Heterosexism
“Are the straights ok?”
Material Covered
- READ: “Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism”; “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality”; “Understanding Patriarchy”; “From ‘Normal’ to Heterosexual” (skim)
- WATCH: “Why Gay Marriage?: Follow the Money” (4 min.)
Listen Up
Introduction
We’ve been talking about the last couple of classes about “default” categories — such as “man” being the default gender — and the way these can create binary categories and systems of oppression. When we consider sexuality, “straight” or “heterosexual” is considered the default or dominant category and situates “homosexuality” as the “other” marginalized category. But, unlike gender (to a degree) and race, sexuality doesn’t always “show up” or “present” immediately upon meeting someone.
Remembering the Man Box exercise from Tuesday, I want us to think about what other kinds of “boxes” are there for other kinds of identities? For this topic, what might be a “straight” box?
Why is straight the default?
If you are straight: What would it feel like to have to come out?
Matrix of Domination
I want us to recall the matrix of domination that we talked about last week and how the domains work independently and together in order to create and maintain systems of oppression. Also, remember how many identities become socially constructed despite many believing that they are part of “human nature” or that they are “durable” and fixed across time and place. The material for today really lays out the way certain kinds of identities have changed over time. I hope that this makes us use our sociological imagination even more to think about the ways that we understand many aspects of ourselves and the world around us.
From ‘Normal’ to Heterosexual
In this article, the author traces the history of heterosexuality and homosexuality categories of difference. As he points out, sexual “desires, behaviors, and identities have a complex relation to one another, the society in which they are configured, and the historical period in which they gain meaning and help constitute how one experiences social life” (2). Just as we looked at last class with masculinity and manhood, we can examine the way heterosexuality comes to be the dominant or “unmarked” category and constructs a binary of sexuality with homosexuality being the “other” or marginalized category.
In this way, masculine men and feminine women are “performing…heterosexual identities” and feminine men and masculine women are “performing…homosexual identities” (3). Therefore, we can understand sexuality as not just about desire and attraction, but as a gendered presentation and a gendered identity. Heterosexuality develops historically as a way to situate certain people apart from others — particularly through notions of masculinity and femininity that we covered last class. We can see this “antifemininity mandate” that the authors last week discussed as being foundational (along with racial and class aspects) in what we now understand as heterosexuality. This identity is then reinforced through the various domains of power and “normalizes” sexual binaries.
This article makes a very important — and intersectional — distinction as well in showing how race also works to shape norms. You have different standards and assumptions based on racial hierarchies. As we read in Fugitive Flesh last class, we also have various institutions such as the State as well as medicine which work towards policing and pathologizing supposedly “deviant” or non-normative behaviors.
The author also explains how sexual behavior was organized via gendered institutions such as marriage. What was considered a “true man” or “true woman” were what was important. What we now think of as heterosexual was first categorized as “normal” and even allowed for same-sex activities for both men and women. However, over time, these categories become more rigid and narrowly defined — producing a false dichotomy between the “two sexualities” — just like what happened between masculinity and femininity.
Further, as a classed phenomenon, heterosexuality is seen as the valid middle-class identity — later moving into working-class cultures as well. Many of these identities are shaped by economic relations and expectations of men and women at the time. At the same time, sexuality is becoming pathologized — it is being studied by medical professionals who begin to theorize about sexual behaviors which end up creating sexual identities. Which, as someone brought up last class in our discussion, can help us question: who made up the medical community then? Who was doing the pathologizing and diagnosing? Who were in positions of power?
This history creates heterosexuality as the normative sexuality and then works to strengthen and further legitimize the traditional gender order. Sexual identities became linked with gender expression as well. And, in the context of the US, this also was reinforced through the institution of the nuclear family and ideas of patriotism and citizenship. All the while, we have people who are labelled or even claim the identity of “homosexual” navigating state repression, policy changes, and cultural shifts. As heterosexuality becomes more fixed and narrowly defined, we can see a rise in homophobia as a way of people distancing themselves from the “deviant” sexuality — despite this being an historically flexible set of behaviors linked to a person’s culturally and historically situated gender roles and gender expression not as an identity.
Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism
Suzanne Pharr shows the way gender roles are instrumental in the development of homophobia. So this helps us link together our readings from Tuesday on gender and our readings today on patriarchy and sexuality.
She outlines the way the ideology of patriarchy and the system of sexism work together. She asks: “Who do gender roles serve? Men and the women who seek power from them. Who suffers from gender roles? Women most completely and men in part. How are gender roles maintained? By the weapons of sexism: economics, violence, homophobia” (631).
If we remember the Five Faces of Oppression reading, we can see the way exploitation, marginalization, and violence work together to perpetuate homophobia. For example, marginalized communities are often economically precarious and are controlled by the myth of scarcity — that there isn’t enough to go around. Yet, it’s not just “actual” violence which creates oppression — but the fear of violence as well as we learned. This fear of violence then, as Pharr states, “shapes our lives, reducing our freedom” (633).
Pharr also explains how these various realities are socially constructed. If you remember the social construction process from last week: we construct certain cultural products that then become external to us. Those then seem to take on a reality of their own. Finally we internalize these products and they become seemingly “natural” — much like how most people understand sexuality (and gender) to be innate and even biological realities.
These realities create inequalities when we make assumptions about what is normal. If normal is heterosexuality, then homosexuality must become that “other” category. Just like with masculinity, heterosexuality is constructed because of homosexuality. It requires homosexuality in order to distinguish itself. Again, recall the “box” activity we did last week. What might that look like if we had a “straight box” instead of a “man box”?
We can talk about the idea of compulsory heterosexuality. This is the idea that Heterosexuality is assumed to be everyone’s sexuality. This
The author suggests that compulsory heterosexuality is enforced by homophobia and works to solidify the nuclear family as a source of patriarchal power. Lesbians then become a threat to this institution as well as gay men which we can understand through gender expectations as they relate to masculinity. When we don’t conform we can face many different consequences. For women, these consequences have historically been codified into law with women not being able to have credit or own property.
However, heterosexuality is harmful to men too as it becomes a very limited way of being. It too is oppressive because it “reduces the ability for people to be fully human” — as Pharr states “war and sports offer a cover of all-male safety and dominance to keep away the notion of affectionate openness being identified with homosexuality”.
Finally, Pharr concludes that “without the existence of sexism, there would be no homophobia” (640).
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
The author, Jane Ward, reframes the point of analysis to not be the marginalized community (homosexuals) but asks, instead, how heterosexuality and heterosexism/heterosexual privilege operate. Like the previous author: we can ask what is the relationship between misogyny and heterosexuality? Heterosexuality, particularly for women and straight people experiencing other forms of oppression, becomes a site of perceived safety.
She explains throughout how heterosexuality and heteronormativity are really sites of coercion — particularly when considering the amount of male violence against women that occurs in these relationships.
She also challenges certain pop culture understandings of sexuality as something we are born with — think of the Lady Gaga song “born this way”. Particularly for white gay men, biology becomes a way of explaining this aspect of their marginalization when all other identities confer privilege. This works by situating queerness with suffering. Nobody would willingly choose to suffer. But this then ignores the suffering which saturates straight culture. And it ignores the source of the suffering of queer people — which is, again, straight culture.
We can also analyze the fight certain gay people took up for equal rights. For well-resourced white gay men, their homosexuality was the only thing preventing them from a full citizenship. Like the video you watched for today about following the money around gay marriage (equality)… What does it mean to be included in systems that oppress people? How does this also work to strengthen the idea of the nuclear family?
