Construction Of Heterosexuality Research Articles

Ficciones somatopolíticas: la invención de la heterosexualidad en la pornografía de distribución gratuita

Framed in the theoretical-political project that asks about the possibility of making those life-forms livable, this article addresses three questions referred to what is a regime of heterosexual intelligibility, which are intelligible bodies in that aspect, and how it is possible to think of another world from it. In this way, we work from an analysis of the categories and labels on which the videos are organized in the pages of pornography for free distribution. Among the results we highlight the construction of a heterosexual body from an internal limit, which differentiates it from subalternity, and an external one, which from subalternity performates through repetition. We conclude a series of transformations in the construction of heterosexuality as a political regime that have gone unnoticed for social analysis and that allow to find in the parodic repetition a mechanism of corporal resistance.

‘Directly in Your Face’: A Qualitative Study on the Sending and Receiving of Unsolicited ‘Dick Pics’ Among Young Adults

‘Dick pics’ are self-taken pictures of penises sent by men via digital devices such as smartphones. Although the unsolicited sending of dick pics has become an object of public and academic attention, few empirical studies have investigated this phenomenon. Based on data from seven same-sex focus group interviews with young adults this qualitative study explores personal experiences with receiving and sending unsolicited dick pics and collective understandings of this phenomenon. Results show that girls experience unsolicited dick pics as intrusive and see them as misguided attempts at flirting, while boys perceive the sending of dick pics as a way of showing off, complimenting, hooking-up with or getting nude pictures in return from girls. Analyses show how these explanations draw on gendered constructions of heterosexuality and how humorous framings of male nudity serve to both reduce the potential consequences of having dick pics shared and undermine the intimidating experience of receiving them. Results are discussed in relation to research on sexting and suggestions for future research are presented.

Accounting for Men’s Refusal of Heterosex: A Story-Completion Study With Young Adults

In the present study we bring together theory regarding the construction of heterosexuality and masculinities to understand the shifting and changing terrain of heterosexual sex (heterosex). We use inductive qualitative content analysis of story completion data to discover the different ways that heterosex is constructed by the male and female respondents in scenarios where women initiate sex and men, at first, refuse. The stories represented a spectrum of responses that reify and subvert dominant understandings of heterosex. Five major themes were generated from the current data (1) men should initiate sex, (2) he wants to take it slowly, (3) it is natural for men to want sex, (4) it is men’s job to look after women, and (5) coercion. We discuss in detail the dominant narratives described by women and men and how they may be shifting. The study thus provides a rich, experience-based representation of heterosexual sexual activity and suggests subtle shifts in how masculinity is managed within heterosexual relationships.

Voices of the Mind

Very little research has examined what goes on in the minds of young men during sex. Such an exploration might reveal gender-normative discourses as well as challenges to such. This discourse analysis understands internal speech as that which both instantiates status quo ideals of masculinity and which challenges them. We use theories of hegemonic masculinity and Vygotskyan notions of “others in the head” to understand how hegemonic masculinity is reproduced during the act of having sex. This study is based on qualitative interviews with thirteen heterosexual young adult US men asking what goes through their mind during sex. Young heterosexual men produce a masculinity discourse that supports dominant constructions of heterosexuality, monitoring their sexual behaviors based on imagined and expected reactions of abstract and very real male reference groups. The analysis shows men describing thoughts during sex that make sex like work, keeps in mind a variety of other people, some literally awaiting news of the sex, and some abstract representations of masculinity. Men report a constant self-evaluation based on women’s performances of pleasure, for example, screaming, never construed as inauthentic, or as a performance at all. Thoughts about masculinity were not present in intimate moments when men described a “letting go of masculinity” in order to be intimate.

‘Straight with a pinch of bi’: The construction of heterosexuality as an elastic category among adult US men

The sexualities of men who have same-sex desires yet identify as straight have attracted significant attention in recent years. We present findings from interviews with 100 such men, whom we recruited while they were seeking sex with men online, and examine the logics that allow them to maintain an identity as straight. Our sample is somewhat unique in that it included men across a wide age range (from 18 to 70), and also because many of our participants are white adult US men who are married or in stable relationships with women. Based on their patterns of sexual interpretation, we discuss how these men make their same-sex desires and behaviours consistent with a primary self-identification as straight. We argue that, in the process of maintaining identities as straight men, they change the definition of heterosexuality, in effect turning it into a considerably elastic category that is perceived as fully compatible with having and enacting same-sex desires.

