ed note: as part of our on-going initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Thomas Hendriks (KU Leuven, Belgium) about his article “On the surprising queerness of norms: Anthropology with Canguilhem, Foucault, and Butler″ (2023), is the sixth of these interviews. See here for others.

1. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests? 

I suppose I have a rather serendipitous academic trajectory – although, in hindsight, it makes some sense. I first graduated as a bioengineer in tropical forestry. During these years, I learnt a lot about forests and trees but very little about human beings living and working in forest environments. After a detour through development studies, I encountered anthropology, and it was love at first sight. I decided to do a PhD in anthropology, and, for my fieldwork, found my way into a timber concession operated by a multinational logging firm in the north of the DR Congo (that is, exactly the kind of work environment I was supposedly trained for). That fieldwork among Congolese workers and European managers was quite intense and exhausting (both emotionally and ethically), because of the everyday violence of resource extraction and labor exploitation and because of everyday racism and misogyny. But I managed to turn its turmoil into a dissertation on life in the rowdy world of rainforest logging. And, several years later, I could also turn it into a book: Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession (www.dukeupress.edu/rainforest-capitalism).

As masculinity had (unexpectedly) become such a central topic in my doctoral research, I decided to deepen this topic for a postdoc project by focusing on queer masculinities in the DR Congo (on which, at the time – and to this day – academics had written very little). Following people’s networks from the rainforest of my previous research to the city of Kisangani and then to the capital Kinshasa, I specifically tried to understand the manifold (and often surprising) interactions between urban sociality, popular culture and queerness. I was very lucky to find people who welcomed my curiosity and accepted me in their midst. This research sparked a set of articles, fed my later teaching at the University of Oxford and initiated fruitful conversations and collaborations with activists in the DRC.

Last year, however, I left academia behind (as a “career”). But I continue doing anthropology (as a “practice”) alongside a job in a small family business in garden furniture. This comes with its own challenges, but it also gives me the luxury to slow down and enjoy a certain freedom from academic expectations. It took some time to adapt (and unlearn) but I now have the feeling this decision allowed me to reconnect to why I had so much fallen in love with anthropology in the first place.

2. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

Fieldwork in Kinshasa and Kisangani among self-identified “effeminate” men (who often call themselves “fioto” in Lingala) and their more gender conforming (so-called “normal”) partners quickly showed me the stark limits of concepts such as “homosexual” or “heterosexual” to approach the erotic lifeworlds I encountered (and became part of). Even a term like “queer” poses serious problems and whenever I use it, it forces me to think again about what it means in this situation. But still, I have the impression I need that term in order to put into words some of the paradoxes I learnt to see and feel during fieldwork. To put it all too bluntly: urban Congo is, at the same time, a very risky and a very fertile milieu for expressions of queerness. These complexities forced me to think harder about queerness as a relationship to what we usually call “norms”.

I realized that, while queerness is often reduced to a (more or less) oppositional relationship to (sexual and gender) norms, fieldwork taught me to see queerness where I had least expected it: that is, within the very norms at work. Fioto men and boys taught me that much of what they did in practice was to (try to) provoke, trigger, and extend a queerness within “normal” masculinity and thus establish a risky complicity between queerness and norms. They showed me how to be responsive to the inherent multiplicity, ambiguity, unpredictability and eventual fragility of norms at the same time as to their potential violence and exclusions. This was a valuable lesson that made me (re)read and (re)think what I thought I knew about norms.

And that is how I ended up writing this theoretical piece, which is mainly a critical reflection on the analytical construct of “norms” we anthropologists tend to use as part of our sedimented conceptual toolkit, without really asking ourselves what norms are and what they do. In brief, I wanted to put some pressure on our little examined and rather common sense idea of “norms” in order to make some space for a more capacious understanding of norms. An understanding that would help me make sense of what I learnt from fioto men in urban Congo but that could also be of some use to others who feel a need to avoid the easy fix of academic norm speak.

3. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

This article wants to slow down our habit of resorting to an all too easy idea of norms (or even “the” norm) that reifies, simplifies and assimilates more complex, heterogeneous, and open processes. To avoid such reifications and reductions, it calls for a more precise conceptual vocabulary and turns to philosophy and critical theory as fields that––unlike anthropology––have conceptualized norms more explicitly. Drawing from Canguilhem’s approach to life as an always already normative process, Foucault’s understanding of discipline, regulation, and norma(liza)tion, and Butler’s theorization of the inherent violence of gender norms, it highlights the affordances and pitfalls of their analytics for contemporary anthropology. It thereby revisits the often overlooked differences between related concepts, such as normativity, normalization and normality, to finetune our analytical tools.

But this article particularly reveals the value of Canguilhemian understandings of normativity for approaching the seemingly counterintuitive ethnographic insight that norms might already be much “queerer” than we think. A queer reading of Canguilhem indeed enables anthropologists to (re)introduce a degree of flexibility and surprise to widely used Foucauldian and Butlerian frameworks, by (re)connecting to an immanent perspective on norms that acknowledges and takes seriously their often overlooked (and perhaps inherent) queerness in action.

4. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Writing this article helped me do some of the theoretical work I needed for trying to make sense of ethnographic “data”. I learnt from Canguilhem that there is no clear break between living and thinking and that concepts are therefore not reductions that inevitably “imprison” life but forms that extend life. That is also perhaps why theory matters to anthropologists: it is an extension of the ethnographic “facts” they so painstakingly construct. For me, theory is not a retreat from the empirical but its humble and risky extension.

Moreover, theory can travel and be changed in the process. Reading theory (from elsewhere, so to speak) is vital to me because it helps me imagine what “facts” might be about. It helps me open up my thinking and create the imagination needed for becoming even more responsive to the facts and to what makes them interesting. I think a lot of anthropologists end up doing this spontaneously. But I remember that for me it took quite some time before I could see (and accept) the playful riskiness involved in ethnographic theory-making when a new love affair turned me from bioengineering to anthropology. Luckily, I found such generous guides as Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway on the way (not un-coincidentally people with a background in chemistry or biology) to help me stay in touch with the fragile beauty of science in action and avoid the self-satisfied business of a certain kind of “critique” that steers so many academic practices and habits in anthropology and the broader social sciences.