rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_03ce3b18-d82d-5750-a820-403c07c8bace">53 Laura Doan, a historian of sexuality in Britain, similarly urges scholars to employ “queerness as method” in unpacking the creation and implications of the sexual binary, rather than conflating heterosexuality with “normal” and thus the opposite of “queer.” “Queerness-as-method,” Doan explains, “invites scrutiny about what is queer in all sexual practices but also invites history’s intervention as a corrective to the queer faith in heteronormativity as a universal or transhistorical value.”54 Doan, Marcus, and other scholars prompt us to examine the tacit assumptions that often presuppose heterosexuality’s historical ubiquity. Our effort to curate a collection of essays in the history of heterosexuality reflects our indebtedness to the insights of queer theory, yet we find such an approach compelling but incomplete without a commensurate appreciation for the feminist critique of heterosexuality.
Prior to the creation of queer theory as a field or the coinage of the term “heteronormativity,” the feminist, gay liberation, and women of color movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a great deal to say about heterosexuality as a system of patriarchy (the systemic oppression of women) and about heterosexual sex. For many feminists, heterosexuality might be normal, but that very norm was the target of their activism. A fair amount of radical and lesbian feminist political writing in the late 1960s and 1970s focused on critiques of heterosexual relationships, describing them as inherently oppressive (even as necessarily violent) given the power of heteronormative patriarchy. One radical group, The Feminists, argued in their manifesto that women could not have noncoercive sex under a system of patriarchy: “Heterosexual love is a delusion in yet another sense: it is a means of escape from the role system by way of approval from and identification with the man, who has defined himself as humanity (beyond role)—she desires to be him. . . . We must destroy the institution of heterosexual sex which is a manifestation of the male-female role.”55 These feminists argued that it was the presumption of normality that made heterosexuality so deeply toxic to the cause of women’s liberation.
Gay liberationists also critiqued the institution of heterosexuality. Radical gay men, such as those in The Red Butterfly, a Marxist-leaning cell of the Gay Liberation Front, theorized gay liberation as a critique of heteronormativity, militarism, racism, and capitalism in a series of pamphlets printed in 1970. Their first pamphlet, Gay Liberation, challenged the idea of normal sexuality and insisted that gay sex was “natural.”56 In a subsequent pamphlet by Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto, he wrote more urgently, “Exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up. It reflects a fear of people of the same sex, it’s anti-homosexual, and it is frought [sic] with frustration. Heterosexual sex is fucked up, too; ask women’s liberation about what straight guys are like in bed.”57 A third pamphlet, Gay Oppression: A Radical Analysis, argued that gay liberation affected heterosexuals both by illuminating that homosexuals were far more numerous than straight society had previously acknowledged and by challenging the idea of heterosexuality as natural or inevitable.58
Radical feminists produced a rich body of academic and vernacular discussions of the hetero/homo binary as a source of women’s oppression. A major contribution to these conversations came in 1975 with the publication of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women.” Rubin was then a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Michigan and a member of feminist groups in Ann Arbor. The essay, which has been reprinted in multiple anthologies, explored the assumptions about women’s subordination within theories of Marx and Engels, Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but it also suggested that these theories offered a powerful resource for a feminist critique. Rubin interpreted these canonical works to reveal a “sex/gender system” that each generation learned and relearned. Rubin argued that cultures “produced” gender inequality and that the sex/gender system was not embedded within, or prior to, the development of human societies.59 Her essay described “obligatory heterosexuality” as a historically created effect of the sex/gender system that subordinated women. Her reading of this process was daringly optimistic: “Sex/gender systems are not ahistorical emanations of the human mind; they are products of historical human activity.”60 The poet and activist Adrienne Rich’s widely circulated and anthologized argument about “compulsory heterosexuality,” first published in 1980, extended this lesbian feminist critique of heterosexuality as a species of patriarchy. In an article in the feminist journal Signs, Rich described heterosexuality as a political institution that bound women into sexual servitude and economic dependency.61 The critique of heterosexuality that Rich and other feminists advanced was of the sex/gender system of patriarchy that oppressed women and queer people, something more akin to what we today name as heteronormativity.62
Black women who broke off from a second-wave feminist group, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), to establish the Combahee River Collective challenged what subsequent scholars would call heteronormativity, and they did so while attuned to the intersectional operations of power.63 The black feminist authors of the “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977, including Demita Frazer, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith, provided a sustained analysis of the intersectional operation of heterosexism within systems of racial and class discrimination: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”64 Members of the collective did not stop there. These black feminists additionally maintained that “the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”65 At once socialist and anti-imperialist, the collective’s pathbreaking analysis shaped generations of feminist scholarship that centered the intersections of sex, race, and class systems of privilege and oppression. What was clear to them, and what historians would be foolish to ignore, is that we should be as skeptical of the idea that heterosexism ever operates in isolation as we are to claims that heterosexuality itself is transhistorical.
Moreover, the poet Audre Lorde’s 1985 pamphlet I Am Your Sister set forth a theory of heterosexual privilege as an operation of power and a means of oppression. Lorde offered a blunt definition: “HETEROSEXISM: A belief in the inherent superiority of one form of loving over all others and thereby the right to dominance.”66 Lorde distinguished that privileging belief from homophobia, a reflection of “terror” at the knowledge of same-sex love. Lorde additionally explained that her identity as a black lesbian was omnipresent in her activism and creative output, a source of power and an inspiration to act. If lesbianism was considered “abnormal,” so too was blackness: both claims ultimately meant that Lorde was systematically oppressed by heterosexist presumptions about women’s and lesbians’ “place” within movements for civil rights, just as racism sought to limit her and other people of color. It was, for Lorde, nothing less than incumbent on progressive activists and thinkers to ask, “what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped?”67
Indeed, pointed interrogation of sexuality and the “normal” vitally animated work by theorists who followed