Improbable frequency? Advocating queer–feminist pedagogic alliances within Irish and European higher education contexts

Heterosexist ideology underpins education policy and practice almost universally. It has the effect of rendering invisible and disrespecting practitioners and students of other sexual and non-gender conforming identities. Much explicitly queer work has challenged this normalising and frequently oppressive higher education terrain. To maximise this queer potential this article proposes re-positioning queer within and through a practice and pedagogy of feminism. The broad-based identity politics of feminism and the anti-identitarian politic of queer may appear a slightly improbable alliance. The article argues, however, that intersectional approaches which reinforce queer integrity, challenge oppressive social norms and simultaneously re-emphasise the importance of the political through an identity politics heavily influenced by feminism, are not just possible but necessary. In seeking to explore what unites feminism and queer educationally, the article makes three observations relating to history, pedagogy and activism. It references two particular LGTBQ Irish and European educational programmes, which it argues highlight this sense of the probable in terms of queer–feminist educational alliances. Such alliances can continue to challenge in material ways sustained educational constructions of heterosexuality as normal, natural and moral and in so doing provide a platform for empowerment and change.

Re-positioning female heterosexuality within postfeminist and neoliberal culture

Contemporary western societies are characterised by a new sexual permissiveness, within which sexualised culture has become normalised and mainstreamed. Situated in this new social landscape, and drawing on postfeminist and neoliberal discourses and dominant constructions of heterosexuality, this article critically examines the impact of these constructions on women’s sexual health in its broadest sense, encompassing physical, mental and social well-being. I argue that dominant discourses of heterosexuality are viewed through a postfeminist and neoliberal lens that both obscures the sexist nature of contemporary culture and transforms, repackages and feeds this sexism back to women as their own choice and as a representation of empowerment; and as such, contemporary constructions of women’s sexuality and bodies are deeply problematic, and pose serious risks to women’s sexual health. To address these issues, not only do we need to develop critical media literacy skills, but we also must open up spaces for collective action and push against the existing sexist culture to allow for alternative discourses and understandings to emerge.

Straight-acting: gay pornography, heterosexuality, and hegemonic masculinity

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the gay adult film industry may contribute to conceptualizations of masculinity and sexuality. Content analysis of a popular gay adult film company’s website, which features ‘str8’ films, provides an exemplary case through which I explore the construction of heterosexuality within the context of same-sex acts, and the relative desire and eroticization of heterosexuality. Findings indicate that straight performers’ profiles contain significantly more masculine markers, while profiles of gay performers are depicted as more feminine and subordinate. Further, data indicate a correlation between masculinity and consumer rating, and through the co-constitution of heterosexuality and masculinity may legitimate hierarchical gender relations.

Engendering the human geographies of Ireland - A thematic section

First Page PreviewThe papers presented in this thematic section are all concerned with questions of gender and sexuality- concerns that over the last three decades have challenged and enriched the practice not only of the discipline of geography, but all of the social sciences and the humanities. Since the middle of the 1970s, feminist geography has had a significant influence on the discipline internationally, opened up new avenues of research and presented critical opportunities to engage with social issues and questions of equality (McDowell, 1999; Oberhauser et ah, 2000). It is arguable that Irish society has always provided productive ground for working through such questions of gender and sexuality. It has not been until comparatively recently, however, that such issues around gender have been consistently examined. Ireland has characteristically been regarded by social scientists as a patriarchal society- a situation that historically was sustained by the apparatus of Church and State, the nature of the labour market and the social and cultural construction of heterosexuality (Mahon, 1994; O'Connor, 1998). Increasingly, these structures have come under sustained critical attention. The emergence of a number of Women's Studies programmes in Irish universities, the establishment of the Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, and the strengthening of bodies such as the National Women's Council to represent women at national level, all illustrate the challenge to patriarchy in academic and public life. Mapping women's experiences in Irish social, political and cultural life has involved the steady accruing of perspectives from a diverse range of disciplines and has brought into visibility the conditions under which gender has acted as a significant axis of difference and social power in Ireland (see Hussey, 1993; Byrne, Byrne and Lyons, 1996; O'Connor, 1998). However, true equality between the sexes remains not only illusive, but unachieved. In one instance, for example, as O'Connor has noted, "...today in Ireland men make up approximately 95 percent of those in senior positions in the civil service, the local authorities, the health boards, etc. Culturally and structurally, there is the deeply embedded idea that women are not suited to authority" (O'Connor, 1998:8).

Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy par Christophe Wall-Romana

of immigration and selfish excess come to the fore.While his character is less endearing in this regard, such behavior reflects a shift in the power dynamics of Arab-European relations—here in the context of a homosexual and transnational love affair.Although filmic adaptations of literary works quite often result in a compromise between the elasticity of literature and the rigidity of the camera’s lens, L’armée du salut demonstrates that the subjective tonality of the novel translates into a powerful, convincing, and thought-provoking piece of cinema. Even though the film’s sudden ending elucidates Taïa’s creative vision, many questions remain unanswered, inciting reflection. University of Miami Walter Shawn Temple Wall-Romana, Christophe. Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7190-8623-6. Pp. 224. $95. Foundational to avant-garde interwar film culture and to philosophical approaches to film after World War II were the writings of Jean Epstein (1897–1953), the noted proponent of photogénie for whom the close-up and altered motion (reverse, fast, slow) could reinvigorate a social body exhausted by warfare and excessive stimuli (19) to reveal realms of experience otherwise inaccessible. Echoing L’Esprit Nouveau’s modernist call to order (171), Epstein’s early books La poésie d’aujourd’hui and Bonjour cinéma (both 1921) not only helped shape photographic and editing styles when silentera poetic experimentalism in France was at its peak; by exposing the enmeshed character of time, movement, and the sensate body onscreen, they unveiled, in WallRomana ’s far-reaching reassessment,a“corporeal subconscious”(28) that later informed the film phenomenology of Edgar Morin, Jean-Luc Godard, and Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to historian Richard Abel, English-language readers had been aware since the 1980s of Epstein’s stature as a theorist—a moniker Wall-Romana contests—while protracted legal battles and poor distribution kept in limbo his directorial output, save La chute de la maison d’Usher (1928, after Poe). Yet Epstein, who had assisted luminaries Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, and Marcel L’Herbier, directed over twenty fictions, from the classic melodrama Cœur fidèle (1923) to the commercial throwaway Mauprat (1926, after Sand). Placing Epstein’s more artistically solid explorations of “borderline sensations and affects”(43) in a fantastic, Symbolist lineage,Wall-Romana makes a strong case for the director of La glace à trois faces (1927) and L’homme à l’Hispano (1932) as a pioneer of queer cinema in France, on a par with Jean Cocteau. Exemplifying Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” Epstein’s œuvre “rather than simply evacuating and closeting homosexuality, insistently makes it a visible part of heterosexual construction”(80); the critic’s duty,then,is to show,beneath an apparently conventional “heterosexual matrix” (85), how films, and melodrama in particular, ultimately“queer”our vision (81).References abound to Epstein’s better-known French contemporaries Gance and Renoir, but also to Hitchcock who plays master of suspense 210 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 211 to Epstein’s art of “suspension” (54). Particularly revelatory in this painstakingly researched volume is chapter 4, “Brittany, Edge of the Modern World.” Epstein’s film essays on France’s savage coastal fringe presage the vérité techniques and collective authorship of Jean Rouch, as well as the rough location shooting of Italian neorealism. Ultimately,this documentary practice,which culminated in the immersive Le tempestaire (1947), may prove more central to our understanding of French film history than Epstein’s poetico-symbolist narratives.While Wall-Romana downplays the importance of screenwriter/actress/director Marie Epstein’s collaboration with her brother, his assessment of the film philosopher’s broader influence is robust: Deleuze’s “timecrystal ”(179) in Cinema I and II, Jacques Rancière’s account of narrative films as fables “thwarted” by moments of photogénie (182); and Ang Lee’s corporeal flights of wuxia fancy in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (197) owe not a little to the subject of this probing and exacting study. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Bahier-Porte, Christelle, éd. (Re)lire Lesage. Saint-Étienne: PU de Saint-Étienne, 2012. ISBN 978...

The discursive production of everyday heterosexualities

In this article, I examine the role of talk in constructing speakers as heterosexual beings. Heterosexuality is a cultural construction relying on strictly enforced norms for its continuing dominance. Queer linguistics initially focused on the language of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups, but is now widening its focus to explore the discursive construction of heterosexuality, and to show that language does not just reflect the heteronormative order; it is also involved in reproducing that order. I shall explore how heterosexuality is ‘done’ in everyday talk, drawing on Cameron and Kulick’s idea of ‘the heteronormative hierarchy’. I shall also show how closely sexuality and gender are linked, and will argue that this closeness is essential to the maintenance of heteronormativity.

Negotiating heteronormativity: Exploring South African bisexual women’s constructions of marriage and family

Although heteronormativity remains firmly in place in many contexts, challenges to a construction of heterosexuality as natural and superior increasingly emerge. However, despite increasing visibility of such challenges, bisexuality remains largely absent from such debates. Bisexual women occupy a potentially interesting position in discourses around heteronormativity and this paper explores how heteronormativity functions in the accounts of 13 South African bisexual women. Through a discourse analysis of interview data, a discourse of heterosexual marriage as normative and socially valued is identified as exerting a powerful influence on participants’ constructions of relationships and families. The findings further explore ways in which bisexuality is complicated by such a heteronormative marriage discourse and indicate a lack of integration of a bisexual identity in participants’ accounts. We suggest that drawing bisexuality into debates around heteronormativity can contribute to increased positions from which to challenge the coercive effects of heteronormativity.

