Toward a Phenomenology of Sex-Right: Reviving Radical Feminist Theory of Compulsory Heterosexuality (original) (raw)
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Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980
I want to say a little about the way "Compulsory Heterosexuality" was originally conceived and the context in which we are now living. It was written in part to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from so much of scholarly feminist literature, an erasure which I felt (and feel) to be not just anti-lesbian, but anti-feminist in its consequences, and to distort the experience of heterosexual women as well. It was not written to widen divisions but to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women-and to change it. I also hoped that other lesbians would feel the depth and breadth of woman identification and woman bonding that has run like a continuous though stifled theme through the heterosexual experience, and that this would become increasingly a politically activating impulse, not simply a validation of personal lives. I wanted the essay to suggest new kinds of criticism, to incite new questions in classrooms and academic journals, and to sketch, at least, some bridge over the gap between lesbian and feminist. I wanted, at the very least, for feminists to find it less possible to read, write, or teach from a perspective of unexamined heterocentricity.
Responses to Adrienne Rich's Lesbian Continuum
isara solutions, 2018
This paper explores the concept of Rich's lesbian continuum, from the perspectives of two Feminist scholars, Ann Ferguson and Jacquelyn N. Zita. Ferguson argues that by targeting heterosexuality as the key mechanism of male domination Rich romanticizes lesbianism and overlooks the actual condition of individual lesbian or heterosexual women's lives. For Zita, adopting Rich's concept means women can define the lesbian option as a mode of resistance to patriarchy qualitatively different from other modes because it contains the sexual component.
COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY AND LESBIAN EXISTENCE
Originallypublished in 1980, when the relationship between lesbianism andfeminism was thefocus of much debate, this article questions the assumption that the majority of women are naturally heterosexual. Rich argues that heterosexuality is imposed upon women and reinforced by a variety of social constraints. She also suggests that rather than then being a simple divide between lesbian and heterosexual women, our experience can be located along a lesbian continuum.
Editors' Introduction to Writing against Heterosexism
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2007
You the reader will notice that in this introduction we depart from the convention of using authors' last names only after first mention. Instead, we use first names. Hilde Lindemann, editor of Hyputia, yielded reluctantly to our departure from convention. But we felt that calling each other and Hilde by last names suggested a distance and detachment that was inappropriate and, frankly, just silly. We then began to question maintaining the convention for our authors, some of whom we know well and all of who worked graciously and very closely with us in creating this volume. We did not feel the distance from them that using their last names only suggested. So we decided to jettison the convention and speak of our authors, as we know them, by their first names. We should mention, too, that throughout this Introduction, we three editors use "we" in a way that sometimes identifies us as heterosexual, sometimes as lesbian. This is because we are mixed company in just this way and we mean to speak in unity. Indeed, we mean for this whole collection to speak in unity in one way-against heterosexism. This special issue of Hyputiu really began back shortly before the U.S. elections of 2004. At that time, there was an intermittently lively discussion of the lack of basic civil rights of sexual and gender minorities on the listerv of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST). Joan, who supervises the FEAST list, asked why feminist heterosexual allies of sexual and gender minorities said nothing, about this; indeed did nothing about this. On one of their typical long Sunday afternoon conversations Sally (Sara) and Hilde discussed Joan's question, which had disturbed them both. Hilde said, "We should do a special issue of Hyputiu on the violation of the rights of sexual and gender minorities and ask Joan to do the organizing."That afternoon, Hilde offered Joan the issue. Sally, not for the first time, took heart from someone else's initiating the organizing and offered to co-edit with Joan. It was with considerable pleasure and high spirits that Joan and Sally sent out that call for papers, which included Joan's original query-"Where are our heterosexual allies?''-but reworded by Sally to ask, "Why do so many good people seem not to comprehend the gravity of the social exclusion of sexual and gender minorities?" Then the 2004 U.S. elections came and stayed. About six weeks later, the essays began coming in and we found Joan's original query to the FEAST list both questioned and reaffirmed. Responding to our "good people" question, Erika Feigenbaum asked why our call for papers had us beginning "with the assertion of a 'common belief' in the unbiased readerlperson." This, she argued, is a bad place to start.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
Hypatia Online Reviews, 2024
Politics and culture in the United States of the 2020s continue to view LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans folks, as in need of "help" from straight, cisgender society-whether that is through the condescending trope of the Pride Month "ally," or through labeling queer books as supposedly sick and unfit for library shelves. In a provocative reversal, Jane Ward's The Tragedy of Heterosexuality takes so-called straight culture to task, drawing a clarifying and at times entertaining picture of how heterosexuality, not queerness, has been in crisis since the term first came into wide usage in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century medical textbooks. At the time, the term connoted a shift from women as subjugated property to companions of men within relationships of mutual likability. However, as #MeToo and Trumpism sadly reveal, this shift never actually occurred, and instead what has sustained heterosexuality is a relentless misogyny. This hatred of women creates straight relationships in which "coercive and male-centric sex" (151) is the norm, along with unpaid emotional and household labor performed by women. Seeing little to no change in this arrangement, Ward writes: "sexual relationships with men have been maintained by force, both through cultural propaganda targeting girls and women and more directly through sexual assault, incest, compulsory marriage, economic dependence, control of children, and domestic violence" (3). She offers reasons why LGBTQ+ people should cry "queer tears" of solidarity for straight women trapped in meaningless, boring, and/or violent and demeaning relationships. Ward insists that queer people are happier, more sexually satisfied, and more engaged with their lives and with the world than their heterosexual counterparts. Invoking John Waters, whose character Aunt Ida forms part of Ward's archive, she proposes that queer culture can be the template for straight people, who, according to Ward, have a hard time reconciling desire, fucking, and mutual respect. Ward's historical archive extends from the late nineteenth century to the present and includes early-twentieth-century "marital hygiene" books, mid-century advertising campaigns, self-help texts, and "relationship science" to show the root systems of so-called modern, companionate marriage. In chapter 2, she shows how the fraught transition from "woman-as-degraded-subordinate to woman-as-worthy-of-deep-love" is unfinished, which plays "a central role in the tragedy of heterosexuality" (35).
