‘Naturalization’, ‘Denaturalization’: What Is Meant by these Terms? Starting out from the Notion of a Constitutive Outside
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Abstract
In this article, I argue that it is important to understand naturalization in a broader, more formal sense than that of specific essentializing concepts, such as biologistic notions of gender or ‘race’. We are complicit in naturalizing discourses per se whenever we treat a given set of concepts as self-evident or devoid of alternatives – as something other than a discourse in the Foucauldian sense of being historically contingent and open to change. The notion that there is no discourse devoid of a constitutive outside or exclusion is helpful in drawing our attention, both to the exclusions we ourselves promote, and to the limits of our capacity to recognize this. Due to the latter, naturalization can occur as readily in queer-feminist, anti-racist and other progressively oriented research as in hegemonic discourse. I exemplify this by focusing on the theorization of happiness offered by Sara Ahmed – herself an important writer on naturalization.
Keywords: Biologism, Deconstruction, Discourse, Essentialism, Emotion
Bibliography: Braunmühl, Caroline: ‘Naturalization’, ‘Denaturalization’: What Is Meant by these Terms? Starting out from the Notion of a Constitutive Outside, FZG – Freiburger Zeitschrift für GeschlechterStudien, 2025, pp. 99-113.
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