Canguilhem turns to this second model when con-
fronting the question of how and why capitalism produces a specific milieu that seems
to turn against human life. To understand capitalism, Canguilhem indeed introduces
another concept: that of “normalization,” which––unlike normativity––is defined as a
socially arbitrary process in which exterior intentions and decisions fix values and
6 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

rules (Le Blanc, 2002: 197–198). Normalization, in his view, refers to norms in their jur-
idical mode when they function as external constraints that separate the normal from the
abnormal. Normativity, by contrast, is the vital capacity to establish new norms: it refers
to the concrete production and deployment of norms by living organisms reacting to and
constituting their milieu.
As we will see, Canguilhem’s concept of normalization resembles Michel Foucault’s
vocabulary, for whom normalization is inherent to the subjection and subjectivation of
individuals. Yet while Foucault’s writings on normalization mostly foreground the effi-
cacy of social norms to produce “docile” normalized subjects, Canguilhem rather empha-
sizes the normative responses of individuals and groups to their normalization (Le Blanc,
2002: 199). Normalization effectively introduces (capitalist) alienation but also triggers
aspirations to question and change social norms. For this reason, Canguilhem always
allows for normativity to “overflow” normalization (Le Blanc, 2002: 217): “normaliza-
tion is instituted normativity while normativity is contested normalization” (Le Blanc,
2002: 221; my translation and emphasis). One cannot think the one without the other.
Hence, although introducing a break between vital and social norms, Canguilhem also
continued to think the latter in light of the former. The institutionalization of normativity
(as a capacity of life) indeed produces normalization (as a social process) that results in
normality (as its effect), which can in turn be contested by normative reactions that create
new norms (Le Blanc, 2002: 229). Rather than a static Durkheimian analysis of socially
coordinated norms, Canguilhem offers a dynamic analysis of normative and normalizing
processes in which normality is the always temporary, unpredictable, and fragile outcome
of a continuing and eventful struggle. So, while Canguilhem separates life from society, it
would be wrong to read his differentiation of normativity from normalization as a simple
opposition between the spontaneous and the artificial (Macherey, 2009: 10). All norms––
both vital and social––are immanent to the processes in which they arise alongside their
objects. Norms cannot therefore be thought of as transcendental forces that would regu-
late a pre-existing inert material; their efficacy is immanent to their action (Macherey,
2009: 102).
As we will see, this immanence also reappears in the work of Michel Foucault and
Judith Butler. Canguilhem’s positive and creative (rather than negative and restrictive)
conception of norms indeed sets the scene for Foucault’s productive analysis of power
and Butler’s performative analysis of gender. Yet Canguilhem’s constant foregrounding
of normativity––as life’s inherent capacity to produce and multiply norms––also intro-
duces a higher degree of plasticity, risk, and contestation into the social life of norms.
So, while contemporary anthropology primarily mobilizes Foucault and Butler to back
up the coercive aspects of norms, Canguilhem enables us to see normativity where we
might otherwise only see normality (Macherey, 2009: 126). In other words, by refusing
the generalizing moves of a science that tends to hide the plurality of the former behind
the uniqueness of the latter (Le Blanc, 2002: 117), Canguilhem reminds us to enliven
rather than reify norms.
For these reasons, Canguilhemian analytics can be a useful framework for anthropol-
ogy, especially in its current turn to “life” as an explicit object of analysis.5 Yet, its impli-
cit Darwinism can also raise some eyebrows. At several points, Canguilhem effectively
Hendriks 7

describes a struggle for survival and refers to the higher or lower degree of “success”
organisms achieve in adapting to their environment. But he also refutes simplifying
ideas of adaptation (and the environmental determinism they suggest) by constantly illus-
trating and theorizing the invention that is inherent to life. Indeed, while an “environ-
ment” is merely a context to which an organism must adapt, Canguilhem’s notion of
milieu presupposes an organism that actively invents and creates its own conditions of
existence by deploying norms that structure and remake its environment. Furthermore,
rather than celebrating fitness or success, he consistently foregrounds the vital importance
of error, risk, and failure to processes of evolution as unpredictable becoming (Le Blanc,
2002: 168, 174).
Canguilhem’s understanding of normativity as the inventive and creative production
of always changing norms therefore reminds anthropologists of the importance of con-
flict, urging us to resist the temptation of reducing always moving and nervous fields
of norms to “a” hypostasized norm (in the singular) that would explain ethnographic phe-
nomena. With Canguilhem, conflict indeed plays a crucial role at three levels of analysis
(Le Blanc, 2002: 136–138). First, living beings constantly find themselves in latent con-
flicts with each other because of their continuous efforts to endure. Second, normativity
implies conflictual relationships between individuals and (already existing) norms. And
third, these conflicts give rise to conflicts between norms themselves—as temporary
and fragile products of struggle. As a result, conflict emerges as the very motor of nor-
mativity that, rather than establishing one unique norm, creates a variety of norms that
are constantly shifting and being renewed. For these reasons, thinking with
Canguilhem can help us avoid freezing the ever-changing multiplicity of norms into a
generalizing account of what things are––and thereby reconnect, as we will see, to a
dimension of Foucauldian analytics that is easily overlooked.

