Managing gendered personality traits: The case for weak vs. surplus normativity

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to opinion essay by, Lisa Selin Davis, “Like tomboys and hate girlie girls? That’s sexist,” December 20, 2018:

One might rightly suspect that, in part because social norms can only be contested by affirming new ones, any concerted attempt to regulate personal identifications and styles will not escape the general problem, which might be called, in a nod to 60s philosopher Herbert Marcuse's "surplus repression," surplus normativity.  

Today the ideal can only be for it to be assumed that gender and other markers of identity and personality are, not meaningless by any means, but groundless, arbitrary, multiple, and ideally up for grabs. The ideal would be the total autonomy of an disembodied individual walking into a store with personal attributes and choosing those he/she likes. (This model is that of a neoliberal capitalism, of course, and it is a fantasy and an impossibility.) Some people think that we should refuse all normativity in order to refuse normality, holding instead that there is no such thing. (Some queer theorists and some forms of "anti-psychiatry" hold this position).  

I suggest instead a "weak normativity." In this schema, it would still be possible to understand yourself as a man and not a woman, or vice-versa (arguably, one cannot be both at once). But not only would styles of recognizably masculine and feminine personality be more numerous and varied, people would in general have less invested in these identities and personalities. And there would be less anxiety about them. The shift could be towards worrying more about other things.