In this episode of the Pythian School of Futures, Denis Maksimov unpacks the term supranormality as a method of breaking down heteronormativity to render its unabiding authority on life powerless. Supernormality or supranormal refers to the abolishment of any established conception of normality. As notions such as normal or natural are instruments to demonize and cast out uncompromising forms of the other from the whole. Today the women and the LGBTIQ+ struggle are both playing a leading role to undo constitutions that underpin speciesism, racism, and sexism. Generating subjectivities driven by otherness, queerness, strangeness, and weirdness.

Inspired by the historical figures that manifested peculiarities with pride and confidence, this episode delves into the negative effects of normativity on language, culture, identity, and overall life. As the supranormal exorcist of Avenir Institute, Denis Maksimov invites listeners to imagine intelligent and cunning ways to purge the demons of the old world to begin building something queer anew today.

Episode Notes:

Supernormality or supranormality is being so extraordinary or peculiar as to suggest powers that break the laws of nature or normality. It referred to otherness, strangeness, bizarreness, and queerness. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/supernormal

Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Queer theory is a critical discourse developed in the 1990s in order to deconstruct (or ‘to queer’) sexuality and gender in the wake of gay identity politics. Queer theorists expand sexuality as a discursive social construction, fluid, plural, and continually negotiated rather than a natural, fixed, core identity.

‘The representation of gender is its construction,’ declares the Italian-American feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term ‘queer theory’ in 1990. Queer theorists foreground those who do not neatly fit into conventional categories, such as bisexuals, transvestites, transgendered people, and transsexuals. Queer theory has itself been a significant influence on cultural and literary theory, postcolonialism, and sociology, and ‘queering’ is now applied also to the ‘boundaries’ of academic disciplines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory

Gay marriage also known as same-sex marriage is the marriage of two people of the same sex or gender, entered into in a civil or religious ceremony. There are records of same-sex marriage dating back to the first century. In the modern era, marriage equality was first granted to same-sex couples in the Netherlands on 1 April 2001. As of January 2021, same-sex marriage was legally performed and recognized in 29 countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage

A nuclear family, elementary family or conjugal family is a family group consisting of two parents and their children (one or more). It is in contrast to a single-parent family, the larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple which may have any number of children .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family 

Produced by Lara Huz |

Sound Production by Barış Tan |

Music by Arsan Sağlar