A Norm (n.) is a cultural ideal that determines the 'desirable body', imposes a 'grid of intelligibility' on the social, delineates possible modes of bodily life, and blurs the distinction between the descriptive and the normative (i.e. Between how things are how they 'ought to' be).
A Norm (n.) is a positive ideal in the sense that it offers a culturally dominant model of those forms of embodiment required to achieve a valorized subjectivity (e.g., 'masculinity' for men, 'femininity' for women).
A Norm (n.) is not an external social imposition that constrains the individual. It is the necessary ground through which the subject is realized and comes to enact her agency.
A Norm (n.) is vulnerable because each reenactment (upon which they depend) can fail.
A Norm (n.) is continually haunted by its own inefficacy — hence the anxiously repeated effort to install and augment its jurisdiction.
A Norm (n.) has a temporality that opens it to subversion from within and to a future that cannot be fully anticipated.
A Norm (n.) of kinship and gender is precarious: a single trespass reveals its sudden, disturbing transferability into contexts no one anticipated.
A Norm (n.) has an aberrant temporality: kinship, however structurally constrained, is socially iterable and so can repeat itself otherwise.
A Norm (n.) does not act on the psyche directly; it condenses into the figure of the law to which the psyche keeps returning.
A Norm (n.) is undone in its ideality precisely through the complexity of its instantiation — families that mirror it imperfectly are not poor copies.