Heterosexual Matrix Research Articles

Gênero, corpos e desejos nas ruínas de O Rei de Havana

Abstract This article proposes a reading of The King of Havana (1999), a novel by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, keeping in mind the connection between the text, the political project of the New Man, implemented by the Socialist Government of Fidel Castro, and the economic crisis in Cuba, in the 1990s, during the Special Period in Times of Peace. In addition to the fractures of the Cuban economic and social project, the narrative explores processes of production of bodies and the instability of the categories sex, gender and desire in order to contest the hegemonic heterosexual matrix (Butler, 2003).

Child welfare workers’ understanding of gender, sexual orientation and sexual health in assessments of youths with a problematic substance use

ABSTRACT The use of alcohol or illicit substances by youths may be related to sexual motives and experiences. Accordingly, child welfare workers need to address young people’s sexuality in their investigative work. In this study, we have examined the significance of different social categories, namely gender and sexual orientation, when child welfare workers assess young people with a substance use and their related sexual health. Fifteen child welfare workers were recruited through a strategic sampling to participate in semi-structured interviews, which were analysed using thematic content analysis. The results consist of three sub-themes: Sexually vulnerable girls; Boys as perpetrators; and Unseen LGBTQ+ youth. Together, these sub-themes constitute an overarching theme where the heterosexual matrix appears to be the interpretative framework when investigating a problematic substance use. The suggested implications for practice include education in sexual and reproductive health and rights for child welfare workers aiming to achieve an equitable assessment process for all youth with a problematic substance use.

Crack, Transformation and Breakthrough of Heterosexual Matrix

This essay applies Judith Butler’s theory to analyze how characters shape the protagonist’s gender identity and awareness of marginalized groups, in Orlando: A Biography. Through Orlando's interactions with Sasha, the Archduke, and Shel, the research traces her journey from deviation from traditional gender norms to acceptance with a fluid gender identity. By examining the impact of these characters, this study aims to highlight gender equality as the theme and the constraints behind the heterosexual matrix.

“The boy in the cupboard”: children in Indian comics and their subversion of heteronormative interpellation

ABSTRACT This article delves into the complex ways in which children and adolescents subvert heteronormativity in/through comics. Situated at the intersection of Comics Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, this research engages with queer theoretical contemplations by locating it within the impetus of queer theory’s inquiry into the figure of the child, more specifically, the crisis of identity as experienced by queer children. It focuses on select contemporary Indian comics by platforms like Gaysi Family and Pratham Books, published both digitally and in print between 2018 and 2022, and employs a theoretical framework drawing from Butler’s conception of the heterosexual matrix and interpellation, as well as Munoz’s theory of disidentification. The article comprises three sections offering four different perspectives on the mechanism of subversion: the first section explores disidentification in characters and their subversion of heteronormative norms, the second delves into disidentification at the intersection of romantic/sexual desire and gender, and the final section examines the role of these comics in reshaping the heteronormative boundaries of ‘children’s literature’ and their role in introducing subversion to comic readers through narratives of disidentification. The article illuminates the transformative potential of comics in challenging norms, fostering resistance, and envisioning alternative futures.

Reifying, Disorienting and Restoring Gender Binaries in Dialogic Literature Discussions

