Clinton Impeachment (Symbol)
In Chapter 1 of The Trouble with Normal, Warner discusses the current state of sexual politics in America. He notes a widespread stigma attached to sex, and he thinks that the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which focused on his sexual indiscretions, is a symbol of a certain kind of sexual hysteria:
The Clinton impeachment should show us, if nothing else, that erotophobia can take many forms besides silence, censorship, and repression. It can coexist with and even feed on commercialized titillation, desperate fascination, therapeutic celebration, and punitive prurience. So although sex is public in this mass-mediatized culture to a degree that is probably without parallel in world history, it is also true that anyone who is associated with actual sex can be spectacularly demonized. (23)
Here, Clinton, as a symbol of the ways in which shame is produced and located in American society, shows that shame doesn’t just happen through repression. Shame is also produced through public discussion. There is a kind of witch-hunt when it comes to people’s sex and sexuality being discussed in public.
Respectability Politics (Motif)
A recurring motif in The Trouble with Normal is respectability politics, which refers to attempts by a stigmatized group to present themselves as normal in order to be accepted by mainstream society. What makes it a motif is that it keeps returning in gay politics, from the Mattachine Society in the 1950s to the Human Rights Campaign in the 1990s. This is disappointing, Warner says, because respectability politics usually leads to increases stigmatization rather than to social transformation. Warner explains why it keeps coming back:
One reason that we have not learned more from this history is that queers do not have the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built. (52)
In straight culture, parents pass on lessons to their children, and there are also institutions of education like the public school system. Queer people don’t have these institutions for transmitting knowledge about sex and sexual politics, which is one reason respectability politics keeps coming back, despite its failures.
