Young Women's Negotiations of Heterosexual Conventions: Theorizing Sexuality in Constructions of 'the Feminist' (original) (raw)

Even though the normativity of heterosexuality has come into question in recent years, heterosexual norms continue to figure as a structuring principle in contemporary social life. Drawing on 40 qualitative interviews with a diverse group of young German and British women, this article analyses empirical research on feminist disidentification to show that heteronormativity plays a central role in young women's negotiations of feminism. Numerous respondents established a link between feminism, unfemininity, man-hatred and lesbianism. By exploring constructions of 'the feminist', and by reconceptualizing the figure of 'the feminist' as a constitutive outside of heterosexual norms that haunts the interviews, this article foregrounds the importance of examining the dimension of sexuality in analyses of contemporary social phenomena. K E Y WO R D S affect / constitutive outside / feminism / heteronormativity / repudiation / sexuality [A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition […]. (Sedgwick, 1990: 1) S edgwick's call for an incorporation of the homo/hetero definition into analyses of modern western culture provides a powerful entry point to this article, which demonstrates that heterosexual norms figure as a structuring principle