Heterosexual Culture Research Articles

Parents’ views on gay male teachers in early childhood education

ABSTRACT The stigma surrounding men’s sexuality in Early Childhood Education (ECE) is complex and part of a sexuality hierarchy within which homophobic, emasculating and disparaging undertones are often used to label male teachers in ECE as gay. In this paper the authors demonstrate the complex and gendered ways in which this stigma unfolds in a South African context and offer a decolonising gender perspective to highlight how the country’s socio-political context impacts on how parents respond to gay men in ECE. The parents in this study expressed tolerance and acceptance of gay men’s involvement in ECE. Notwithstanding, these diverse views, many parents’ tolerance and acceptance of gay men in ECE was found to be powerfully structured along a discriminatory heterosexist culture. Despite this, some parent’s acceptance of gay male teachers in ECE were underpinned by gender-progressive attitudes to focus on curtailing gender discrimination and promoting gender diversity and inclusivity at school.

The Broken Promises of the Lesbian Utopia: Woman to Woman Intimate Partner Abuse

The feminist movement of 1970s America notoriously prioritized issues faced by white, heterosexual women. The movement’s leaders explicitly distanced themselves from lesbian members out of fear of “lesbian baiting,” a sexist and homophobic tactic employed by anti-feminists to discredit the feminist movement by blanket-labeling its members as lesbians. In contract, others embraced “lesbian feminism,” a feminist movement that sought to prioritize issues faced by predominantly white lesbian women. These lesbian feminists promoted the concept of the “lesbian utopia,” which posited that lesbian relationships are “gender empty,” thus fundamentally egalitarian and devoid of interpersonal violence. A predominantly heterosexist culture further fueled this concept, layering it with homophobic stereotypes, including dismissing woman to woman intimate partner abuse (WWIPA), intimate partner violence occurring in a relationship between two sexual minority women, as a “catfight” or “mutual abuse.” Together, the lesbian utopia and heterosexism acted synergistically to erase the experiences of victim/survivors of WWIPA. Despite the promises of the lesbian utopia, sexual minority women are just as or more likely than heterosexual women to experience IPV and its adverse mental health outcomes. However, sexual minority victim/survivors face additional barriers to receiving support. Sexual minority women report formal support systems such as domestic violence shelters and police departments to be last-resort options out of fear of experiencing discrimination or compounding trauma. For sexual minority women of color and transgender women, these stressors are further compounded by experiences of racism and transphobia. Public health interventions centering diversity, inclusion and social justice to provide adequate support and healthcare services to victim/survivors of WWIPA are needed.

Queering the English Translation of Male Same-Sex Desire in 1990s Chinese-Language Literature

In recent years, we have come to see translation studies as intimately intertwined with queer theory. The interpenetration of the two fields has stimulated significant shifts in how we understand both the nature and the uses of queering social identities and categories. It has also illuminated the complex and nuanced ways in which desire, sexuality, and gender are inscribed in languages and translation. If the word queer is significant both for its “celebration of difference” and in its “reappropriation of the language used by the heterosexist culture,” then the meanings that queer acquires in its translation both to and from non-English linguistic and cultural codes are particularly useful for the study of how queer goes beyond universal notions, fixed identities, or default categories. Translation is “comparably indeterminate and similarly imbricated with issues of gender and sexuality, playfulness, and power.” In this article, I discuss the relationship between queer and translation, and the implications of this relationship for the queering of translation, through textual analysis of the translated, transferred, transmitted representations male same-sex desire and practices, particularly fetishism and sadomasochism, in Taiwanese queer literature from the 1990s. That decade saw an unprecedented flowering of queer literature in Taiwan and, as such, provides a fascinating case study in the historical and social development of the global circulation of queer theory across languages and cultures. I centre my discussion around two seminal texts, Ta-wei Chi’s short story anthology 膜 (The Membranes, 1996) and Chu T’ien-Wen’s novel 荒人手記 (Notes of A Desolate Man, 1994), and draw on William J. Spurlin’s (2017) rethinking of gender and sexual politics in the spaces between languages and cultures, Brian James Baer’s (2020) application of queer theory to translation studies and Douglas Robinson’s (2020) formulation of “equivalencefuck.” I argue that their insights enable an approach to the queering of translation that incorporates queer theory into the theory and practice of translation by understanding translation as essentially a queer praxis that simultaneously fucks with linguistic and cultural binaries on the one hand and with sexual and gender binaries on the other. While fucking binaries plays a vital role in critiquing what is fetishized as source-target equivalence in translation, considering translation as a queer praxis demonstrates that the conjunction of queer and translation offers “new sites of heterogeneity and difference.” Thus, I argue that bringing queer theory to translation and translation studies disrupts some of the foundational assumptions about translation. In turn, this offers new opportunities to queer how we think about sexual and gender difference, cultural dissimilitude, and linguistic diversity in both translation practice and translation studies.

