Heterosexual Culture Research Articles

Judith Butler’s Postmodern Existentialism

Bucher ascertains that Butler's description of the temporalized process of structuration, which seeks to avoid recourse to political voluntarism, or the sovereign intentionality of the autonomous individual, yields powerful insights into social identity. He asserts further that Butler's description of the dominant heterosexual culture in terms of melancholia, and her insights into the structures of repetition and difference that make up the social conventions that produce cultural norms, represent important resources in thinking about contemporary cultural conflicts.

Condoms and the Making of Sexual Differences in AIDS Heterosexual Culture

In feminist analyses of HIV/AIDS and heterosexuality it is often suggested that the constitution of sexual difference and gender concerns the specific image of heterosexual women's bodies. Such understandings of power and embodiment are especially at play in analyses of safer-(hetero)sex advertisements where the object of the condom is considered to represent a diseased female body. But while the object of the condom in AIDS heterosexual culture is generally understood to concern a female `other' and in addition a disappearing male body, in this article I call into question this understanding of the condom. Specifically, through an analysis of AIDS research findings on safer heterosex practise, I suggest that the object of the condom concerns not sexed female bodies but a heterosexual masculine self-identity.

"They Still Don't Understand Why I Hate Wearing Dresses!" An Autoethnographic Rant on Dresses, Boats, and Butchness

Using autoethnographic scenes from her lived experiences, the author argues that butchness is a discursive and performative practice in a sexist, heterosexist culture that engages female-bodied people, in particular lesbians, in the expression of ableness. The author uses the notions of dresses and boats as metaphors for requisite femininity and ableness, respectively, and argues that butchness is used as a resource to respond—personally and theoretically—to a culture that sees the female body as less competent than the male body. This article suggests that theories of gender and sexuality must be more attentive to practices of constructing self in everyday life and that they must give greater consideration to how individuals present themselves to various audiences.

The Overstimulation of Everyday Life: I. New Aspects of Male Homosexuality

Western heterosexual culture surrounds the homosexually inclined boy in a climate of erotic overstimulation that powerfully affects his development and adult sexual adaptation. This assertion is illustrated through a case presentation of a homosexual man who shared a bed with his brother from childhood into adolescence. Analysis of the patient's transference enactment--repeatedly falling asleep on the couch--gradually revealed the psychic impact of this everyday overstimulation: the creation of a tantalized inner world of longing. The regular occurrence and developmental understanding of adolescent homosexual boys' unrequited love affairs with adolescent heterosexual boys are described and explored. Finally, the overstimulation of everyday life is proposed as a new model for understanding certain behavioral aspects of male homosexuality, such as the avoidance of rough-and-tumble play in childhood and homosexual cruising.

Judith Butler: Une Nouvelle Existentialiste?

For indeed no one has yet determined what body can do. -Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Proposition 2, Scholium is thinking: therefore there is something thinks: this is upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But this means positing as true a priori our belief in concept of substance:-that when there is thought there has to be something that thinks is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom adds a doer to every deed. -Nietzsche, Will to Power, (secs)484 To be born is both to be born of world and to be born into world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in first case we are acted upon, in second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness. -Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 453 Judith Butler ends her preface to Bodies Matter with following remark: This text is offered, then, in part as a rethinking of some parts of Gender Trouble have caused confusion, but also as an effort to think further about workings of heterosexual hegemony in crafting of matters sexual and political. As a critical rearticulation of various theoretical practices, including feminist and queer studies, this text is not intended to be programmatic. And yet, as an attempt to clarify my `intentions,' it appears destined to produce a new set of misapprehensions. I hope they prove, at least, to be productive ones.1 To date, Butler's work has been exceedingly productive for those working in both feminist and queer studies and, if my undergraduate students' enthusiasm for her work is any indication, it will continue to be productive for next generation or two of graduate students at least. But her work has yet to be as productive in more traditional philosophical venues as I believe it deserves to be. While not wanting to take anything away from positive reception her writings, and in particular Gender Trouble, have received from readers interested in feminist theory and in rapidly evolving field of queer theory, I want to suggest her work warrants serious consideration from philosophers and theorists working in more mainstream political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and, in particular, twentieth-century French philosophy. It is primarily from this perspective I read Gender Trouble, not for its account of gender identity and performance but for role several French theorists, and in particular Michel Foucault, play in her argument. While her account of subject as a performative is far more than simply an application of Foucaultian analytic, it can certainly be engaged as one of most interesting and innovative appropriations of Foucault, and in particular of account of subject, has appeared to date. I say Foucaultian-Nietzschean because while there are many different ways in which Foucault's work has been appropriated within contemporary theory, Butler has been at forefront of those who have made a case for relevance of Nietzsche to a critical project seeks to rethink gender (and) identity insofar as she has positioned Nietzsche's challenge to a metaphysics of substance at center of her articulation of a performative account of identity. Drawing upon Foucault and Nietzsche both, Butler challenges language of interiority, offering in its stead language of performativity in which the gendered body [as] performative suggests it has no ontological status apart from various acts which constitute its reality. While distancing herself from several of Foucault's positions on sexual difference and body, political dimension of Butler's conclusions identity is a practice and gender a performative remained profoundly Foucaultian as she articulated alternative gender possibilities produced within repressive and constraining practices of our compulsory heterosexist culture. …