Foucault: Discipline, regulation, and norma(liza)tion

The work of Michel Foucault has had a more substantial impact on anthropology than
Canguilhem’s.6 In a recent overview article on anthropological theory since the 1980s,
Sherry Ortner (2016: 51) even identifies Foucault as the single most important reference
for a “dark” anthropology that has dominated the discipline until fairly recently. In a
starkly unjust world, Foucault is indeed a major resource to account for the ruses of
power, domination, and subjection, and his vocabulary of power/knowledge, governmen-
tality, and biopolitics continues to irrigate anthropological work––notwithstanding occa-
sional objections to ritualistic invocations of his name or simplifying reductions of his
analytics to a universally deployable “theory” (e.g. Boyer, 2002; Sahlins, 2002).7
While some might feel his readings are too rigid, or reject his self-invoked nominalism
for more realist analyses, few would contest that his work occupies a dominant position
in anthropology today.
When it comes to academic norm speak, Foucault is indeed massively cited. Usually,
his name backs up the coercive force of social norms as they discipline bodies, police
populations, and shape subjects. Yet, as we will see, quick and standardized references
to his work can also erase the nuance of his analytics and lump together some of his
8 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

conceptual distinctions. The following paragraphs therefore turn to the changing concep-
tualization of norms in Foucault’s work––and, especially, in his writings from the 1970s,
where norms were an explicit object of analysis––in the hope of breathing some new life
into otherwise formulaic renditions of his thought.
Foucault mainly argues against the widespread idea that norms would essentially
repress individuals and that, to be free, one must liberate oneself from repression. His
argument against the “repressive hypothesis” is stated most explicitly in the first
volume of his history of sexuality (Foucault, 1978). In this book, Foucault investigates
the historical making of sex as a problem for thought and shows how sexuality was pro-
duced (rather than repressed) by an apparatus of institutions, practices, techniques, and
mechanisms of power/knowledge that emerged in 18th and 19th century Europe
(Foucault, 1978: 47–49). Until his day, he suggests, this relatively recent dispositif of sexu-
ality does not primarily say “no” to sex but excites and incites pleasures and discourses––
thereby giving rise to a proliferating series of “sexualities” (Foucault, 1978: 48).
The common idea that sex would be repressed, Foucault (1978: 128) claims, is itself
part of the deployment of sexuality. Its capillary dynamics produce subjects who are con-
vinced of “having” a sexuality as their innermost truth and whose free expression requires
them to liberate themselves from social restrictions and censorship. However, for
Foucault (1978: 8–9), the interesting question is not whether or not we are repressed,
but rather “Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our
most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?”
The conviction of our repression and the resulting desire for our liberation, he suggests,
are cogs in a complex mechanics of power (Foucault, 1978: 156–157). For this reason, he
argues, the critique of repression (although necessary and justified) cannot operate as a
key for understanding, let alone dismantling, sexuality (Foucault, 1978: 131).
The repressive hypothesis indeed simplifies the actual operation of norms by under-
standing them as laws whose objective and effect would be prohibition and obedience.
As Foucault (1978: 82–85) sees it, such understandings remain trapped in a “juridico-
discursive” representation of power that reduces all power to its purely negative and limit-
ing dimension. Foucault’s genealogy, by contrast, shows that modern power no longer
operates as the sovereign enunciation of prohibiting laws but works as a productive
circuit that creates the very objects through which and in which it operates. Again,
Foucault (1978: 86) suggests that the common juridical (mis)understanding of power
is itself a ruse of power to hide its non-juridical operations. For this reason, his study
of power is an attempt to get away from the law as a model for power, and “to cut off
the head of the king” (Foucault, 1978: 89) so as to track and conceptualize other
forms of power. One of the crucial ways in which these new forms differ from older
modes of power is that they no longer operate as laws but as norms––an entirely different
reality.
The Foucauldian understanding of norms cannot therefore be separated from what, in
the same movement, he calls “biopower”––a form of power that would have supplemen-
ted or replaced sovereign power in modern European societies. Biopower denotes the his-
torical entry of life as a political problem and describes the turn of politics towards an
explicit management of life. While sovereign power was based on “the ancient right to
Hendriks 9