AbstractDialogic pedagogy aims to bring multiple voices and perspectives into conversation, to create a classroom environment inclusive of multiple student identities, and to challenge hegemonic approaches to knowledge. As such, it seems particularly well‐suited for interrogating gender binaries and enhancing gender equity. Through micro‐ethnographic discourse analysis of video‐recorded literacy lessons, this study examines how traditional gender categories were reified and/or disrupted in literacy discussions in four Israeli elementary school classrooms experimenting with dialogic pedagogy. We found students and teachers frequently relying upon gender stereotypes in the participant examples they offered and in their interpretations of the story, “Fly, Eagle, Fly,” in class discussions. Originally framed as a parable of transformation and growth, the story unexpectedly provided an avenue to explore topics such as gender, transgenderism, and transsexuality. Sporadic instances arose in the discussion in which students subverted traditional binary gender constructs. These fleeting moments of disorientation underscored dialogic pedagogy's capacity to challenge gender norms. However, students and teachers treated transgenderism as taboo, and the topic's explicit consideration generated anxiety, with the teachers and some of the students trying to silence non‐heteronormative voices. Ultimately, teachers reinforced interpretations that allowed the gender order to be restored and seemed relieved when they were able to move on from the gender trouble episode. The study highlights the potential of dialogic pedagogy to challenge the heterosexual matrix and promote gender equity. However, it also demonstrates the importance of paying greater attention to gender issues in the development of dialogic pedagogy.

”Sin fars rareste patent”

This article analyzes Lars Saabye Christensen’s novel Maskeblomstfamilien (2003) with a particular focus on uncovering how the novel portrays and addresses the shame and stigma associated with deviating from established gender norms. Drawing on Judith Butler’s works Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, the article investigates the social regulation that the novel’s protagonist undergoes in 1960s Norway within the framework of the heterosexual matrix. While Butler’s theoretical texts do not provide extensive descriptions of how the regulation of the heterosexual matrix operates in practice and how it feels to be subjected to it, an analysis of Maske­blomstfamilien offers a more comprehensive understanding of how these regulations function in relation to the allocation of shame, acts of violence and hatred, institutional violence, and social exposure. Concurrently, the novel highlights the protagonist’s resistance to these regulations through strategies such as hyperbolic misquotation.

De fyrstefødte og fyrsteløse

With a deconstructive method and theoretical starting point in Raewyn Connell’s theory of masculinity as well as various queer theoretical perspectives, this article examines the gender-critical potential of Cecilie Eken’s science-fiction trilogy for children The Karana Galaxy (2018-2019). The thematic interpretation points to an unraveling of conventional gender perceptions in which diversity triumphs over conformity. But does the text indeed break with heteronormative assumptions, or are the descriptions of gender and sexuality (or the lack thereof) more like a modified version of gender binarism? The analysis shows that The Karana Galaxy both transcends and respects the logics of the heterosexual matrix. At the surface level of the text, the genders in the galaxy are defined by compulsory heterosexuality. At the same time, the text’s depiction of female masculinity breaks with these logics. Thus, the text can be interpreted as a homoerotic love relationship between a man and a masculine woman. However, the text’s bid to portray alternative forms of gender identities seems to contradict such a reading. Overall, the article therefore concludes that although the conventional understanding of masculinity and femininity is modified in The Karana Galaxy, the text’s constructions of gender and sexuality are still shaped by binary logics.

“Who the Hell Are You?”

Tom Stoppard is an outstanding playwright, embellishing his plays with scientific and philosophical approaches and presenting complicated, mysterious plots to the reader. He bases the plot of his postmodern play, Hapgood (1988), on quantum theory and draws an analogy between Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, termed “The Uncertainty Principle”, and international espionage. Thus, he constructs the complicated relationship between the particle and the whole throughout the play to depict the relativistic and deceptive relationship between sex and gender. Focusing on the title character of the play, the present study proposes that the play represents the fluid and indeterminate nature of gender and identity within the context of espionage and indeterminism. Hapgood, who is a mother, a lover and a successful master agent in a man-dominated British secret service, navigates between “masculinity” and “femininity” during a day. Moreover, she metamorphoses into her twin, who is entirely different from her, except for their identical faces, to entrap the mole in the office. The study consults Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and fluidity to indicate the unpredictable and uncertain nature of ‘gender identity’, which formulates itself through performances in social relations and trespasses the heterosexual matrix. It juxtaposes the Butlerian approach with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory pertaining to the confusing relationship between gender, the body and identity. The Butlerian analysis of the play reveals that particularly the modern way of life makes women transgress the Cartesian dichotomies of sex/gender, masculine/feminine and man/woman through the fluidity of their roles even during a single day and makes it difficult to find out who is really who.

