I was lucky to find Adrienne Rich's essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" on pfd file. Like the previous writers that I have read in my one-person book club, Rich is a name that constantly pops up when it comes to feminist theory. I was very excited to read this essay about compulsory heterosexuality (heterosexuality as default sexual orientation). The first time I came across that notion, it was very lightly addressed by my political science professor when he stated blankly to the class, "Everyone assumes you are straight."
You can read Wikipedia synopsis of the essay. Basically Rich's argues that heterosexuality has been present in our social consciouses and a dictating narrative in literature, culture, and lifestyle. Rich uses Kathleen Gough list of '“eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary societies” to identify the denial of sexuality for women by means of control and suppression. Rich also identifies lesbianism in two terms: lesbian existence “both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. The other, lesbian continuum, refers to the overall “range - through each woman’s life and throughout history - of woman-identified experiences, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman”.
I did some highlights (on the Kindle). The following are her quotes:
- "I am concerned here with two other matters as well: first, how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, like partners co-workers, lovers, tribe has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise; and second, the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings, including feminist scholarship."
- "A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue"
- "Heterosexuality is presumed as a 'sexual preference' of most women,' either implicitly or explicitly."
- Women as consumer victims: "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."
- "I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution..." [When I finished reading this essay, this is the most important idea I came out with, and something that I haven't thought of before, that we need to see heterosexuality as a political institution. If we begin to see it as such, we begin to understand the power structures it enforces in society]
- "But even so-called soft-core pornography and advertising depict women as objects of sexual appetite devoid of emotional context, without individual meaning or personality: essentially as a sexual commodity to be consumed by males."
- "A lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life; her job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual but a heterosexual woman, in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of "real" women."
- "Enormous male population engaging in female sexual slavery": Rich lists wife beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, johns (tricks) and rapists, pornography purveyors, associated with prostitution, pimps, slavery gangs, etc.
- Rich doesn't like the term 'gay' nor 'lesbian' because it is a "stigmatized clinical term"
- "If we think of heterosexuality as the 'natural' emotional and sensual inclination for women, lives such as [Emily Dickinson and Zora Neale Hurston] are seen as deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived."
- "Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty."
- Rich writing about lesbian women who are in a heterosexual marriage, they see it as a 'natural destiny' and 'their only expectation for ECONOMIC security."
- "For black woman -- already twice an outsider -- to choose to assume still another 'hated identity' is problematic indeed.'
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