Mediocrity as method and resistance

Mediocrity, while highly underconceptualised theoretically, is an ubiquitous feature of both human and non-human forms of life. Scholars across disciplines who interrogate “mediocrity” usually confer to the term a negative connotation. A life not striving for “excellence” remains at the margins of capitalist societies as well as the polity. Whilst “deserving citizenship” is discussed, citizenship studies neglect “mediocrity” as a structuring feature of social and political participation. Queer scholars, particularly those working on the anti-social turn of queer theory, acknowledge failure is an escapable, yet devalued, part of human (and queer) experience. This chapter theoretically analyses the potential “mediocrity” harbours in relation to Human Rights and Sexual Citizenship. It does so by discussing how deploying the concept of “mediocrity” can both act as a “method” to normalise individuals along lines of respectability in intersectional terms as well as be appropriated by queer subjects themselves as a practice of resistance towards capitalist narratives of “excellence” and “deservingness” associated with the attribution of the privileges of belonging to the polity or the nation.