After thinking about white privilege in the last article before the holidays, we’re pushing forwards to think about another facet of identity: sexuality.
a long straight road
I’ll warn you before we get started: this article is dense. It’s definitely of its era (it was published in 1980) and while the central premise is very valuable, there are also legitimate critiques of the position. Just go with me here, please. It’s worth a read because it raises so many good questions and really makes a clear point about the dominant nature of heterosexual identity in culture, even if you don’t follow (or agree with!) her other assertions. Also, a quick trigger warning: she discusses sexual violence in broad terms in the article, including using the word ‘rape’ quite often, although there are no explicit or graphic discussion of sexual violence.
Here’s where you can find a copy of the text: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
There are, of course, a good number of articles commenting on and engaging with this article. For a quick summary of the article, this review on Feminist Current is fairly clear and accessible.
Is Heterosexuality Really Compulsory?
The essence of the article identifies something that we all experience, and that our children experience: the cultural assumption that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise (and even, indeed, sometimes after it’s disproven), and that being heterosexual is the normal state of affairs. The article was written when it was considerably less comfortable for LGBTQ+ people to be ‘out’ in public, but even in our comparatively queer-embracing culture, the set-point for relationships and people's sexual identities is heterosexual unless further information is disclosed.
This affects us, and our children, in a number of ways. It makes it a climate where non-heterosexual people have to ‘come out’ - to disclose their sexuality - and decide at all of these junctures (which happen lots - it doesn’t just come up when you’re directly discussing a partner, but when people use ‘gender clues’ or ‘sexuality clues’ - things like coded parts of your appearance - to try and determine your sexuality) whether or not it’s safe to do so. It makes invisible the queer identities of people whose relationships appear heterosexual on the outside - for instance, for queer and bisexual women who partner with men - which can feel jarring, isolating, or like they are keeping back some kind of secret from people they know.
It affects our children by teaching them to assume they are heterosexual themselves, with the implicit message that if they’re not, they are somehow less than, not normal, not what we expected. Even very young children start to absorb these messages, through exposure to media where all the characters are straight, by people making jokes about ‘boyfriends’ and ‘girlfriends’ when they have different-sex playmates, and certainly by overhearing and noticing the undercurrents of homophobia and transphobia in society. This glides into gender essentialism for me and the assumption of a gender binary - the very core of compulsory heterosexuality which uses as its base the existence of two polar-opposite ‘sexes’. This is certainly not something that Rich herself would have been considering when she wrote the article.
Born that Way
This article is full of interesting points that are worth pointing out. The political choice, in Rich’s article, for women to become lesbians is counter to the popular story that LGBTQ folks are ‘born that way’, and that instead sexuality can be a choice. One perspective on the ‘born that way’ approach to sexuality - one that we’ll talk about more next week when we focus on queer identities and the introduction of ‘queer theory’ - is that by presenting sexuality as an accident of birth, it can paint LGBTQ folks as somehow fundamentally different than heterosexual folks, which could then open up the possibility for segregation or oppression as a class. Others believe that a ‘can’t help it’ attitude towards sexuality makes for a more accepting society.
Who has the Power?
This article brings to light some of the same types of privilege that we looked at in last week’s article about white privilege. Rich addresses this in the letters at the end of the article, where she says:
“In this paper I was trying to ask heterosexual feminists to examine their experience of heterosexuality critically and antagonistically, to critique the institution of which they are a part, to struggle with the norm and its implications for women’s freedom, to become more open to the considerable resources offered by the lesbian-feminist perspective, to refuse to settle for the personal privilege and solution of individual “good relationship” within the institution of heterosexuality.”
For readers who are heterosexual, or who are in heterosexual relationships, she is asking them to consider the privilege that comes with that in a culture which normalises and rewards heterosexual relationships above all others. Rich mentions a scholar called Catherine MacKinnon, w believes that there is no way of separating out the power imbalance of patriarchy from heterosexual relationships, no matter how the individual relationship is conducted. In her view, any heterosexual relationship replicates patriarchal oppression.
Rich’s outline of the effects of ‘male power’ in society - a list of ways that patriarchy affects women, and mothers in particular - is a valuable jumping-off point for thinking about the ways that our own lives, and those of our children, may be limited by patriarchy and racism.
There is so much to unpack and discuss with this article, but I’ll leave it here for now. Have a read and see what you think. What themes jump out at you? Can you see ways that you could make heterosexuality seem like one option, instead of the most expected option, for your children?