take life or let live,” biopower aims “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”
(Foucault, 1978: 138). In its attempt to make live and increase the utility of life, biopower
therefore produces norms rather than laws: it has “to qualify, measure, appraise, and hier-
archize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the
line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects [but] effects
distributions around the norm” (Foucault, 1978: 144; my emphasis).
With the emergence of biopower, the importance of norms significantly grew at the
expense of laws, to such an extent that it gave rise to what Foucault (1978: 144) calls
a “normalizing society.” But the actual operation of norms also differed along the lines
of a distinction Foucault (1978: 139) makes between two forms of biopower: an
“anatomo-politics of the human body” and “a bio-politics of the population.” While
the first refers to disciplinary techniques deployed to make bodies useful and docile,
by individualizing, classifying, and measuring them as objects of knowledge––as previ-
ously theorized in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977)––the second refers to the regu-
lation and control of biological processes, such as mortality, fertility, and morbidity, that
operate at the level of the species.
Foucault (1978: 145–46) shows how these two forms of biopower––the disciplining of
bodies and the regulation of populations––come together in the modern dispositif of
sexuality. Sex is indeed the articulation point where political concerns over the life of
individuals and the health of populations meet. For this reason, sexuality is a strategic
site for the deployment of biopower, and a major device for what he calls processes of
normalization that separate the so-called normal from the deviant. But while The
History of Sexuality: Volume 1 uses “normalization” to refer to social control of both indi-
viduals and populations, Foucault (2007) later proposes the little used word “normation”
for processes in which disciplinary techniques train and correct bodies at the level of indi-
vidual gestures, postures, and acts (i.e. anatomo-politics), while reserving normalization
for processes of regulation and government at the level of populations (i.e. bio-politics).
This subtle distinction highlights a crucial difference in the operation of norms. While
anatomo-politics coercively shape and modify bodily dispositions so that they come to
match a preexisting model, bio-politics implies a statistical notion of norms as a
normal distribution of cases rather than a predetermined ideal. In other words, while discip-
linary processes of normation impose the norm by applying a regulating model that already
exists before the actual separation of normal and abnormal bodies, regulatory processes of
normalization produce the norm from a comparative study of distributions (Mader, 2007:
12). It is especially in this non-disciplinary guise of normalization that norms cannot be
considered as constraints or external ideals being applied to preexisting bodies or behaviors:
such norms are immanent to ongoing processes of normalization, as they produce them-
selves while producing their fields of application (Macherey, 2009, 2014).
In an insightful resume, the political scientist Samuel Chambers (2017) equally points
at the crucial distinction between normation and normalization to understand Foucault’s
changing reflections on norms. Regrettably, however, Chambers’ essay (2017: 19, 20)
ultimately adds to the confusion when slipping from “normation” to “normativity,” a
word Foucault rarely uses.8 Yet, for reasons of conceptual clarity, we better reserve
the term normativity for what Canguilhem (1989) described as life’s inherent capacity
10 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

to establish and institute norms. In this sense, normativity cannot be used as a synonym
for normation because the former does not presuppose the operation of a norm imposing
itself on life as an external ideal.
Such conflation between seemingly kindred terms is frequent in academic norm speak.
It not only overlooks Foucault’s difference between normalization and normation but also
(at least implicitly) reduces norms to constraining rules or ideals that act on individuals
from the outside. As Stéphane Legrand (2007: 11) observes, many Foucault readers
indeed misrepresent his work by “hypostasizing norms and giving them a sui generis
reality and ability to act on behaviors by and of themselves.” To counteract this habit
of assuming the existence of norms as causal realities out there, Legrand (2007: 148) pro-
poses to read Foucault’s vocabulary of norms in a “purely nominalist” way and to take
into consideration how norms always exceed any original intentionality and operate dif-
ferently from what their apparent function suggests (Legrand, 2007: 45).
Such a reading would also circumvent Foucault’s own occasional reification of norms
as a singular force underlying modern societies––for instance, when invoking “the power
of the Norm” (Foucault, 1977: 184) or “the power of normalization” (Foucault, 2003: 26,
42–43). One has to admit that several passages in Foucault’s work from the 1970s indeed
justify a certain determinism by suggesting that, as subjects, we are always prisoners of
complex dispositifs and can only ever function as sites for the further deployment of (a
singularized and capitalized) Power. In this sense, even deeply felt aspirations to liberate
ourselves from norms are only further iterations of these norms. Norms effectively con-
stitute and shape subjectivities to such an extent that all processes of subjectivation are
also processes of subjection (assujetissement). The widely used Foucauldian idea that
we are always already captured and governed by the norms that make us (and in relation
to which we must also make ourselves) can therefore stimulate a paranoid hermeneutic
that leaves little way out of the cunning machinery of power.
Yet, a Foucauldian take on norms does not necessarily imply such rigid social
mechanics. Already in the 1970s, Foucault (1978: 95) maintained that power can only ever
exist in relation to a “multiplicity of points of resistance,” where norms are simultaneously rede-
ployed and reformulated. For Foucault, tactical resistance can nevertheless only arise within
processes of subjection and subjectification, and not from without. As a result, he does not
situate resistance at the level of the autonomous individual (and their free will) but in the
always unpredictable circulation of power between subjects and the norms that make them.
In his work from the 1980s, however, Foucault takes another step. While, in earlier
formulations, resistance was still a rather mechanical reaction to domination that does
little, in the end, to change the status quo, his later turn to ethics made him focus more
explicitly on the possibility for subjects to play with, work through, and eventually
change the norms that bring them into being.9 This later (more optimistic) work allows
for a degree of plasticity and contingency that is easily brushed aside in dominant recep-
tions of Foucault. His writings on “ascesis,” for instance––which he defines as work on
the self to transform the self (Foucault, 2000a)––or on “problematization”––as the self-
distancing movement and critical practice in which one constitutes oneself as an object of
thought (Foucault, 1984)––clearly allow for “freedom” as a capacity for action (and as the
condition for both ethics and power).
Hendriks 11