'I think Houston wants a kiss right?'

This article provides an ethnographically based discourse analysis of linguistic practices of heterosexual construction in a transnational media context, Eurovision Song Contest press conferences. It aims to shed light on how research on heterosexualities can contribute to the critical discussion of heteronormativity as commonly found in Queer Linguistics. The analysis identifies the following patterns of heterosexual construction: 1. talk about spouses, partners and family, 2. talk about heterosexual love song lyrics, 3. binary gender polarisation, and 4. the projecting of heteronormative desire onto participants. This order roughly corresponds to an increase in the heteronormative force of the constructions found. More blatant forms of heteronormative enforcement prove to cause negative reactions in this community of practice. It is argued that the sexual constructions documented incorporate aspects of both sexual identity and desire and that the transnational salience of the context facilitates a stronger confrontation of heterosexual construction with alternative discourses.

Women’s constructions of heterosexual non-romantic sex and the implications for sexual health

Qualitative interviews with 15 Australian women who engage in non-romantic sex demonstrate that women choose a variety of non-romantic sexual arrangements and activities. A discourse analysis examined the ways in which the women position themselves relative to dominant constructions of femininity and heterosexuality, themselves embedded in neoliberal, post-feminist assumptions of women’s unproblematic capacity for individual empowerment, choice and sexual freedom. Despite choosing non-normative sexual encounters, the women were frequently constrained by the gendered hetero-normative discourses of hetero monogamy and gender differences. The analysis demonstrates that the conventions of heterosex implicit in both of these discourses subordinate the legitimacy of women’s sexual agency, sexual desire and sexual entitlement. Although the women resisted these constructions with varying levels of success, we argue that they cannot be resisted outright because women have no discourse to draw upon which encapsulates an empowered female sexual agency. Thus, women who have non-romantic sex frequently internalise the discourses of hetero monogamy and gender differences, posing serious risks to their sexual health, both physically and emotionally. For women to ensure their sexual health, conventional constructions of female sexuality need to be challenged at a societal level.

Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go

Contemporary debate and speculation about the prospect of reproductive cloning reveals the way in which such beings, as ‘copies’ of human originals, challenge notions of the human, especially in relation to issues of individuality, authenticity and origin. This article explores the representation of human cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction, Never let me go, published in 2005. It investigates the possibility that Ishiguro's exploration of the contingency of human identity has a significant, if oblique, relationship to heteronormative constructions of heterosexuality and the human. In order to trace how a fiction of human cloning might give rise to questions of heteronormativity, I will foreground issues of reproduction and their relationship to normative constructions of heterosexuality. The controversies prompted by the potential prospect of reproductive human cloning can be attributed in part to the ways in which it challenges the heterosexual prerogative to reproduction; I aim to situate human cloning within the context of other technologies of assisted reproduction and to theorise its challenge to the heterosexual prerogative to reproduction within feminist and queer frameworks.

A study on the social construction of heterosexuality in early childhood as observed in the practices of young girls

A study on the social construction of heterosexuality in early childhood as observed in the practices of young girls

This Is home, or Is It?: Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space

In this article, as suggest by the subtitle, I try to expose a kind of hidden homelessness. One that is not worse than others but important to bring to light. One where narratives are missing. One that goes against the essentializing of home as a middle-class heterosexual construction while not negating the desire for a home by the ones that have none.This is a textual performance about the idea of linking traditional notions of home with how academic knowledge is constructed about the homeless—by disrupting grand narratives of home as physical or institutional space. It is a decolonizing performance autoethnography exposing homelessness that returns its gaze into the process of knowledge production in the hope that by reflecting on how knowledge is produced, troubling the Western concept of home, we academics may create narratives that help more people feel housed.

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality. (The New Middle Ages). Louise M. Sylvester

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality. (The New Middle Ages). Louise M. Sylvester

Louise M. Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality. (The New Middle Ages.) Palgrave McMillan, 2008

Louise M. Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality. (The New Middle Ages.) Palgrave McMillan, 2008

Medieval romance and the construction of heterosexuality

Constructing the Heterosexual Contract Romance and Rape The Sadistic Hero Dynamics of Consensual Heterosex Romance Debased