of heterosexuality as normal. The literary scholar Karma Lochrie explains that the late-medieval and early modern European people she studies would have found the concept of the sexually normal incomprehensible. She can locate ideas of neither “heterosexuality” nor “heteronormativity” in medieval sources.19 Ruth Mazo Karras similarly notes in her history of “unmarriages” in the Middle Ages that while “sexual unions between men and women were a dominant social form in medieval Europe,” those relationships existed alongside “a variety of pair bonds,” which included celibacy and same-sex unions. Karras’s intention to “analyze pair bonds without privileging marriage, while still recognizing that medieval people did, in fact, privilege marriage,” well captures our goal of studying the history of heterosexual privilege while attending to its historical specificity. If the essays herein do not, as Karras puts it, explicitly explore “elements that fell by the wayside” as opposite-sex pair bonds and activity assumed normalcy in North America, many of the authors do carefully consider how what we now think of as “race” informed that process.20 Often invisible to those who experience the privileges of the sexual practice, heteronormativity serves as a historically specific exclusionary boundary and form of discipline on the lives of those who fail to meet its particularistic guidelines and expectations.
The association between heterosexuality and “the normal” (and thus the deployment of heteronormativity’s incredible cultural and political power) may have occurred much later than historians have long assumed.21 In Normality: A Critical Genealogy (2017), the historian Peter Cryle and the cultural theorist Elizabeth Stephens demonstrate that the idea of “the normal” was not fully realized in Europe and North America until the conclusion of World War II.22 Much new scholarship questions the historicity of the very idea of norms and “the normal.”23 More controversially, in a special issue of the feminist journal differences, scholars interrogated the centrality of “antinormativity” to queer theory.24 This wave of provocative scholarship challenges us to question not only how normality shapes modern sexuality but also the extent to which queer theory relies on notions of deviance, normality’s binary opposite. We thus need to examine critically the histories of heterosexuality and the historiographical uses of heteronormativity.
The intertwined histories of heterosexuality and heteronormativity reveal systems of meaning-making and of privilege. Lochrie explains that scholars often conflate this concept of heteronormativity (heterosexuality as a regnant norm) with the more limited idea of heterosexuality (different-sex erotic ideal). As Lochrie writes, “Heterosexuality is rarely used in its strictly technical meaning of desire for the opposite sex without invoking all of its cultural appurtenances, including the sexual act of intercourse, the social and legal rights of marriage, ideas of domesticity, doctrines of procreation, concepts of parenting and child rearing, legal definitions of privacy, and even scientific concepts of animal behavior.”25 The theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged.” Berlant and Warner associate heteronormativity with their concept of “national heterosexuality,” which they define as “the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship.” Such a “familial” model hides the “structural racism and other systemic inequalities” that constitute its origins and that sustain it.26 This approach provides more of an opening for historically variable heterosexuality, a product of human actions and culture, not a preexisting condition.
Historically specific, heterosexuality has changed over time, and its meanings can shift according to context. The “modern” reconceptualization of sexuality as a discrete and particularly important aspect of individuality changed the stakes in possessing and benefiting from a heterosexual disposition or family organization. Even so, heterosexuality’s modes and effects are various. Heterosexuality in its modern form anxiously reiterates its asserted privilege within an array of legal and social rights, not to mention its associations with psychologically “normal” health. Yet many people who engage in practices and/or form relationships that meet all other basic criteria of “heterosexual” do not enjoy that privilege because of their race, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, or religion. To be sure, heterosexuality is a culturally understood idea about what is “natural,” “normal,” or some combination of the two concepts, but it is far from universally defined, applied, or valued.
Our goal is not to reify heterosexuality or claim a special place for it, intellectually or politically. As David Halperin has written about his history of homosexuality, “I wish to avoid the implication that by analyzing the triumphalism of a modern discursive category I am in any way participating in that triumphalism.”27 Rather, we have encouraged the authors in this anthology to subject heterosexuality to careful scrutiny as a means to reveal its inseparability from hierarchies of power; its intersections with ideals of race, class, and gender; and, as several of these essays demonstrate, its utility as a weapon against marginalized groups. In this introduction and in the essays that follow, we seek to explain how and why heterosexuality became a known thing in the United States—and to establish that seemingly long-standing terms emerged in our vernacular far later than many readers might realize. We do not take a heterosexual identity as a timeless given, then. We endeavor as well to interrogate the imprint of heteronormativity on same-sex desires both before and after the word “heterosexual” existed and the consequences of those definitions, norms, and values in North American history.
We hardly seek to entrench what Marjorie Garber terms “a binary opposition between homosexual and heterosexual” herein. As much as there is no exploration of the concepts and histories of asexuality or pansexuality in this anthology, we certainly recognize that individuals can go through the course of their lives without feeling (or acting on) sexual attraction to others and that sexuality can be fluid. It is worth noting that some scholars—Garber included—have maintained that bisexuality is “not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges . . . easy binaries.”28 We do not necessarily seek to undo sexual categories, but we certainly seek to unsettle “heterosexuality” and its history. In the remaining pages of this introduction, we offer a brief overview of the ways that historians and theorists have defined both heterosexuality and heteronormativity, we consider how “race” has been invoked in terms of both heterosexuality and heterosexism, and we preview the essays in this volume to highlight how each one addresses these and other questions in uniquely salient ways.
Heterosexuality’s History
Different-sex relationships stretch back through human history, but we began to call them “heterosexual” relatively recently. The German sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in the 1860s, and they did not appear in print in English until 1892, when “heterosexual” was an entry in an American medical journal. American psychiatrists and physicians took note, writing professional articles about the “heterosexual instinct” and the “homosexual invert.”29 New terminology for sexual desires proliferated. During these same years, the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined the term “bisexual,” one that the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud began to use in his theories of sexuality
