Radeviance
Why and how
Radeviance is a new political and philosophical concept. It is an attempt to explore the meaning and the potential of deviance – deviant identities (orientations, including gender-based and paraphiliac ones, genders, neurodivergences, and more) and deviant presentation, which is very likely but not inherently a means of expressing an identity.
The approximate purposes:
- To let deviant individuals explore their identities both separately and in an interconnected manner. Nobody should be forced to choose whether they participate in a community for one part of their life or for another, nobody should be harassed for finding parallels or causation between their identities, e.g. drawing some links between being otherkin and being transgender.
- To de-purify those deviant identities that were given a “protected status” by exclusionist communities and are considered above being compared or mixed with something else.
- To disconnect being disordered, perceiving one’s experience as hurtful, from the concepts of treatment and elimination. Those with identities caused by illnesses and trauma are equally allowed to celebrate and be proud.
- Similar to the above, to lift the stigma around identities, understood through sex or pornography.
- To stop the process of fragmenting and exclusionism, to prevent groups that may gain more social acceptance in the future from aligning with the majority and using their increased visibility for hurting the less lucky ones.
The basics:
- A norm in the social sense is a system that assigns value to traits and to those who possess these traits, writes and distributes roles, and punishes for deviating from these roles.
- A deviant is someone who does not have traits that are considered valuable from the point of view of the norm, who feels or presents in a way that is rejected by their environment.
- The principles by which something is considered normal or deviant do not correspond with humane ethics, even if some currently stigmatized acts are objectively bad.
- Not all oppression targets deviance, but non-deviant marginalized groups may still be affected by anti-deviant oppression, because no marginalized group is immune from oppression that is primarily designed for some other group.
- Some deviant groups or individuals may be accepted conditionally if they agree to self-policing and participate in attacks on other deviants. This is not true acceptance and does not make them safe.
- The only way to create a better world is to deconstruct the norm.
Answering potential questions:
- The word “deviance” is chosen as the root word because it has not yet been fully reclaimed.
- This is not a subcategory of radqueer/blankqueer. The term itself comes from a discussion about insufficiency of the radqueer approach.
- Paraphilias and transids are included in our analysis alongside queerness.
- The radical change of the society we’re proposing does not imply abolition of the age of consent or acceptance of “nonharmful rape” and other xenosatanist ideas.
Articles:
Defining norm, deviance, and liberation
Mapness as a deviant identity
Queerness as a deviant identity
Deviance-adjacent groups
Behaviors, identities, and perceived deviance
Violation, perpetrators, and violator roles
Antisurvivorism – oppression of sexual abuse survivors
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