'Coming out': Gender, (hetero)sexuality and the primary school

Foregrounding the primary school as a key cultural arena for the production and reproduction of sexuality and sexual identities, this article goes some way to addressing what are absent from many sociological portrayals of young children and schooling. Drawing on data derived from an ethnographic exploration into children's gender and sexual identities during their final year of primary school, the article examines how dominant notions of heterosexuality underscore much of children's identity work and peer relationships. The article further illustrates how boys and girls are each subject to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, where to be a 'normal' girl or boy involves the projection of a coherent and abiding heterosexual self. The implications of recognising children's sexual cultures and the pressures to conform to a heterosexual culture are discussed briefly in the concluding section.

The cross-culturing work of gay and lesbian elderly

Homosexuals wend their way through a hostile culture in which an understanding of the attitudes and actions of the dominant heterosexual culture is necessary for practical, emotional, and even physical survival. By virtue of their life-long experiences in such a culture, gay and lesbian elderly provide a perspicuous opportunity to examine practices through which people define and engage other cultural groups—practices we call “cross-culturing”. Our analysis of in-depth interviews with a sample of gay men and lesbians over the age of 65 showed that, for them, cross-culturing is complicated by divisions within the homosexual community regarding the appropriate response to the “heterosexual other”. We examine how our subjects use their relation to both heterosexual culture and to the alternative paradigms within the homosexual community to define and evaluate the self over the life course. We conclude the paper by suggesting the possibilities and concerns for exploring the response to cultural diversity among future cohorts of elderly, homosexual or otherwise.

Desire, Cultural Dissonance, and Incentives for Remaining HIV-Negative

SUMMARY This article, written from the personal observations of an HIVprevention coordinator in San Francisco, discusses some of the current challenges for gay and bisexual men'S primary HIVprevention efforts. Psychological issues of personal motivation and identity formation are lopked at within the framework of gay culture, pop culture, and the larger heterosexual culture emphasizing their influence on the lives of HIVnegative men. The article also looks at age-specific dimensions comparing the needs of adult men with those of much younger gay and bisexual men. Renewed energy and fresh ideas will be called for to make HIVprevention interventions relevant to the lives of these men. Though the examples and qualitative data cited are from San Francisco, similar phenomena are noted from other cities with gay networks within the U.S. and internationally, suggesting that the: experience of San Francisco men will be relevant to prevention providers in any other locales.

Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance Felicia Bender Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance. Edited by Sue-Ellen Case. Performance Studies/Lesbian and Gay Studies. London: Routledge, 1996; pp. 276. $59.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. In her introduction to Split Britches: lesbian practice/feminist performance, Sue-Ellen Case notes that “[m]ore than any other group, Split Britches has set the stage of lesbian and feminist performance in the United States during the last fifteen years” (1). Case, an early follower of Split Britches who has become an aficionado of the company, tackles the formidable task of organizing and commenting upon productions by a company whose work is based upon disrupting categories and defying boundaries. This volume brings together seven representative texts by Split Britches—Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin—along with Case’s critical and historical introduction. Case frames Split Britches, Beauty and the Beast, Upwardly Mobile Home, Little Women, Belle Reprieve, Lesbians Who Kill, and Lust and Comfort with a materialist feminist critique of the company’s work and an account of their collaborative creative process and their involvement with Women’s One World (WOW) Café. [End Page 136] Case maintains that “[w]hile lesbian theory is beginning to distinguish itself from feminism, it also remains allied with it in retaining gender as the primary category of oppression and disruption” (13). Case herself bridges key issues of lesbian practice and feminist performance, pointing to problems of lesbian/feminist practice in order to “extend a single feminist critique across difference” (12) rather than wedge “difference” into unyielding personal and political positions. Most valuable to Case’s argument is her ability to make astute connections from playtext to playtext, noting similarities and differences between the plays while placing the script within an over-arching social, political, and artistic context. From its founding in 1980 until the present, Split Britches has presented vital lesbian-feminist theatre. By mixing and matching genres and performance styles, the company formulates a representational space that allows them full expression as lesbians, as women, and as feminists. A lesbian context is clearly articulated in the performances by, and off-stage relationship of, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Since Deb Margolin is heterosexual and Jewish, much of her performative work contributes to dismantling gender assumptions not from a lesbian perspective but from an ethnic one, while her playwriting—according to Lynda Hart—comprises “some of the most enduring, passionate, complicated lesbian language of our time” [Hart, “Queerer Than Thou: Being and Deb Margolin,” by Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan, Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 273]. Seeing the plays in print reinforces the notion that the scripts are truly performative “playtexts.” The non-linear plays are semi-musicals, but rather than include the music for each play, the written texts offer suggestions for songs that might command the same mood as the song used originally. In Upwardly Mobile Home, the script suggests the characters “sing and tap dance to the tune of a Broadway musical in the style of “America” from West Side Story” (101) and in Beauty and the Beast, the Beast “talks a song in the style of Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is’” (85). The way the texts are formulated reminds us that Split Britches is collaborative in the most ideal sense, and that the authors of the scripts do not desire an authoritative hand in how their plays are conceived by another producing organization. It is tempting to conclude that this type of collaborative theatre exemplifies an early feminist ideal. But while Margolin, Weaver, and Shaw are successful at collaboration, their feminism is not overtly didactic. Split Britches crosses boundaries between queer and feminist performance and by doing so, highlights the inherent tension in these categories. In its fifteen year history, Split Britches has built a reputation for innovative performance techniques. Not only does the company appropriate styles meant to support heterosexual culture—vaudeville, burlesque, and the strip-tease, for example—but they turn those styles into expressions of lesbian and feminist representation. The content of their work meshes with their stylistic choices of performance by reimaging and restaging various aspects of women’s lives...

Recombination, rationality, reductionism and romantic reactions: culture, computers, and the genetic algorithm.

The genetic algorithm (GA) is a computational procedure that 'evolves' solutions to optimization problems by generating populations of possible solutions, and then by treating these solutions metaphorically as individuals that can 'mate' and 'compete' to 'survive' and 'reproduce'. In this paper, I explore how culturally specific notions of evolution, population, reproduction, sex/gender, and kinship inflect the ways GAs are assembled and understood. Combining the results of fieldwork among GA workers with analysis of GA texts, I contend that the picture of 'nature' embedded in GAs is resonant with the values of secularized Judeo-Christian white middle-class US-American and European heterosexual culture. I also maintain that GA formulations are accented by languages inherited from sociobiology. I argue that examining GAs can help us track how dominant meanings of 'nature' are being stabilized and refigured in an age in which exchanges of metaphor between biology and computer science are increasingly common.

Sex in Public

A paper titled Sex in Public teases with the obscurity of its object and the twisted aim of its narrative. In this paper we will be talking not about the sex people already have clarity about, nor identities and acts, nor a wildness in need of derepression; but rather about sex as it is mediated by publics.' Some of these publics have an obvious relation to sex: pornographic cinema, phone sex, adult markets for print, lap dancing. Others are organized around sex, but not necessarily sex acts in the usual sense: queer zones and other worlds estranged from heterosexual culture, but also more tacit scenes of sexuality like official national culture, which depends on a notion of privacy to cloak its sexualization of national membership.

Different youth, different voices: Perspectives from young lesbian wimmin

This paper presents and examines issues pertaining to young lesbian wimmin in an Australian setting, with particular emphasis on the ‘coming-out’ process. Stereotypes as presented by Western culture are examined. Society’s honouring of the masculine at the expense of the feminine and the effect this has on young lesbian wimmin, and the development of non-heterosexual adolescents in general, is also discussed. Specific examples of episodes from a research project using memory-work methodology are used to highlight the experience many young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people encounter as they come to terms with their sexuality in a heterosexual culture.

