ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the normative dilemmas faced by queer politics in the context of same-sex marriage. The term heteronormativity is useful in understanding how heterosexuality achieves hegemony. Thus, for Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is a combination of economic domination plus intellectual and moral leadership. Political society includes the armed forces, police, courts of law and prisons, together with the governmental administration including taxation, finance, trade, industry and social security. The recent turn within Euro-American queer theory and politics increasingly focuses on diasporic queers of colour on the one hand as 'targets' of homonationalism and on the other hand as agents of Utopian futurity and queer world-making. Mimicry of a powerful institution like heterosexual marriage can be co-opted to legitimize violence against non-normative others. To conclude, the politics of same-sex marriage is at once an effective and risky strategy, which unfolds the 'normative dilemmas' of queer, postcolonial politics.
