Frustrating Queer's Antinormativity: Encounters With the Paedophile and the Child.

Abstract

This thesis offers a counterargument against the idea that queer subjects need necessarily be antinormative. The thesis is rooted in contemporary critiques against antinormativity and shows how antinormativity is tied to a methodological stance of idealization that lacks theoretical curiosity about, as well as care capacities for, its objects of study. Using the child and the paedophile as case studies of the exclusionary work of idealized antinormativity, this thesis operationalizes a methodological stance of ambivalence to understand how these figures came to be seen as ineligible for integration into the queer canon. What the child and the paedophile share is that they elide the forms they are disciplined into. From the simultaneity of within as well as beyond signifying forms, it becomes possible to as what work the child and the paedophile do for both queer theory and social order at large. The child signifies beyond the normative Child, which has provided queer with its antinormative telos. The queer child is mobilized in which queer indicates the immanence of queerness to the child, even within the social and Symbolic structures that deny the child its queerness. The paedophile signifies beyond itself by being part of a much more general mode of sexual attachment called paedophilia. The paranoia with which one’s own – including queer’s – paedophilia must be displaced into the figure of the paedophile installs paranoia as one of the defence mechanisms against psychoanalytic sex. This thesis insists on the avowal of that paranoia such that the overwhelm leads to might reconfigure the self – not in the last place: the queer self – in new and refreshing ways.