Bisexuality: The Great Divide. Feminism and the Gulf between Heterosexuality and Homosexuality., 1996
In this thesis, I wish to discuss bisexuality as a possible alternative for women who, within the confines of western culture, are expected to maintain a static sexual identity which upholds heterosexuality as its ideal. In attempting to explore the viability and attractiveness of bisexuality for women, the premise will be that the binary oppositions of heterosexuality and homosexuality are a deliberate and alienating social construct. They are not exclusive categories, yet they are compartmentalised in order for society to avoid having to confront and deal with the many variations of behaviour that occur in between. Heterosexuality worldwide is dominant, and most acceptable modus O\operandi for all humans. I believe that it is a pervasive means of control and regulation. As a construct, it supports entrenched patriarchal imperatives through which women are socialised from birth into their particular gender roles in the heterosexual equation, quite often believing that this is the only path they can take. Thus, heterosexuality can be a trap in which many women become ensnared. Heterosexuality also requires the rejection of homosexuality, which discounts the possibility of valuable, rewarding and life-enriching relationships with members of one's own sex. It precludes liberating freedom of choice whilst helping to reinforce patriarchal doctrines.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2012
Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The 'invisibility' of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its ' "unmarked" and "naturalised" ' 1 status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned. Indeed, as Linda Schlossberg puts it, 'heterosexual culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm [emphasis added].' 2 Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction aims to contribute to what Richard Johnson has described as the 'impetus to render heterosexuality visible to critical scrutiny'. 3 Heterosexuality as an institution continues to have immense normative power; while this power impacts most explicitly on non-heterosexual identities it also extends to heterosexual identities which do not conform to familial, marital or reproductive norms-norms which have a particular impact on female identities, the principal concern of this book. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and sexuality, Rereading Heterosexuality takes as its distinctive focus the representation of female identities at odds with heterosexual norms; more specifi cally, it explores representations which serve to question the conventional equation between heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female identity. In this context, it will offer close readings of six novels published by British and American
From This Day Forward: A Feminine Moral Discourse on Homosexual Marriage
The Yale Law Journal, 1988
The definitional equation of marriage with heterosexuality forms a selfenclosed system inaccessible to single-gender couples who desire equal protection under the law for their intimate enduring relationships. The summary state denial of homosexual marriage 2 exposes the fundamental right to marry, deemed to inhere in the individual,' as an exclusive privilege conditioned upon heterosexual orientation. During the past decade, commentators have argued that the proscription of homosexual marriage violates the constitutional mandate of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. 4 They have unwittingly assumed, however, that the Court would take such challenges seriously, and that conventional equal protection analysis provides a principled and coherent means to eliminate the selective application of the right to marry. After Bowers v. Hardwick, wherein the Court ridiculed homosexuals' claim to privacy for their intimate sexual relations as "at best, facetious," ' homosexuals' claim to marry may readily be dismissed by the Court as "at best, absurd." This Note examines the homosexual marriage challenge anew to investigate, through the lens of feminist jurisprudence, 6 why the courts have 1. There is a danger in labeling the discourse in this Note "feminine" as it threatens to exclude and may fail to engage male readers. Such separation may lead to its devaluation. But to name, at times, is to empower. Lecture by Professor Toril Moi at Yale Graduate School (December, 1987). My purpose in employing feminist theory is to demonstrate that its lens of questioning, rethinking, and redefining terms promises valuable insights into the law in a voice new to, but compatible with, the legal domain. 2.