ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Judith Butler relates to the concepts of contingency, hegemony and universality. It examines how recent theories of hegemony and feminist/queer critiques of heteronormativity can mutually enrich as well as subvert one another. The chapter attempts to demonstrate, Butler repudiation of extra-political categories risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater by concomitantly disavowing the conceptual distinction between 'the political' and 'politics'. Even though the politico-ontological difference renders impossible any guarantees with regard to a particular political outcome, the political difference is not untainted by any particular 'beings' or ontic regions. Butler's argument for relinquishing the category of ontological difference pertains to her refusal of the transcendental notion of the pre-social or pre-political. According to Butler, he 'posits a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans'.
