Abstract
The concept of compulsory heterosexuality was initially developed by lesbian feminists and gay liberationists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Compulsory heterosexuality proved to be a major conceptual innovation because it made possible a structural sociology of sexuality. The center of analysis shifted from the individual homosexual and from individual acts of discrimination to the institutional enforcement of normative heterosexuality and its consequences for nonheterosexuals. This essay provides a critical analysis of this concept as it has been elaborated from the late 1960s to the present. The author outlines the analytical and historical limits of the critique of compulsory heterosexuality without abandoning a notion of the institutionalization of normative heterosexuality.
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