LEGAL EXTRANORMATIVITY: INTRODUCTION TO THE DIALECTICS OF STRANGEMENT
identities; sexuality; dialectics
In this paper, we aim to establish some provocative foundations for a new understanding of the discursive structure of legal normativity, questioning the highly individualized development that has marked the progressive agenda in recent years. We begin with an analysis of the use of the term "queer" to explore the critiques articulated even by the left regarding the so-called "identity agendas," with the intention of analyzing not only the formation of contemporary identities themselves but also examining them in the context of the formation of capitalist modernity. In this sense, we seek to differentiate what we understand by a discursive perspective and how it not only can, but must, relate to a phenomenological dimension of human action. In light of this, we defend a critical approach regarding categories or identities that have undergone a process of hypostasis sponsored by the capitalist structure itself. This occurred illustratively with both homosexuality and transgender identity, albeit in different ways. While homosexuality became entrenched as a neutral and homogenizing category, transgender identity appeared in discourse primarily in heroic-martyrized forms, romanticizing or sensationalizing the suffering of these individuals. We argue that this situation justified much of the criticism that, in contemporary times, has been identified by the terms "postmodernity" or "identitarianism." However, we aim to propose alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between these identities and the cultural structure in which they are embedded. After establishing this dynamic base of cultural structure, we move to one of its discursive structures most conducive to the normalization of social practices and expressions: legal normativity. We suggest that if the State is the form of Capital, Law presents itself as the form of social normativity. Through its inherently discursive structure, Law becomes the apparatus par excellence of the modern structure to articulate various devices of control over individuals. Thus, in search of an approach that does not reproduce the same universalist dynamic that tends to characterize not only law but the bourgeois cultural structure itself, we argue in favor of an attitude of estrangement in the face of the existing normativity. In this sense, we propose adopting a queer perspective that seeks to appropriate law from its foundations, not from those already established. In other words, rather than a method that seeks consensus, typical of modern legal dialectics, we defend the pursuit of more spaces for expansive dissensus, through which the strange nature of the fracture separating social practices and expressions, which appear as disobjectivized in the norm, becomes increasingly evident.