This emphasis on play, plasticity, creativity, and experimentation, resembles aspects

of Canguilhem’s reflections outlined above. In this sense, it is no coincidence that, at
the end of his life, Foucault wrote an encomium to Canguilhem, praising the latter’s
deep recognition of life’s capacity for error as a “radical feature” (2000b: 476) that ques-
tions the “whole theory of the subject” (2000b: 477). Both indeed perceive a permanent
potential for error, crisis, and struggle beneath the apparent stability of norms and their
fragile emergence, consolidation, and disappearance (Legrand, 2007: 311).
Yet, whereas Canguilhem emphasizes the always risky vitality of norms, Foucault
(1982: 231) never forgets their inherent danger. This shift in emphasis and nuance,
which follows from the overall shift from life to power, certainly allows for a better
understanding of the “dark” aspects of norms as forces of correction and qualification.
But it also stimulates readings that, in order to critique their existence, reduce norms to
social forces that would essentially limit the (implicitly universal) subject yearning for
freedom. Whereas the idea of a sovereign subject is at the exact opposite of Foucault’s
thinking (and has also been destabilized and provincialized by anthropologists), it
might indeed be tempting to only use the more transcendental affordances of
Foucauldian analytics because they suggest the existence of norms as preexisting
forces that come in all too handy when explaining social phenomena.
It is however first and foremost Foucault’s inheritance from Canguilhem’s immanent
analysis that allows us to go beyond standard understandings of norms as merely “estab-
lished mode[s] of behaviour to which conformity is expected” (Barnard and Spencer,
2002: 919). Reading Foucault with Canguilhem indeed reminds us that the force of
norms can never be reduced to any simple “action on” but must also be understood as a
more complicated action in or with. Immanent understandings of norms preclude any para-
noid identification of a “manipulating force”––whether as Power or “the” Norm––operating
behind the scenes (Macherey, 2009: 92). Accordingly, a more Canguilhemian anthropology
could breathe back some life into the rigidity of frequently used Foucauldian (physical and
mechanical rather than biological) metaphors and keep us alive to the sheer unpredictability
of norms as they arise, transform, surprise, and provoke (see also Esposito, 2008: 188–191).

Judith Butler: The violence of norms

To focus more directly on gender norms, the third part of this article turns to Judith
Butler, whose work has been heavily influenced by Foucault’s––an imprint that is par-
ticularly visible in her earlier publications, which were not only foundational for the
development of queer theory but also exerted a significant influence on the anthropology
of gender and sexuality through the concept of gender performativity (Butler, 1990, 1993;
see also Morris, 1995).
Butler specifically inherits from Foucault a relationship between power and subject-
hood that undermines any notion of stable identities. Both Foucault and Butler indeed
highlight how processes of subjectification (i.e. the making of subjects) are also
always processes of subjection (i.e. the subjugation to a dispositif of power) and vice
versa. In other words, subjects only come into existence in and through the norms that
make and seize them: they have no independent or autonomous status on their own
12 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