Exploring the relationship between transphobia and homophobia and other demographic factors among practicing and future primary school teachers

Based on an existing measure of homophobia, we developed an instrument to measure both transphobia and homophobia, as well as their relationship with other demographic variables that included attributed sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and political affinity. Research was designed to establish the relationship between homophobia and transphobia, by comparing the results of a validated Homophobia Test with a Transphobia Test that has been designed by adapting the same items; and to explore the relationship between homophobia/transphobia and other socio-demographic variables, specifically including gender, geographic origin, sexual orientation, political ideology, and religious conviction). Our research with 1,133 trainee and 182 practicing teachers demonstrated the reliability of our instrument, suggesting a correspondence between the two types of prejudice. Our results also found that these two prejudices followed similar trends with respect to other variables: respondents who identified as men showed higher levels of both homophobia and transphobia, as did those who professed religious conviction and were affiliated with the right wing of the political spectrum. We found that people who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual were less homophobic and transphobic that those who identified as heterosexual. Based on these data, we hypothesize that the two types of prejudice explored here derive from a common factor, the broader social construct of cisgenderism, so that any deviation from the heterosexual matrix, whether in terms of gender identity, gender presentation, or sexual orientation, results in social stigma. The professionals included in our sample are entrusted with well-being of all children, and are responsible for teaching about human diversity as part of the curriculum. Our findings will help us understand how teachers might respond to children who transgress, or are perceived to transgress, cisgendered norms, and to design more effective teacher training concerning sex and gender diversity.

Messing up research: A dialogical account of gender, reflexivity, and governance in auto‐ethnography

AbstractThis paper aims to contribute to a growing critical and reflexive awareness of the implications of gendered assumptions about ontology, epistemology, and ethics in academic research governance and practice. It provides a retrospective account of the authors' shared experiences of an autoethnographic study of lap dancing clubs, focusing on critical or “sticky moments” encountered, and considering the implications of these for research more widely. It does so by highlighting the gendered power relations shaping academic research, showing how Judith Butler's critique of the heterosexual matrix can be applied to a critical, reflexive understanding of the impact of binary, hierarchical gender power relations. The analysis provides insight into some of the ways in which autoethnographic research on sexualized work may become messy, dirty, and sticky in ways that accentuate power inequalities but also open up moments of opportunity for gender binaries and hierarchies to be revealed, challenged, and resisted. Using a Butlerian lens to reflect on our experiences, we contribute to understanding how heteronormative assumptions shape perceptions of what makes “good,” “clean,” and ethically (formally) approved research that conforms to the governmental norms of the heterosexual matrix and, by implication, those contaminating forms of research that disrupt or resist its disciplinary effects. As ethnographic research is often messy by its very nature, and particularly so when situated within sex/sexualized work, we aim to show how gendered assumptions can inhibit reflexivity in academic knowledge production, resulting in research processes that are (paradoxically) unethical. In response, we suggest three ways in which gender reflexive research might be pursued, by: (i) identifying gendered assumptions reflexively and dialogically, (ii) adopting an anti‐essentialist approach that foregrounds experiential, embodied knowledge, and (iii) developing an anti‐hierarchical methodology. We do so in the hope of opening up ways that might enable others to avoid heteronormative assumptions having potentially detrimental consequences for their research and to offer a starting point for developing gender reflexive knowledge production in the future.

Her ‘Love Laws’: Political Reterritorialization of Sexuality in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The article attempts to showcase the performativity of gender and nationality as elements of a subject’s identity in a heterosexual matrix. Applying Judith Butler’s theories regarding sex and gender to the novel The God of Small Things clarifies how Ammu, the most rebellious female character of the novel, subverts the expected performative desire of heterosexual respectability and is able to go beyond the limits of sexuality and thereby beyond the ideologies and performativity of national inclusion. Her subversion of imperatives reveals the gaps in the law and, thus, turns her act into a political one as well. She demonstrates political agency through re-territorializing ‘phallus’ and further through re-signifying her sexual desire.