Yet, she is not arguing that heterosexuality should not exist or that “everyone should be queer” but that heterosexuality is so linked to misogyny that it becomes a toxic and violent culture. Only by addressing the sexism inherent in heterosexuality can we have a liberated heterosexuality that is free of violence and domination. We are also steeped in a culture where the onus is on women to “fix” or “repair” men or to quietly accept their dehumanization for the possibility of safety. This is even more apparent when we consider the racial, class, nationality, ableness, etc. of women.
As Ward also explains, straight culture then creates this “misogyny paradox” “wherein boys’ and men’s desire for girls and women is expressed within a broader culture that encourages them to also hate girls and women” (27). Men love women — but only certain kinds of women (again narrowly defined) and they are also prevented from being open with other men about their desires for women in a non-sexist way without it “feeling kind of gay”…. (Recall the “No homo, bro” phenomenon a few years ago?)
Understanding Patriarchy
#NotAllMen?
- Are there question(s) we could ask that challenge this framing?
- What connections can we make to the video we watched in class Tuesday about gender?
- What connections can we make to other material we’ve read?
Patriarchy, Cisnormativity, Heteronormativity
This article makes important connections between the systems of patriarchy, cisnormativity, and heteronormativity. Importantly, the author, Kelly Howe, stresses how important it is to understand these systems of power as bound to each other while being amplified by capitalism. A critical examination of these systems can allow us to find other forms of oppression that are “overlapping, holding each other up” (130). This can make the dismantling of these systems of oppression difficult because “even when you consider yourself to be working against it, you are, but simultaneously you are not so much against it as you are inside it, within it. Tangles everywhere you turn” (130).
When thinking about these systems, we need to be mindful not to individualize the problems that they create. As we have been learning, it is not about “good” or “bad” individuals and our relationships to them but about a set of social relations that have real material consequences enforced through institutions.
“To analyze patriarchy is…more to analyze how the fabric of the world has been constructed in favor of men, how those relations of power cause suffering and oppression and for whom, and how we can identify opportunities to struggle together to remake the world anew. It is also to understand that patriarchy is a relational system; it manifests not only within and around men. Women, LGBTQIA individuals, non-binary people, and others who suffer at the hands of patriarchy are also frequently its agents, having internalized its power relationships and living them out on the body, even policing themselves and others with the very norms that have disciplined them” (131).
We need to also be mindful of not allowing our understanding of patriarchy to (re)produce binary ways of thinking (i.e. “men” vs. “women”). In that way, our analysis of patriarchy leads us to an analysis of cisnormativity. Because gender and sex are often used interchangeably in popular discourse — and even within some academic discourse — we might fall into the trap of taking a less nuanced look at patriarchy. As we have discussed, gender is something that is enacted — something that we do not something that we are. Cisnormativity creates a disciplining mechanism that structures the lives of cis men and cis women but can be devastating and deadly to trans and non-binary people through overt and covert forms of violence. When we take the time to critically analyze and understand this system, we can once again realize the instability and limitations of binary gender systems.
Heteronormativity is defined in this article as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent — that is organized as a sexuality — but also as privileged” (133). This system is so pervasive that we often don’t even see the ways that our lives have been structured by heteronormativity. Our institutions largely privilege (and legally recognize only) heterosexual relationships and these are reinforced through dominant media narratives.
Some theorists and writers have taken to using the term heteropatriarchy to show how these systems overlap with and are inextricably bound to each other. It is in the recognition of these overlaps that offer an opportunity to work in solidarity with people impacted by these systems in varying degrees. If we dig further and “ask the other question,” we can also see how other categories of difference such as race and class may also impact experiences of and with patriarchy, cisnormativity, and heteronormativity.
The struggles against these systems, when viewed through a queer lens, can help us to see potential moments of solidarity across struggles. Might we ask ourselves: “What kind of world do we want?” “How do we work with others to practice it into being?” (135) How can we examine what we view as “normal” in ways that lead us to an anti-normative position? How can this help us understand the interconnectedness of our struggles?