and are products of historical conditions that overflow them. This interplay between
norms and subjects is not, however, a mechanical process of strict causality but a more
complex relationship in which norms constitute, regulate, and discipline subjects who
are equally sites for the further deployment––and transformation––of norms.
By contrast, Butler’s references to Canguilhem are surprisingly scarce––especially
given his undeniable influence on Foucault’s work.10 This silently passing over of
Canguilhem seems crucial for understanding Butler’s view on norms, which easily inten-
sifies the transcendental potential of Foucauldian analytics at the cost of their more imma-
nent dimension. To foreground and challenge the everyday “violence” of norms in the
production of gender, Butler effectively comes close to critiquing “the” norm as a singu-
lar, preexisting, coercive, and essentially limiting force. And yet, at the same time, her
writings allow for an alternative reading that goes beyond a rigid critique of “the”
norm and realigns itself with Canguilhem.
By far the most cited of Butler’s writings when it comes to providing a theoretical
basis for the operation of norms is Gender Trouble (1990). Surprisingly, however, this
influential book, which offers a powerful account of the role of norms in the performative
production of gender as the everyday stylization of repeated acts, contains very few expli-
cit reflections on the concept of norms, beyond their function as a regulatory but fictional
ideal (Butler, 1990: 173). For a more upfront theorization of norms, readers need to turn
to a chapter in Undoing Gender (2004b), titled “Gender Regulations,” that explicitly
tackles the question of what norms are and how they operate, and where Butler formulates
a theory of norms in dialogue with two influential Foucault commentators: François
Ewald and Pierre Macherey.
In this chapter, Butler first thinks gender norms by separating them from mere regulations.
She argues that we cannot understand how gender is “regulated” by only looking at empirical
regulations (in the fields of law or psychiatry, for instance) because we also need to understand
“the norms that govern those regulations” and which “exceed the very instances in which they
are embodied” (Butler, 2004b: 40). Norms, in this view, operate at a deeper level than the reg-
ulations they produce. While external regulations suggest a pre-existing gender that needs to
be regulated, norms operate internally and produce the gendered subject in and through pro-
cesses of subjection and subjectification. Butler thereby renders the Foucauldian insight that
power produces subjects specific to the realm of gender and argues that there is no such thing
as “a” gender before its regulation. Gender, in other words, “requires and institutes its own
distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime” (Butler, 2004b: 41).
Second, Butler notes that norms are also different from explicit rules. A norm, she
writes, “operates within social practices as the implicit standard of normalization”
(Butler, 2004b: 41)––thereby immediately framing norms through Foucauldian normal-
ization (rather than, say, Canguilhem’s notion of normativity). Moreover, she emphasizes
that norms define who or what will be recognized as legitimate. “The norm,” she writes,
“governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and actions to become recog-
nizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility and defining the parameters of what will and
will not appear within the domain of the social” (Butler, 2004b: 42; my emphasis).
Gender is therefore a norm because it produces a field of intelligibility in which some
bodies will be recognized as subjects—and not others (Butler, 2004b: 48).
Hendriks 13

Third, Butler explicitly differentiates her analysis from structuralist or psychoanalytic

theories that explain gender as an effect of symbolic laws. For Butler, gender is not part
and parcel of a universal law but the situated product of social norms, which (unlike
unconscious structures) can and do change over time. More importantly, the concept
of “norm” itself is equally a historical product and, to historicize the operation of
gender as a norm, Butler draws from François Ewald’s study of the proliferation of
“the norm” as a principle of valorization in recent history. In the wake of Foucault,
Ewald (1990: 153) indeed shows how spreading procedures and standards of comparison
produced a “normative order that characterizes modern societies [where norms] commu-
nicate among themselves, shifting from one level or field of their existence to another
according to a kind of modular logic.”
Under these historical conditions, Butler (2004b: 50; my emphasis) notes that “to
become an instance of the norm is not fully to exhaust the norm, but, rather, to
become subjected to an abstraction of commonality.” Yet Butler also departs from
Ewald’s analysis when he argues that, for this reason, “[t]he norm, or normative space,
knows no outside [and] integrates anything which might attempt to go beyond it”
(Ewald, 1992: 173). Ewald (1990: 154) indeed claims that a norm works according to
“a rigorous principle of self-referentiality” and “forces the group to turn back in upon
itself [letting] no one escape its purview.” Butler (2004b: 51) objects that such a perspec-
tive implies a bleak diagnosis in which there is no way out of the norms that make us
because “any opposition to the norm is already contained within the norm, and is
crucial to its own functioning.”
For this reason, Butler eventually turns to Pierre Macherey’s less totalizing reading of
Foucault.11 Butler (2004b: 52) specifically takes from Macherey that “the norm only sub-
sists in and through actions” and that it is exactly because of this action that norms can
become targets of social intervention. Hence, much like in her account of gender perfor-
mativity, Butler puts action center stage in her theorization of gender norms as the motor
of their reproduction and transformation. Action is indeed crucial for the “doing” of
gender––but also for its potential undoing. Yet, as we will see below, she thereby also
comes to suggest that (queer) politics should not merely aim for changing specific
norms but, more fundamentally, for “departures from the norm [that] disrupt the regula-
tory process itself” (Butler, 2004b: 53).
Many have taken this call for disruption as a plea for opposing all norms, because they
work, by definition, through processes of exclusion. Butler’s stance is indeed often
framed as a political argument against “the norm.” Yet, while her writing often tends
to move from reflections on norms (in the plural) to statements on “the” norm (in the sin-
gular), so as to strengthen her argument against the excluding nature of normalization, her
philosophy also remains quite ambivalent about the actual status of this norm. On the one
hand, she admits that “[t]he norm has no independent ontological status” of its own and is
only “(re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it,
[and] through the idealizations reproduced in and by those acts” (Butler, 2004b: 48). On
the other hand, she holds that “[t]he norm appears to be indifferent to the actions that it
governs [and] to have a status and effect that is independent of the actions governed by
the norm” (Butler, 2004b: 42; my emphasis).
14 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

