At present, LGBTI politics is primarily concerned with practical legislative reforms and resource allocation issues in the context of HIV/AIDS, focusing on full citizenship rights and responsibilities. What might the alternative be like?

In 1993, Michael Warner argued that ‘queer theory” should be focusing on resistance to ‘normativity.’ He argued that LGBTI communities should work actively to dismantle institutions that demarcated people into normal and ‘abnormal’/'inferior’ social categories. Due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, effective western liberal legislative reforms and the ascendancy of pragmatic LGBTI politics, that road wasn’t taken.

Well, not quite. The transgender and intersexed communities have revolutionised concepts of biological sex and social gender, arguing that there are times that they don’t match up due to psychological gender identity issues or conversely, that intersexed people don’t need ‘corrective’ surgery for their variant genital anatomies.

The intersexed community is a particular challenge to concepts of ‘normative’ sexual physiology due to its insistence on informed consent and the option of refusing surgical modification of variant genital anatomy. This leads to other questions of what ‘normativity’ means in people’s lives and what social movements emerge to uphold the rights of those who are variant individuals and groups.

However, there are some practical questions about what might be legitimate struggles or otherwise. In this article, I’ll deal with four non-normative groups- multiple personalities, conjoined twins, heterosexual polygamists and Pentecostal poisonous snake handlers/poison drinkers.

As we’ve noted over the last few weeks of the United States of Tara, multiple personalities are a complex phenomenon. The current clinical term is ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder.’ It means that there are multiple continuous biographical individual identities that co-exist in the same body, usually due to infantile/early childhood trauma or sexual abuse. Dissociation is the subject of debate. Is it a ‘disorder’, or should it be seen as an adaptive survival response to brutal treatment in early life? Given that most survivors of child sexual abuse are female, so are most cases of observed multiple personalities.

This has implications for feminist politics, as well as LGBTI concerns. Lesbian feminists might consider solidarity based on the gendered aspects of this issue, while bisexuals and transgendered rights groups might focus on the existence of multiple alter genders and sexual orientations in the same individual body. And what if a multiple personality rights movement arises, decides that dissociation isn’t pathological and then campaigns for related human rights and civil liberties?

Like intersexed individuals too, conjoined twins are the product of variant anatomies. In their rare cases, variant pre-embryonic cellular development occurs and result in various alternative anatomies. Some are lethally anomalous, but others are not. In the latter cases, some parents of conjoined twins have decided not to have surgical ‘resolution’ of their variant anatomies, just like the intersexed rights movement in their anatomical context.

Not all non-normative social identities, communities and movements are benign. I have serious problems with the question of legal recognition of heterosexual polygamy, given what I’ve read about spousal violence and pedophilia within some schismatic fundamentalist ‘Mormon’ communities in North America. As I’ve concluded beforehand, I do support the preservation of intact polygamous family units in the context of humanitarian refugee policies, in the probable context of climate change displacement from adjacent nations like Bangladesh. However, I do not favour wholesale recognition of all forms of heterosexual polygamy.

North American Pentecostal fundamentalist ’snake handlers’/poison drinkers are another non-normative social group that should be analysed in this context. In 1910, one George Went Henley split from his original Church of God sect in Tennessee because he believed that charismatic divine endowment enabled ‘true believers’ to handle venomous snakes or ingest poison with no ill effects. Unfortunately for some of the faithful, that didn’t happen and some died. As a result, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky all ban Pentecostal snakehandling sects, although West Virginia does allow them. Sadly, Henley himself was bitten by one of the reptiles in question and passed away in 1955.  If religious practices harm people, then they can and should be curtailed for the common good.

Some variant populations question whether their ‘abnormality’ should be viewed as an ‘impairment’ or ‘pathology’, which may lead to new social identities, communities and movements, as might be the case in the event of increased incidence of multiple personalities or conjoined twins. However, others are antisocial networks that condone destructive interpersonal relationships or place individuals at risk from unhealthy behaviour. If the need arises, we might want to consider solidarity with the benign new social movements, but argue for the maintenance of social sanctions against their negative, harmful counterparts.

Recommended:

Ian Hacking: Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1995.

Dennis Covington: Salvation on Sand Mountain: Reading: Addison-Wesley: 1995.

Alice Domurat Dreger: Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex: Cembridge: Harvard University Press: 1998.

Alice Domurat Dreger: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal: Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2004.

Andrea Moore-Emmett God’s Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Fundamentalist Mormon and Christian Polygamy and the Stories of Eighteen Women Who Escaped: San Francisco: Pince-Nez Press: 2004.

Michael Warner (ed) Fear of a Queer Planet: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1993.