Identifying (with) the queerness of Melville's Pierre

Identifying (with) the Queerness of Melville’s Pierre Neill Matheson (bio) James Creech. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. James Creech’s Closet Writing/Gay Reading is a remarkable book in several ways. First, it offers a significantly new interpretation of Melville’s enigmatic novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which has increasingly been viewed as marking a crucial turning point in Melville’s career, gaining the status of a major if equivocal work of nineteenth-century American fiction. Creech’s reading of Pierre adds much to previous work on homosexuality in Melville’s writings, making an important contribution to the history of Melville criticism. Supported by a shrewd, detailed analysis of the novel, and some surprising extratextual evidence, he argues compellingly that Pierre is preoccupied with the closeting of gay identity and with the tenuous possibilities for homosexual self-expression in a repressively heterosexual culture. Nevertheless, as its subtitle suggests, Pierre is a work that advertises its own ambiguity with a high degree of ironic self-awareness. Creech’s claims about it, made with a certain bravado, though accompanied by many hesitations and caveats, seem at times to diminish the complexity with which the novel itself explores the problem of identity. In addition to its interest as a reading of Pierre, Closet Writing/Gay Reading also represents a provocative statement within the wider context of critical and theoretical work on homosexuality, staking out a position that resists both the problematizing of identity performed by queer theory and the historicizing aims of much recent gay studies work. Creech elaborates the notion of “identificatory” or “camp reading” with great self-consciousness about its place in the critical landscape, so that it is as much a reaction to various theoretical positions as a stance in its own right. It is the combination of this critical hyperawareness, as if continually looking over one’s shoulder, and a kind of willed innocence with respect to interpretive problems that is most extraordinary, and it is worth exploring further. If one of the book’s aims is to add to a theory of the closet, it is also concerned with describing a poststructuralist theory that is in complicity with the suppression or emptying-out of homosexual meaning. Creech’s argument that deconstruction in particular has been blind to homosexual content contains in its margins a personal narrative of his own emergence from a theory closet. One of the strategies of Creech’s reading is to make his coming-out story converge with the one that he attributes to Pierre: his unambiguous claim for Pierre’s gay identity is simultaneously an avowal of a critical approach no longer in conflict with his own sexual identity. He alludes to his early and lingering attraction to deconstruction, the subsequent discovery that its influence, inhibiting unequivocal identity claims, prevented him from affirming his sexuality, and his tentative, incomplete, but increasingly assured rejection of that influence. Creech [End Page 30] asserts more than once that an analysis of Pierre’s impossible mourning would be valuable, but the story of his own critical history begins to sound like an account of the identifications, losses, and self-reproaches typical of melancholia. In this light Closet Writing/Gay Reading is interesting not because it is itself representative of recent gay criticism, but because it is a highly original, idiosyncratic, and suggestive response to a representative set of critical pressures surrounding the problem of identity. The central methodological claim of Closet Writing/Gay Reading is that identification is the form of reader response necessary to bring closeted homosexual meaning to light. Creech argues that the task of gay literary criticism is to counter the reductiveness of traditional, straight criticism by “putting homosexuality back in its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored, within which it has only been allowed an encrypted and ciphered status, or out of which it has been abstracted” [29]. Gay literary criticism faces the interpretive problem of recovering homosexual meaning that may have become nearly invisible through the combined effects of the restrictive cultural imperatives under which the author was writing and the reductiveness of later criticism...

Bodies in Sight: Shawna Dempsey (Re)Configures Desire

Solo performance artist Shawna Dempsey (together with her collaborator, Lorri Millan) uses performance in an innovative way - one that exposes, bare(s) witness, and intervenes in the social “performance” of gender roles and also stages lesbian presence. Revealing how misogynist, heterosexist culture is re-produced, and therefore how it can be altered, she states, “in the self-created world of the performance space, our personas have the freedom to make their own self-definitions” (Bennett 9). Dempsey has collaborated with Lorri Millan on the creation of feminist, costume-based performance art since 1989. Her worldwide performances and Dempsey and Millan’s film and video productions critique cultural scripts for “femininity” and the appropriately performed, properly gendered body. Exemplifying Judith Butler’s claim that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (278), Dempsey invites awareness of the performative aspects that produce gender in an ongoing process of cultural construction, including dress, stance, gestures, looks, and voice. Significantly, whether on the stage or in the street, her body and looks are very feminine, her body has the shape that culture tells women to strive for, and her age is within the range where women are provoked to show their bodies.