Whatever the exact status of “the norm,” one can easily get the impression that
Butler’s work implies that any “hope for change must come from outside” (Kirby,
2015: 113; my emphasis). And yet the question of whether change necessarily comes
from external oppositions to the norm, or rather from within, as a dimension of its
own deployment, is not so easily settled. To some extent, it comes down to the issue
of whether Butler believes that norms are always already “violent” in and of themselves.
If all norms are violent, hope must indeed come from opposing “the norm” in general. To
understand Butler’s philosophy of norms, it is therefore important to investigate the ques-
tion of their supposed violence a little further.
In a critical review, Catherine Mills (2007) claims that Butler’s account of the gen-
dered constitution of the subject always implies violence. The emergence of the
Butlerian subject effectively depends on the operation of norms that exclude non-
conforming bodies to a domain of non-recognition, unintelligibility, abjection, unlive-
ability, and social death. In this sense, the hegemonic apparatus of gender produces sub-
jects through an inherently violent “heterosexual matrix” that imposes binary and
coherent gender as a necessary condition for their recognition as subjects (Butler,
1990, 1993). Mills (2007: 140) argues that Butler’s point is not merely that “prosaic vio-
lence [is] perpetrated against those beings who never achieve the status of the subject,” or
that norms can do violence to all subjects, but that “norms themselves enact violence.” In
this reading, norms are “internally and necessarily violent, insofar as they bear a direct
world-making capacity [that] entails exclusion of that which does not accord with the
norm or does not fall within the grid of intelligibility established by it” (Mills, 2007: 140).
For Mills (2007: 134), however, the constitutive violence of norms and the inherently
violent constitution of the subject contradict Butler’s later calls for a “nonviolent ethics.”
In a series of publications, which turn to broader questions of politics and social justice,
Butler indeed makes repeated pleas for nonviolence as an ethical position (2004a, 2004b,
2005, 2021). Yet Mills (2007: 148) argues that, according to Butler’s own logic––
whereby all norms entail violence––a nonviolent ethics would automatically imply a
“nonnormative ethics,” which seems a logical contradiction. Although Butler admits
that life is impossible without norms, Mills (2007: 150) claims that Butler’s ultimate
problem is “not the content of norms … but the normative form itself.” In her view,
Butler’s nonviolent ethics would imply the eradication of “the ontological violence
that inheres in normative regulation per se” (Mills, 2007: 150)––which, given the neces-
sity of norms for livable lives, is an existential impossibility.
In her reply to Mills, Butler (2007) refutes that she ever claimed that norms are “onto-
logically violent” as such. Given her strong criticism and deconstruction of essence,
being, and identity, it is indeed quite odd to maintain that Butler makes any ontological
claims at all. Butler reminds Mills that the processes in which norms make subjects are
inherently iterable, and that norms “cannot [therefore] exist outside of the iterations by
which they are established, disestablished, and … reestablished” (Butler, 2007: 182;
see also Jenkins, 2007). For this reason, she argues, one cannot just assume that norms
structurally reproduce the violence in which they might originate; neither that the vio-
lence which they do reiterate simply maps onto the violence at their origin (Butler,
2007: 183).
Hendriks 15