"I am willing to do both well": Chinese academic mothers facing tension in family and career.

Academic mothers perform intersected roles. They carry out their profession in workplaces, while they take the "second shift" of motherhood back to their families. The contested expectations in family and career built by the heterosexual matrix cause tension to academic mothers. We qualitatively investigate the interview data of six Chinese women academics on how they perform to negotiate their motherhood and academic work in the context of Chinese higher education, driven by the Butlerian theoretical concept of the heterosexual matrix. The findings suggest that Chinese academic mothers play a zero-sum game between being mothers and being academics, deriving from their ontological responsibilities of motherhood. We conclude that in the masculine academia, these women academics help maintain the heterosexual matrix by satisfying the gender normativity when they negotiate their performances in their family and career; meanwhile, most have developed some strategies to achieve their career advancement.

‘It’s not who I want to be!’: Negotiating the ‘illegible’ single woman in US–UK popular culture

Drawing on analysis of media representations and interviews with 25 single women, this article argues that the single woman is abjectified in US–UK popular culture through processes of instability and incoherence, which construct her as a threat to heteronormative femininity and recentres the coupled norm. Yet there are moments of contestation within media portrayals, where her ‘illegibility’ allows for a troubling of the gender binary and opens up spaces for working with and against such oppressive structures. Drawing on Butler’s heterosexual matrix, I show that singledom is produced here as a non-normative heterosexual practice, which radically destabilises femininity and heteronormativity. This article examines not only how single femininity is being culturally delegitimised, but also how single women in the United Kingdom experience such delegitimisation. Through complex processes of what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘(dis)identification’, the women work with, alongside and against representations of normative coupled femininity. They also tactically work with portrayals of the single woman to self-reflexively construct alternative single feminine subjectivities. Yet more troublingly, even in moments of resistance, the single women make painful identifications with their abject positioning.

Trashing or Rather Thrashing out the Gender Binary? Trans Employees’ Gender Performance at Work

This article analyzes 32 individual interviews and 5 focus group interviews with trans-persons and trans-experts, and focuses on how openly trans individuals, who are successful in their careers and who do not work in in especially ‘trans-friendly’ business sectors, perform their gender at work in Thailand. As non-passing trans-persons they do not meet the idealized cis-gendered standard of Butler’s heterosexual matrix. We show, however, that in order to make themselves ‘intelligible’, and with this, employable and promotable, another matrix applies: this we call the trans-matrix. This demonstrates that successful trans-women tend to adjust their way of ‘doing transgender’ to an ultra-feminine standard, whilst the gender performance of successful trans-men tends towards more of an ultra-masculine standard. While trans-femininity is primarily performed on the level of appearance for trans-women, trans-masculinity is, for trans-men, rather performed on the level of behavior. Although the rigid gender binary is the main obstacle to their struggle for equal recognition, compensating for any deficiency with regard to non-conformance with the cis-gender ideal of the heterosexual matrix by performing in accordance with the ideals of the trans-matrix (that is, performing extreme positions of the gender binary) contributes more to stabilizing the binary, rather than undermining or challenging it.

Reinforcing the binary and disciplining the subject: The constitutional right to gender recognition in the Italian case law

Abstract The article addresses the reasons why the Italian Constitutional Court requires trans people to transform their physical, psychological, and behavioral characteristics in order to obtain the legal recognition of their gender identity. It discusses how such a doctrine is implemented. Examining the case law of the Constitutional Court and of the Court of Cassation in light of queer theory, the article argues that such requirements are intended to benefit the “certainty of legal relations,” which, in this context, is inextricably tied to the preservation of the heterosexual matrix of family law. Developing a Foucauldian analysis of a consistent sample of decisions by courts of first instance, the article reasons that the application of such requirements amounts to the exercise of disciplinary power, which defines and regulates binary gendered subjects. By focusing on the underexplored doctrine of the Italian Constitutional Court on gender recognition, the article offers a case study which innovatively contributes to the bourgeoning debate on the right to gender recognition.

