As much as we need to under­ stand that norms of gender are relayed through psychosocial fantasies that are not first of our own making, we can see that norms of the human are formed by modes of power that seek to normalize certain versions ofthe human over others, either distin­ guishing among humans, or expanding the field of the nonhuman at will. To ask how these norms are installed and normalized is the beginning of the process of not taking the norm for granted, of not failing to ask how it has been installed and enacted, and at whose expense. For those effaced or demeaned through the norm they are expected to embody, the struggle becomes an embodied one for recognizability, a public insistence on existing and mattering.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 37)