The Moral Practice of Disrupting Norms

Abstract

Black queer people acknowledge and respond to the social constructions that shape black queer subjectivity and familial relations by disrupting oppressive norms and processes of normalization. Disrupting norms is an important way that black queers exercise moral agency in relation to family, and black queers’ use of disruption both confronts and destabilizes norms of relationality built on unjust power dynamics and oppressive notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Young explores the economies of relation that become stabilized through the norms of capitalism and heteropatriarchy and delineates the process of disrupting norms, explaining how it requires an ongoing commitment to recognizing technologies of normalization.