Black people are not included in certain representations of ‘america’ (sic) or, indeed, in political theoretical discussion of ‘citizenship’ can take place precisely because the exclusion has happened at the level of presumption, as an epistemological condition of political judgement.
Performativity takes on a new meaning against such a backdrop, since what happens when the less than human nevertheless assumes its place within the human, producing a paradox and a tension for the norm? It exposes the norm as exclusionary and its ideality as normative. But it also produces an aberration with the power to redefine the norm. What is important, of course, is to keep the ‘redefining of the norm’ from being ‘an assimilation to the norm’ (which is what gay marriage is doing). The redefinition has to take aim at normativity itself, establishing the progressive an irreversible dissonance of human life, its radical non unity, as the only viable definition (20-21).
The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain 1940
Joan Miró