Between Privileges and Sacrifices: Heteronormativity and Turkish Nationalism in Urban Turkey

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relation between nationalism and heteronormativity through the lens of hegemonic masculinity and shows how Turkish nationalism helps to construct the “normal” and thus strengthen heteronormative thinking in Turkish society. Utilizing in-depth interviews in Çanakkale with 16 men who carry the typical features of a privileged Turkish citizen—namely the ones self-identifying as Turkish, Sunni Muslim, heterosexual, and breadwinner—my aim in the paper is to reveal and comprehend attitudes toward non-heterosexual people in Turkey, to challenge the effect of the possible nationalist ideological tendencies on participants’ discourses, and to explicate if such tendencies play a part in justifying their attitudes. I suggest that respondents’ privileges are obtained in exchange for strict commitment to Turkish nationalistic values. These values not only define what constitutes “normal” but also determine and disparage anyone who deviates from such definition. Greater commitment to such values signals a more powerful heterosexual matrix and thus greater exclusion of queer people in Turkey.

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

The Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality

This paper both revisits and productively draws on Judith Butler’s theory of sexuality offered in Gender Trouble, to consider how this foundational queer theory text inadvertently works to contain and bracket plurisexualities such as bisexuality. I consider how Butler at once rejects the idea of originary bisexuality provoked by psychoanalytic discourse on polymorphous perversity yet subsumes bisexual oppression into that of homosexuality. I interrogate Butler’s monosexual presumptions to extend their notion of the heterosexual matrix to account for an operational hetero/homo binary that both excludes plurisexuality as its Other and obscures this exclusion. Following this theoretical line, I consider how the asymmetric hetero/homo binary has been coded along the lines of comedy/tragedy in culture, and in contrast how bisexuality and other plurisexualities are often rendered impossible. I suggest that plurisexualities, representing a refusal to refuse the originary prohibition, “haunt” both straight and queer contexts alike.

Silencing the single woman: Negotiating the ‘failed’ feminine subject in contemporary UK society

Despite a growth in single women in UK society over the past two decades, single femininity continues to be highly stigmatised. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix and applying this to qualitative interview data with 25 single women, I argue that single femininity is produced as abject through processes of silencing which render the single female a ‘failed’ subject and reinscribe heteronormative coupled femininity. Yet while deeply painful, such ‘failures’ may also be productive, offering moments where the boundaries of heteronormative feminine subjectivity and hierarchies of intimate life are troubled and transformed. This article complicates understandings of stigma and resistance through a nuanced analysis of processes of abjectification and ambivalence.

Narratives of Trans people in the workplace: Possibilities for subverting the Heterosexual matrix

The article is inspired by the use of the term subversion in Chambers and Carver’s comments of Judy Butler’s work and it aims to explore the possibility of subversion of gender matrix by some trans people in the workplace. The article grounds its argument in queer theory and in the notions of gender performativity, hetero gender matrix and heteronormativity and analysis qualitative material generated through conversations with trans people working in Italy. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler’s writing on gender we present, analyze and discuss three employees’ cases (Alessandra, Gabriel and Lucia) to grasp how they construct (un)intelligible subject positions which potentially subvert disciplinary powerful and normative idea of gender. In the analysis we focus on how these trans people –through their narratives, their body, their actions, their practices…– within their heteronormative workplace contexts potentially subvert gender and heterosexual matrix. We highlight three possible ways of subversion – subversion through wondrous; subversion through incoherence; subversion through betray. In the conclusion we connect the idea of potential subversion with the concept of unheimlich which can open up site/sights in organization/organizing processes.