A Postmodern Qualitative Study on ‘the Passage to the Act’ of a Female Homosexual Who Married to a Man

The researcher analyzed the life of a female homosexual who had to marry a man in order to adapt without being criticized among many heterosexuals by the postmodern qualitative research method according to Lacan's 'the passage of the act' theory. The participant of this study decided on their own independent life through a divorce after experiencing their father's coercion to marry men, bullying due to homosexual tendencies, fear of sexual identity being discovered in the church, marriage for socialization, fear of sexual behavior, and guilt of cheating and marrying homosexuals. After divorce, the research participant maintained a friendship with her husband, and was disconnected from her parents, and became more friendly with her siblings. She was leaving the church that treats homosexuality as a sin and attending the church that accepts the research participant, and is making a relationship that supports her regardless of sexual identity. The researcher was able to confirm the difficulties of homosexuals living in many heterosexual cultures through the postmodern qualitative research process, and it was difficult to criticize her marriage, even if it was a lie. This was because it was not only a lie of the research participant but also a problem of social gaze. The social perspective should be changed so that 'the passage of the act' does not occur dangerously and subjectivity can appear in discourse.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Contextualising Dickinson’s non-heteronormativity in Verse: A Portrayal of otherness

The study aims to place in critical perspective Dickinson’s non-heteronormative stance, adopted in selected love-poems – To Own a Susan, Title Divine is Mine, Her Breast is fit for Pearls, among others. Her cloistered life dictated by 19th century New England’s restrictive culture, together with self-imposed isolation from contemporary society, segregated her considerably. Denying the institution of marriage and consummation, she defies domination by custodians of hegemonic masculinity: such is her unambiguous proclamation of resisting docile divinity, that reduces women to positions of choiceless-ness, material and emotional subjugation. Dickinson’s letters reveal an ‘otherness,’ antithetical to age-old conceptions of Victorian Femininity. She refused to be contained by phallocentric norms, countering the ‘Angel in the Hearth’ stereotype and surpassing compulsory heterosexuality. These possibly never appealed to her psyche, sometimes revealing an extraordinary love for death – ushering in her existentialist crisis. Dickinson’s homoeroticism, being a crucial route to navigate a personality as multidimensional, anticipates 20th century Lesbian Existence. While critics examine her feminism, her erotic voice isn’t ignorable. Her impassioned, often controversial, partnership with Sue proves a direct subversion of archetypal choices invariably expected of women. The study shall probe into Dickinson’s experience and portrayal of lesbian identity within the politics of heterosexual culture. Dickinson’s “God” bears close proximity to a patriarch, who may not be violently dominant, but may reckon and revive narratives with the male-female binary unperturbed. The paper explores her treatment of ‘human body’ as a metaphor of transcendence from essentialist notions of heterosexual relations, while enquiring into circumstances behind the emergence of alternative gender ideologies and evolving survival strategies in staunchly patriarchal societies.

How emerging trends in historiography expose the Canadian Army’s past discriminatory practices and provide hope for future change

This “lessons learned” article examines how emerging trends over time in the historiography of the Canadian Army have challenged and continue to challenge the white Anglophone masculine heterosexual culture which is especially associated with its combat units. This study began as an examination of the intersection between the historiography and the current priorities for sufficient female participation in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) which are intended to improve past abusive patriarchal practices and create effective and safe international interventions. Gender and sexual abuses were the initial foci, but the historiography revealed the interconnectedness of widespread discriminations against all “others”—defined here as anyone with a different gender, sexuality, race, language, religion, or culture. The article opens with a brief summary of evolving feminist ideas about security forces in general. It then delves into the historiographical trends which have demonstrated how systemic discriminations have privileged white Anglo men in combat roles while underplaying their contributions and the contributions of “others” in support roles in the Canadian Army over time. The key lesson learned from this work is that gender balance alone is not enough to address the profound cultural issues which plague the Canadian Army.

