Compulsory Heterosexuality

Responding to Animating Revolt and Revolting Animation, by Judith Halberstam

I really enjoyed Halberstam’s piece on “Pixarvolt”, and their argument that animated movies for children are often sites of transgression, due to undertones of queer narratives and Marxist critique. I was particularly struck by their exploration of the ways that humans enforce ideas of compulsory heterosexuality in animals. I found a lot of parallels between this reading and The Egg and the Sperm by Emily Martin.

Both pieces explain how gendered and/or queerphobic stereotypes in contemporary Western society have integrated themselves into scientific work in insidious ways. These stereotypes are so pervasive that researchers will interpret their findings through a gendered or queerphobic lens, thus projecting unquestioned cultural biases onto the results. Therefore, the conclusions that are drawn from those data become tainted. However, the authority that “science” as a discipline has in our society means that these studies are considered/read as unbiased sources of factual information. This is incredibly problematic because these (hetero)sexist stereotypes become “validated” through academia.

Although Martin talks about humans and Halberstam talks about animals, the similarities in their pieces are alarming. It seems that reproduction, no matter the species in question, is subject to a lot more surveillance and regulation than I had expected. Of course I was aware of this in the context of human relationships, and the prejudice that different types of bodies experience (for example, what Shohat talks about with regard to endometriosis). But I was surprised to learn about the ways in which our internal organs are also subjected to such gendered scrutiny, for example the “wastage” of eggs that are unfertilized vs. the “abundance” of sperm that is produced but does not go on to fuse with an ovum. I was quite shocked to learn about the narratives of compulsory heterosexuality when it comes to animals, and thinking about how those narratives are co-opted, exploited, and capitalized from in media. This was particularly notable in Halberstam’s example of films about penguins, both as documentary (March of the Penguins) and fiction (Happy Feet).

Would a documentary like March of the Penguins even get made if not for the insertion of a heteropatriarchal storyline? Even if it did, would anyone watch it? Would anyone even care about penguins, or nature in general, if we did not see our own (assumed heterosexual) selves reflected in animals’ lives? Is this supposedly shared experience of “modern love” what motivates us to be empathetic towards animals?

Would we care about animals if we knew how queer they were? Would we still try to preserve their environments? Have other species died out because their queerness could not be obscured to the human observer?

All of these examples makes me second guess a lot of the information or “knowledge” that I have been taught, memorized, or internalized over my lifetime. I also wonder about whether these sorts of biases affect other, less corporeal disciplines, beyond biology. What sorts of expectations do we place on chemistry, or even physics which is considered the most “objective” science? Even as a designer, do I replicate these sorts of power dynamics? How do these sorts of issues translate within a creative praxis?

I wonder if I have also bought into heteropatriarchal ideas. Am implicated in these narratives, and am I responsible in some ways, non-consciously, for perpetuating them? How would I ever know?

Do I have a stake in maintaining the heterosexist status quo?