Rather than claiming transcendental violence as the foundation of all norms and hope
for a magical break with normalization as such, Butler (2007: 183) asks us to keep an eye
out for what can happen “in the iterations that produce the norm through time.” Perhaps,
she suggests, while the norm “may well function to establish a certain control over tem-
porality … another temporality [might] emerge in the course of its iterations” (Butler,
2007: 183; my emphasis). In this sense, she proposes, her plea for nonviolence should
be understood as an exploration of what subjects can do to live the violence of their for-
mation differently and to “work with the violence against certain violent outcomes [so as
to] undergo a shift in [its] iteration” (Butler, 2007: 185; my emphasis).
Whatever the precise role of violence, Butler’s point is not very different from
Foucault’s (1982: 231): “not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,
which is not exactly the same as bad.” Yet, because of Butler’s more explicit political
positioning, her writings can easily give the impression that norms are “bad” in and of
themselves because they can only function by excluding others. Butler indeed uses the
term “violence” to describe what, for Foucault, remained (more ambiguously) known
as regulation or normation. When she writes that “[p]ower sets the limits to what a
subject can ‘be’ [and] seeks to constrain the subject through the force of coercion”
(Butler, 2002: 221), the focus on limitation, constraint, and coercion risks to somehow
re-essentialize power as a restrictive force and thereby reinvite the repressive hypothesis
through the back door. Hence, it should be noted that Butler’s conceptualization not only
risks to naturalize violence (which is a highly variable and situational concept) but also––
and notwithstanding her explicit rejection of the autonomous subject––ends up endorsing
an implicitly Western normative individualism that has long been criticized by
anthropologists.
Moreover, what happens with power also easily happens with norms: gender norms
can quickly unify behind “the” heterosexual matrix or “the” norm of heterosexuality,
which then come to operate as actually existing forces in society. As anthropologists
we should be wary of the pitfalls of this reduction. Pierre Bourdieu (1990) has warned
us for the danger of attributing real-world causality to the theoretical models we infer
and construct on paper (such as, for instance, the existence of “norms”). For him, the mis-
attribution of social efficacy to reified abstractions is the result of the epistemological
break between the anthropologist/observer and the practical world she claims to partici-
pate in. Indeed, “to slip from regularity, i.e. from what occurs with a certain statistically
measurable frequency and from the formula which describes it, to a consciously laid
down and consciously respected ruling (règlement), or to unconscious regulating by a
mysterious cerebral or social mechanism, are the two commonest ways of sliding from
the model of reality to the reality of the model” (Bourdieu, 1990: 39).
When a model comes to behave as a socially efficacious force, and when that force is
considered violent or dangerous, it is not unsurprising that this model (now taken as a
reality) generates strongly felt theoretical opposition. That is why, despite Butler’s
repeated statements that we cannot do without norms (theoretically, politically, and stra-
tegically), not in the least because we “need norms in order to live, and to live well”
(Butler, 2004b: 206), “the norm” still lurks so vigorously in her texts as what generates
suspicion and hostility. These ambiguities eventually allow for a political investment in
16 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

what came to be known as “antinormativity”––a term Butler herself rarely uses, but
which became a dominant (if rather misnamed) banner for what is taken to be (good)
queer politics (Wiegman and Wilson, 2015).
Perhaps such suspicious modeling is what critique does––and should do––in disci-
plines and fields that claim to be critical of existing injustices. But even then, we
should be careful with models that ossify, singularize, and simplify. In the dominant
reception of Butler’s philosophy, “the norm” indeed becomes so obtrusive that it
erases complexity and ambivalence and ends up pushing all queerness out of its realm.
When queerness can only ever be the other-of-the-norm, it can only be recognized as a
space of opposition from where that norm is troubled and subverted from the outside.
As anthropologists, we thereby risk losing sight of entire fields of more immanent queer-
ness from where to see, imagine, and think the realities we are studying (Hendriks, 2021).

Back to (a queer) Canguilhem

We have seen how the works of Butler and Foucault contain dimensions where norms are
immanent to their own action and arise in the same processes in which they create their
objects. At the same time, they afford more transcendental directions in which norms
seem to operate as coercive forces that regulate a pre-existing material. This immanent(-
ist) and transcendental(ist) conception of norms should not, however, be thought of as an
excluding binary opposition. For anthropologists, the right spot on the spectrum of imma-
nence and transcendence is first and foremost an ethnographic question––as it is variable
through time and space. But “immanence” and “transcendence” also remain two possible
ways of looking at norms that can have vastly different effects on our analytics (and
politics).
In their dominant circulations, Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics are often reduced
to simplifying transcendental frameworks for understanding the social force of normal-
ization. This reduction not only overlooks the subtlety of their theorizations but also
clogs any openness for surprise in normative processes. In this respect, Canguilhem
can be a welcome reading companion for (re)connecting to a queer aspect of life that
easily remains out of view.
Canguilhem’s sustained attention to conflict, variation, and impermeability indeed
resonates well with queer theory’s investment in undermining the uniqueness of a (gen-
dered and sexualized) norm. For Canguilhem, norms are always multiple and contingent
because they are constantly subject to transformation, and therefore full of surprise. In
this sense, Canguilhem repeatedly foregrounds life’s “lability”: its inherent capacity to
overflow and distance itself from its norms. Crucially, this capacity does not contradict
but enable the very normativity of life (Le Blanc, 2002: 88–92). From this perspective,
life––as a constant creation of difference––is always out of sync with itself; its errant
nature not a negative quality but a positive force that drives the invention of new
norms (Le Blanc, 2002: 90).
Canguilhem (1989: 285) effectively prioritizes infractions over regularity. As life, in
his view, constantly risks itself, one might therefore read his philosophy as a reminder
that life itself is already queer (see also Spronk, 2020). Rather than adopting any
Hendriks 17