Accepting or rejecting the label: how gay employees cope with harassment at work

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how gay employees, as labeled deviants, cope with heterosexist harassment at work in an Asian culture of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity, using the modified labeling theory.Design/methodology/approachUsing qualitative research approach, in-depth interviews were carried out with 16 self-identified gay employees.FindingsResults revealed how the coping strategies of gay employees, in the face of harassment, are entwined with the labeling and stigma leading to diverse and complex coping strategies. Several broader coping strategies were thus identified based on whether the participants accepted the label of deviance and stigma and whether they were open about their sexuality. These broader coping strategies are support seeking, confrontation, inaction, quitting and, stigma and labeling avoidance strategies. Under these broader strategies, there were also sub strategies such as seeking social support, organizational support, legal support the support of the wise, as well as secrecy and social withdrawal.Originality/valueThese findings will advance the knowledge in coping strategies of heterosexist harassments at work as well as knowledge in harassment of gay employees, in hegemonic heterosexual cultures.

Asking queer(er) questions: epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative inquirers

This collection of distinct scholarly essays deliberatively turns to queer experience and theorizing as a resource for constructing vibrant qualitative research designs. Queer theory offers a breadth of epistemological and methodological possibilities for qualitative projects that are too frequently overlooked for many reasons. These reasons include frequently strict association of queer theory with queer research topics and researchers, as well as a concurrent reluctance to interrogate the representational needs of heterosexist culture served by the metaphor of the ‘closet.’ Queer theory also compels inquiry that takes up the unique circumstances of queer subjects. Locating educational inquiry within globally complex socio-historical dynamics and a post-Obergefell/post-2016 election U.S. context, this article poses multiple trajectories through which various scholars explore queer(er) qualitative inquiry in educational studies. These perspectives invite researchers to rethink qualitative inquiry designs through engagement with the queer, inclusive of research topics not initially perceived to be queer.

Words for a conversation: speech, doubt and faith in the films of Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve

Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1996) are landmark studies that established the centrality of women’s experience in mid-twentieth century Hollywood’s imaginary and posed, against a backdrop of increasing sexual equality following women’s suffrage, deep ethical questions of recognition and non-recognition, desire and freedom, within the traditional American heterosexual couple. Cavell identified conversation as central to these films’ attempts to grapple with shifting forms of private intimacy and their relation to broader changes in the public sphere. In this article, the author demonstrates that Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve deploy the Cavellian techniques of everyday language brought to vivid life within a naturalistic mise-en-scène to explore heterosexual coupling culture within changing French gender norms and roles. This allows their films to explore a specifically feminine subjectivity, bringing to the fore questions of self-reliance and doubt in a society which allows women legal and social freedom but still subjects them to patriarchal expectations. The article thus sheds light on why Rohmer and Hansen-Løve’s cinema makes such use of dialogue, its connection to a sympathetic interest in female becoming, and traces a new New Wave inheritance outside of Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism.

Colonising antinormative sex: The flexibility of post-porn heterosex in random webcam sex

Random webcam encounters first came into popular consciousness with the rise of Chatroulette in 2009. Since then, various websites have emerged based on a similar model, catering specifically to webcam based sexual practices. This article focuses on one of these sites, Dirtyroulette, and argues that it is an example of what I am calling ‘post-porn heterosex’—defined by the increasing acceptance of pornography into heterosex. An examination of the dialectics of engagement on Dirtyroulette—the complex navigation of public and private, boredom and attention, exhibitionism and voyeurism, signal and noise, and randomness and consistency—reveals how users perform post-porn sex acts. For Dirtyroulette users the normative is not opposed to the nonnormative, and sex acts which appear transgressive or homosocial may be demonstrating how heterosex colonises emergent sexual practices and spaces. This article speculates as to why the site is not a space for antinormative sex, and why the majority of sex acts should be considered as post-porn heterosex. Dirtyroulette demonstrates that post-porn heterosex is more fluid than the public, symbolic and static images of heterosex that form the foundation of heterosexuality’s ‘natural’ claims. This article asks: Does the visibility of Dirtyroulette provide a potential rupture in heterosex—does it produce opportunities in which the ‘natural’ claims of heterosex are contradicted by an image that is not fixed and does not have a foundational orientation? Or is a correlation between the symbolic image of heterosex and the gestures of heterosex no longer required for the maintenance of heterosexual culture?

