New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » November 20th: Compulsory Heterosexuality

November 20th: Compulsory Heterosexuality

Plan for the Day

Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience”

Instead of going to major quotations of the article, let’s watch some videos and think about what Adrienne Rich would say. Maybe some vocabulary first:

  • Compulsory Heterosexuality: (Adrienne Rich) “women may not have a preference toward heterosexuality, but may find it imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by society.”
  • Heterosexism: the belief that heterosexuality is the only valid relationship type–man and woman.
  • Heteronormativity: a term that is used to describe situations wherein variations from heterosexual orientation are marginalized, ignored or persecuted by social practices, beliefs or policies.
  • homophobia: fear or hatred of homosexuals; fear of one’s own homosexual desires or the idea that one may be homosexual.
  • Myth: Lillian Feder’s definition–“Myth is a narrative structure of two basic areas of unconscious experience which, of course, are related….In other words, myth is a form of racial [national, social, regional, etc.] history–a narrative distillation of the wishes and fears both of ourselves and the human race” (Dick, p. 188).
    [myths] tap into our collective memory,” our unconscious.
    “Myths are ultimate truths about life death, fate and nature, gods and humans” (Dick, p. 189).
  • phallocentrism: male-dominated society holding power over the others (usually women) through the phallus, the symbol of male potency.
  • phallus: any object that represents the figure of a penis.

Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality”

Last reading of the semester! I’m sure you’ll have lots to say and lots to connect to other readings and a myriad of texts.

  • p. 632: “Any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less “natural” phenomenon, as mere “sexual preference,” or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions.”
  • p. 633: “heterosexuality is presumed the “sexual preference” of “most women,” either implicitly or explicitly. In none of these books, which concern themselves with mothering, sex roles, relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, is compulsory heterosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully affecting these, or the idea of “preference” or “innate orientation” even indirectly questioned.”
  • p. 634: “None of the “experts’” advice has been either particularly scientific or women-oriented; it has reflected male needs, male fantasies about women, and male interest in controlling women—particularly in the realms of sexuality and motherhood—fused with the requirements of industrial capitalism.”
    • “…the economic imperative to heterosexuality and marriage and to the sanctions imposed against single women and widows—both of whom have been and still are viewed as deviant.”
  • p. 635: “The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence, to the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the “only ones” ever to have done so.”
    • “Chodorow believes that the fact that women, and women only, are responsible for child care in the sexual division of labor has led to an entire social organization of gender inequality, and that men as well as women must become primary carers for children if that inequality is to change.”
  • p. 636: “According to Chodorow, women ‘have learned to deny the limitations of masculine lovers for both psychological and practical reasons.'”
  • p. 637: “I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution—even, or especially, by those individuals who feel they are, in their personal experience, the precursors of a new social relation between the sexes.”
  • p. 638: “I believe large numbers of men could, in fact, undertake child care on a large scale without radically altering the balance of male power in a male-identified society.”
  • pp. 638-639: Kathleen Gough “The Origin of the Family”–eight characteristics on the power of men
    • 3. “male control of abortion, contraception, sterilization, and childbirth”
  • p. 640: “…we are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property possession, but a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness, which suggests that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained.”
    • “Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable—even if unsatisfying or oppressive—components of their lives.”
  • pp. 641-642: Via Katherine MacKinnon, “Central and intrinsic to the economic realities of women’s lives is the requirement that women will “market sexual attractiveness to men, who tend to hold the economic power and position to enforce their predilections.'”
  • p. 645: “The ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use, as [Kathleen] Barry documents.”
  • p. 648: “The assumption that “most women are innately heterosexual” stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women*….it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic.”
    • *In her 2003 revision, Rich replaces this 2nd “most women” with “feminism.”
  • p. 649: “Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women.”
  • p. 650: “[Rich] perceive[s] the lesbian experience as being, like motherhood, a profoundly female experience, with particular oppressions, meanings, and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences.”
    • p. 651: “exist[ing] on a lesbian continuum…”
    • Consider this in the context of non-monolithic identities. Then, consider the factors that could influence a subgroup’s experiences (race, class, gender, region, etc.). Then, consider the individual. A label can’t capture the entirety of one’s experience.
  • p. 652: “…male tyranny.”
  • p. 653: “Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.”
  • p. 657: “Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality.”
  • p. 659: “Historians need to ask at every point how heterosexuality as institution has been organized and maintained through the female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class women’s “leisure.'”

Images of Gender vs. (normal) Behavior

It seems we live in binary worlds, the feminine and masculine, the gay and straight, the liberal and conservative, the red and the blue. While there are more complex arrangements in the “real world,” our menus for gender and sexuality are usually dualistic. Those spheres (and their duality) are socially constructed–they are made up of what is considered normal, and any deviation is considered abnormal. Some say media influence our understanding of what it means to be a man or woman, but others point out that it merely reflects what is already considered normal, or, more importantly, ideal. That’s fairly easily seen with images of men and women–we’ve discussed the limited standards of beauty that are simulated and repeated throughout media–but it’s not as easily seen when we analyze behavioral patterns.

What are normal behaviors and where do they come from?

He-Man and She-Ra

Compare the two introductions to He-Man and She-Ra. Are they the same–meaning no difference in the portrayal of the masculine character vs. the feminine character?

Are the representations congruent with your understanding of masculine and feminine roles? Don’t forget your psychoanalytic hat either: What’s going on with the ways the two hold their swords?

Poor Unfortunate Soul…

I have a couple clips for you from The Little Mermaid. As you might remember, Ariel loses her voice and grows legs, so she can be with her man. What’s going on in terms of gender, compulsory heterosexuality, and a girl’s/woman’s conditioning to be acceptable in patriarchal society. Before you answer that, watch the final scene where she’s “given away.”

While we’re on the subject of princesses, who was the audience for the last Royal Wedding? Why are so many American girls/women obsessed with princesses?

Next Class

We’ll finish up discussing the readings and Critical Media Analysis Essay and the presentations you’ll be giving after Thanksgiving.