biologism that would simply reduce the social to the biological, Canguilhem invites us to
rethink the former in light of the surprising queerness of the latter. For this reason, his
work can be welcomed as a queer anthropology avant la lettre where norms are
already “bets or provocations” (Macherey, 2009: 138).
Of course, it remains an open ethnographic question to what extent norms are liable to
queering. But my fioto interlocutors in Kinshasa and Kisangani would certainly welcome
a Canguilhemian view on the provocative nature of norms. Out of sheer necessity, they
have become experts in turning a potentially dangerous environment into an always shift-
ing and ephemeral queer milieu by triggering the often-overlooked queerness within
already existing norms: that is, by relaying and extending their provocations, and
playing into their always risky vitality and unpredictability.12
It is perhaps symptomatic of my (and our) theoretical curriculum and habitus that I
needed Canguilhem to help me think what Foucault or Butler could equally point out
but were unable to do, because of a deep scholarly investment in critiquing “the” norm.
To avoid such reification and singularization, rereading Canguilhem alongside Butler
and Foucault can help anthropology find a more precise vocabulary and conceptual appar-
atus that avoids confounding casually deployed terms such as normality, normativity, and
normalization, and that keeps us alive to the surprising queerness of norms in action.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Rachel Spronk and Steven Van Wolputte for their valuable
feedback.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.

ORCID iD
Thomas Hendriks https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4855-9789

Notes
1. Aware of the pitfalls and implicit exclusions of an anthropological “we” (Chua and Mathur,
2018), I use the first plural to refer to a “we” constituted by colleagues, peers, and students
whom I meet and think with (often in such privileged settings as lecture theatres, conference
halls, seminar rooms, and zoom meetings––but also in and through texts). It is an anthropo-
logical “we” that allows for a group-criticism that transcends individual reflexivity.
2. Social norms were explicitly theorized by Emile Durkheim, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott
Parsons, Clifford Geertz, and Pierre Bourdieu, amongst others. See also Ruth Benedict
18 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

(1934) on the range of normality in different cultures and the lesser or greater malfunctioning of
“abnormal” individuals. See also Victor Turner (1969) and Mary Douglas (1966) on norm
reversal and transgression.
3. Fieldwork took place in Kinshasa, the national capital, and Kisangani, the capital of the Tshopo
Province, over a total of 12 months between 2013 and 2016.
4. In comparison to Foucault, Canguilhem has been less visible in anthropology. The late English
translation of his work might be one of the reasons for his minor influence (but see Mol, 1998,
and Rabinow, 1996 for some early exceptions). Recently, however, the anthropological interest
in Canguilhem has increased, mainly due to the larger turn to life (e.g. Coren and Brinitzer,
2019; Das, 2015; Fassin, 2018; Povinelli, 2015).
5. The relationship between Canguilhem and “vitalism” is however complex (Le Blanc, 2009:
264–275). While the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson maintained an unbridgeable rift
between living and thinking (and therefore turned to intuition as a direct pathway to life),
Canguilhem did not suppose a radical break between knowledge and life. For him, concepts
are not reductions that inevitably “imprison” life but forms that extend life (Canguilhem, 2008).
6. See, however, Abélès (2008) for the contrast between American anthropologists’ eager uptake
of Foucault since the 1980s and their French counterparts’ more reticent reaction to his work.
7. It is, above all, the 1970s Foucault who has influenced anthropological understandings of
power (Ortner, 2016: 60). His later work on ethics and critique has been less influential,
although this has started to change (see Faubion, 2001 for an early exception).
8. “Normativity” appears several times in Abnormal (2003), but only once in The History of
Sexuality: Volume 1 (1978: 54) and twice in Discipline and Punish (1977: 19, 304).
9. It is however striking that, in this late work, the terminology of “norms” largely disappears and
is replaced with “rules” and “formulas” that can be played with and (re)invented.
10. For rare mentions of Canguilhem, see Butler (2004b: 253, and 2007: 184).
11. Note, however, that Butler starkly neglects Macherey’s crucial reliance on Canguilhem (and
consistently misspells his name as “Macheray” throughout the entire chapter).
12. This in no ways implies there would be no limits to their queering––only that these limits are
always temporary and situational.

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Thomas Hendriks is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven University. His

ethnographic work on queer masculinities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has
been published in American Ethnologist, Sexualities, Africa, Journal of African Cultural
Studies, and Research in African Literatures. He is also the author of Rainforest
Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession (Duke
University Press, 2022).