Girls negotiating sexuality and violence in the primary school

Girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence and harassment is a recurrent theme in much of the literature on schooling in sub‐Saharan Africa. Within this research, girls are often framed as passive victims of violence. By drawing on a case study, this paper focuses on 12 to 13‐year‐old South African school girls as they mediate and participate in heterosexual cultures that are simultaneously privileging and damaging. Set against the wider social context where violent gender relations are key to the building blocks of patriarchy, the paper examines how heterosexuality underscores the formation of femininity as girls engage with and participate with each other and boys in informal school relations. To this end, Butler's concept of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ is deployed to examine how girls navigate the wall of male power, where the ‘real’ expression of femininity is embedded within heterosexuality. The paper explores girls’ investment in heterosexual cultures in the school playground and on ‘dress‐up Friday’ to examine how gender power inequalities and violent relations manifest. In expanding the analysis of heterosexuality to primary school contexts, the paper broadens the focus of school‐based gender and sexualities research in sub‐Saharan Africa to address a neglected area of younger girls’ femininity and their active agency. The paper argues for the importance of addressing primary school girls, femininity and the power of heterosexuality through which relations of inequalities operate.

Masculinity and Melancholia at the Virtual End: Leaving the World (of Warcraft)

Avatar suicide videos ritualize an avatar’s final exit from the virtual world. Focusing on such videos in the context of World of Warcraft, this essay argues first that the avatar-player relationship produces a fluid subjectivity; then, drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of melancholy gender, the author contends that this subjectivity enables a recognition of the same-sex love and desire prohibited by heterosexist culture through an enactment of its loss. As such, avatar suicide videos dramatize death in order to create an important space of public grieving in which the cultural prohibitions against such recognition and mourning might be suspended. Disrupting norms of aggressive heteromasculinity in dominant gamer culture, these videos might help us imagine alternative ways of living with melancholy gender.

Deconstructing the ‘Dance Hall Space’ in Jamaica

Dance Hall, like the famous Jamaican reggae music, emerged out of the bowels of poor inner-city people wanting to tell their story. The proverbial socialization and identity need found in all human populations and culture, the need for the catharsis, the need to be heard, the quest to have the ears and attention of a neglectful society served as the scaffold from which jettisoned this emergence. For black lower classes, glossed as downtown people, the dancehall represents a symbol of pride in the ghetto; a source for black identity and expression, and the awakening of our roots in African culture. One such deviation occurs when women and men are erotically oriented to members of the same sex. A man who acts upon this erotic orientation violates a tenet of masculinity and most importantly appears to reject standards by which ‘real men’ are defined as selves and as subjects. Within a heterosexist culture like Jamaica, what is not masculine is feminine. Unable to cross freely between spheres, gender traitors are deemed to be homosexuals despite where their biological or sexual orientation may lie. A man who acts too effeminate is then regarded as a ‘maama man’ (feminine or effeminate man), and a,woman who acts too masculine is termed as being ‘butch’ or as being ‘man royal’. One of the most notorious homophobic songs ever produced in dancehall history is perhaps “Boom-bye-bye” by Buju Banton. Saunders posits that upon its release, the song received substantial air play on the radio and in the dance clubs however, when news of its content hit the air waves, the song was immediately banned for its homophobic lyrics. In addition, the song nearly cost Banton his international career and resulted in the sudden demise of DJ Shabba Ranks’s career after he supported and reiterated these sentiments in an international interview. The ‘Dance Hall Space’ is a social institution that expresses Jamaicans resistance to sexual exploitation, particularly the sodomization of Black slaves, and goes to the root of their allowed dissention with Europeans supremacy.