A study of lesbian lifestyles in the homosexual micro-culture and the heterosexual macro-culture.

Abstract Ninety-one lesbians were surveyed in an effort to determine how homosexual women function within the heterosexual macro-culture and the homosexual micro-culture. Those sampled tended to be young, white, urban, and well-educated professionals. By exploring four major categories (demographics, lesbian lifestyles/homosexual culture, social relationships, and participation in the heterosexual culture) it was found that respondents felt isolated from the heterosexual macro-culture and turn to the homosexual micro-culture for friends, emotional support, and social interaction. It was also discovered that while lesbians do feel isolated from the majority of society, they function productively in a dual role within their general environment.

Claiming a Lesbian Identity as an Act of Empowerment

Claiming a lesbian identity in a heterosexist culture is an act of empowerment in the struggle against oppression. This article dis cusses both the nature of the oppression that lesbians face and the strengths and skills that lesbians demonstrate in constructing the unique components of their lesbian identity.

Insult and Inclusion: The Term Fag Hag and Gay Male "Community"

The term fag hag is normally used in gay male culture to describe a straight woman who associates with gay men. This article uses intensive interviews with gay and bisexual men to explore what the term indicates about contradictions emerging from dominant views of gender and sexual identity. Other sociological studies provide explanations for why women and gay men form relationships and how these relationships are negotiated. This article explores what the term, residing at the nexus of discourses of sexuality and gender, tells us about (1) how dominant, heterosexual culture's assumptions threaten gay identity and culture; (2) the tensions present within gay male culture's own dominant discourses, tensions which certain straight women create and/or highlight; and (3) the limitations imposed on political mobilization by a discourse that posits the existence of a coherent “gay community.”

Changing the Game: Homophobia, Sexism, and Lesbians in Sport

The purpose of this article is to discuss, from a feminist perspective, the interconnected nature of homophobia and sexism in women's sport. After a brief description of the early 20th-century origins of the lesbian stereotype and the political function of homophobia in a sexist and heterosexist culture, manifestations of homophobia in women's sport are discussed: silence, denial, apology, promotion of a heterosexy image, attacks on lesbians, and preference for male coaches. The underlying beliefs that support homophobia in women's sport are described, and several strategies for confronting homophobia in women's sport are suggested.

Homophobia and Sexual Difference

The binary opposition, contends Derrida, is a violent hierarchy. He is surely right, and the opposition masculine/homosexual, a conflation of two classic binaries (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual) has been one of the most violent of all. I'm concerned here with something which serves directly to express that violence and which violently secures the opposition itself, namely homophobia. This is, I confess, an ambiguous and not entirely satisfactory term, though I don't propose to unpack that ambiguity except to say that the sense in which I'm using it is roughly descriptive of a manifest phenomenon: the hatred, fear and persecution of, the raging at, homosexuality. The wider project of which this paper is a part seeks to explain why the negation of homosexuality has been in direct proportion to its actual centrality, its cultural marginality in direct proportion to its cultural significance; why homosexuality is so strangely integral to the self same heterosexual cultures which obsessively denounce it, and why it is history — history rather than human nature — which has produced this paradoxical position. There are two analytic perspectives which address first, this paradoxical centrality of homosexuality in our culture, second the phenomenon of homophobia, and third the construction of masculinity (the three things being closely related). The one is a radical psychoanalysis, the other a materialist account of deviance. I'm aware of the theoretical tension — indeed incompatibility — between these two perspectives, and in a sense I welcome this, finding in that tension an impetus to recover the historical and political dimensions which theoretically self consistent (hermetically sealed?) critiques often gesture towards but rather more rarely engage with..

A Study of Lesbian Lifestyles in the Homosexual Micro-Culture and the Heterosexual Macro-Culture

Ninety-one lesbians were surveyed in an effort to determine how homosexual women function within the heterosexual macro-culture and the homosexual micro-culture. Those sampled tended to be young, white, urban, and well-educated professionals. By exploring four major categories (demographics, lesbian lifestyles/homosexual culture, social relationships, and participation in the heterosexual culture) it was found that respondents felt isolated from the heterosexual macro-culture and turn to the homosexual micro-culture for friends, emotional support, and social interaction. It was also discovered that while lesbians do feel isolated from the majority of society, they function productively in a dual role within their general environment.