Heteronormative Beliefs Research Articles

Accounting for Self, Sex and Sexuality in UK Social Workers’ Knowledge Base: Findings from an Exploratory Study

The social work profession struggles to engage with sexuality under the anti-oppressive banner as deftly as it does with other types of social difference, such as ethnicity, age, class and gender. Despite recent theorising and empirical work about sexuality in social work, little is known about social workers’ perceptions, knowledge and values about sexuality in contemporary professional practice. This exploratory study is the first to examine social workers’ beliefs and values about sexuality in relation to everyday professional interactions within the UK. It aims to better account for the ways in which sexuality is constructed and understood within interactions with colleagues and clients. Utilisation of an online survey instrument examined 112 respondents’ perceptions about sexuality, incorporating the Heteronormativity Attitudes and Beliefs Scale (Habarth, 2015) and open-ended questions exploring how social workers acquire knowledge about sexuality. Respondents were qualified social workers from Wales, England and Scotland. Findings suggest that some respondents ‘bracketed’ values to manage between professional and personal identities. We found a relationship between social workers’ religiosity and investment in heteronormative beliefs. Implications for delivery of services to social work clients and practitioners’ learning needs are discussed.

The Relationship Between Heteronormative Beliefs and Verbal Sexual Coercion in College Students

Heteronormative standards for sex and romance situate men and women in a hierarchical relationship that characterizes masculinity as active and persistent and femininity as passive and responsive to male sexuality. Individuals who endorse heteronormative beliefs, such as the belief that men should dominate women sexually or that men are always ready for sex, may therefore be more approving of and experienced with behaviors that involve one partner exerting sexual pressure on the other. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between the endorsement of heteronormative beliefs and men's and women's approval of and experience with verbal sexual coercion (both as a perpetrator and as a victim). We first established a gender-neutral higher-order construct representing heteronormative beliefs consisting of multiple measures of gender norms for sexuality and relationships in a sample of 555 heterosexual college students (292 women, 263 men) primarily of Hispanic origin. We next found that endorsement of heteronormative beliefs was positively correlated with personal acceptance of verbal sexual coercion strategies and personal experience as the victim and perpetrator of verbal sexual coercion for both men and women. While men reported more overall support for heteronormative beliefs and more experience as a victim and perpetrator of verbal sexual coercion, there were minimal gender differences in how heteronormative beliefs related to verbal sexual coercion variables. The positive association found between heteronormative beliefs and sexual coercion in young men's and women's relationships represents an important step towards better understanding the antecedents and consequences of intimate partner violence.

Sexualidades marginais nas bordas do texto: cinema, política e performatividade de gênero em El beso de la mujer araña

Este artigo pretende discutir algumas das ambivalentes relações entre cinema, política e performatividade de gênero no romance El beso de la mujer araña [O beijo da mulher-aranha], romance argentino escrito por Manuel Puig e publicado pela primeira vez em 1976. Embora esse romance não seja o primeiro a problematizar gênero e performatividade no contexto da literatura latino-americana, ele apresenta um enredo particularmente subversivo no que diz respeito à representação de rupturas no interior dos preceitos heteronormativos.

Deconstructing the complex perceptions of gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation among transgender individuals

Conventional heteronormative beliefs about the nature of gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation are fundamentally challenged by the experiences of many transgender individuals. Eleven self-identified transgender individuals were interviewed about their definitions of, understanding of the relationships between, and perceptions of their own gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The questions focused on how transgender individuals define gender roles vs gender identity, how they defined themselves on these dimensions, and how they perceived the relationships among gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. All of the participants understood gender roles to be social constructs and viewed gender identity as being more fluid, compared to essentialist, binary, heteronormative ideas about gender. Most viewed sexual orientation as being dynamically related to gender identity. These findings are discussed in terms of an emerging transgender theory of the nature of gender that transcends essentialist, traditional ideas, as well as social constructionist views of feminist and queer theories.