A Computer-Mediated Escape from the Closet: Exploring Identity, Community, and Disinhibited Discussion on an Internet Coming Out Advice Forum

Research suggests that gay men and lesbians, as a product of being raised by heterosexuals in a heterosexist culture, are often shielded from information to help them cope with their stigmatized identity in their early years. Unsurprisingly, this community of individuals has been found to use the Internet more heavily than their heterosexual counterparts. This study examined an advice sub-forum on a popular set of forums designated for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) people negotiating the coming out process. Employing online disinhibition as a framework, and drawing from an identity management standpoint, a thematic analysis uncovered seven unique ways that LGBTQ people create community and craft identities in a computer-mediated context.

Qualitative case study on the heterosexual culture of female students: Focusing on the transition period from elementary school to middle school

Qualitative case study on the heterosexual culture of female students: Focusing on the transition period from elementary school to middle school

Desiring machines and nomad spaces: neoliberalism, performativity and becoming in senior secondary drama classrooms

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.

The relativity of heterosexual norms and gender power on young peoples sexuality in Africa

Within sociological discourse, young people’s sexual practices have become an area of particular interest as sociologists attempt to contextualise sexuality as multifaceted social experiences rather than as psychological or psychoanalytic processes. This study introduces a conceptual framework for investigating young people’s sexuality and sexual practices in African context. It was achieved through a critical review of the conceptual framework developed by a group of feminist authors in the UK context which identifies five interacting layers of power through which young people become sexually active and socially heterosexual. By adapting and modifying the feminists’ framework, this study delves into the social processes through which certain norms, beliefs, gender practices intersect with heterosexual norms to constitute well-established practices among young Africans. This study concludes by asking for a space to redefine conventional practices of gender and heterosexual culture in order to enhance young people’s agency for pleasurable and healthful sexual relations. Key words: Gender, sexuality, heterosexual, culture, young people, Africa.

The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, by Louis-Georges Tin

The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, by Louis-Georges Tin, translated by Michael Roy. Boston, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2012. xi, 197 pp. $21.95 US (cloth). Historians of sexuality often take for granted that modern Western has enforced what amounts to compulsory heterosexuality--and that is itself of relatively recent vintage. These ideas are also the points of departure for this brief and ambitious work by Louis-Georges Tin, French scholar-activist specializing in sixteenth-century literature. Originally published in 2008 by Editions Autrement, this work appeared in France year after Jonathan Ned Katz's The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago, 2007). By largely focusing on French body of texts, and pushing the origins of back to the Middle Ages, Tin considerably extends the scope of Katz's study. Yet, by opting for breadth and brevity rather than depth and detail, Tin ends up erring on the side of generality. Tin seems aware of these problems but, rather inconveniently for those who would have expected to find such discussion in the introduction, he addresses the aims and limitations of his study only in the conclusion. The central terms of The Invention of Heterosexual Culture are loosely defined. Tin marks difference between heterosexual practices, which he says are tied to instinct and are therefore universal, and which give[s] symbolic primacy to the man-woman couple and to love in its cultural, literary, or artistic representations (p. ix). The opposite of heterosexual is nevertheless not homosexual or practices because, in many cases, the form of love that bound men together prior to the triumph of courtly love was not necessarily physically consummated. Thus Tin employs the term (p. 5) as the preferred opposite of heterosexual culture, even though the only homosocial that Tin entertains is male-male. Tin's use of the term culture refers in rather traditional way to works of high and not in the anthropological sense of the word. Thus consists largely of selectively chosen texts (chivalric, ecclesiastical, and medical) that prescribe or comment on ideals and behaviour, but has little to do with social behavior (p. 26). Tin argues that the Middle Ages represented transitional period during which an ancient warrior celebration of homosocial male bonds was eclipsed by new emphasis on heterosexuality manifested in the emerging ideals of courtly love and the chivalric code. In the form of conjugal bonds, heterosexuality had always been deemed necessary for the purposes of reproduction, but had long been considered capable of causing effeminacy in those men who practiced it exclusively or excessively. The Church too seemed hostile to heterosexual culture, but since for it the problem was less military prowess than spirituality, it privileged a society of pious brotherhood and saintly predilection (p. 56). Yet the homosociality the Church promoted seems to have been erected against sexuality in general. However affectively charged they might be, and regardless of what might happen in everyday life, male-male relations were assumed to be chaste, and it was heterosexual relations that might cause the concupiscence that distracted men from their spiritual obligations (p. …