Heterosexuality

Plan Introduction: heteronormativity – the heterosexual imaginary Hidden in history Invention of heterosexuality Homosexuality’s ‘other’ An absent presence Heterosexuality actually named: Kinsey ‘The heterosexual mystique’: 1940s and 1950s Invisibility again

Heteronormativity: objects Heterosexuality is everywhere: A heterosexual cell phone (the firefly), admittedly now a little old, with male and female buttons (on right), and (on the left) heterosexual Lego!

Heteronormativity: weddings The heterosexual imaginary: adverts for wedding chapels, honeymoons, and wedding venues.

Heteronormativity: movies

Hidden in History Generations of historians have imposed heterosexual assumptions on the past – in effect helping to construct the heterosexuality of their own society just as the early wave of gay historians had used the past to construct their identity. The only difference lies in their respective awareness of what they were doing. So the power of heterosexuality resides in a strange combination of ubiquity (being everywhere) and invisibility (in the sense of being taken for granted). Heterosexuality has maintained a hidden power in traditional ways of viewing the past. It has a history, many histories, but they have remained hidden because the category has been taken for granted. Historians have assumed that heterosexuality had always been and that it was only homosexuality that had been constructed. The famous theorist, the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once observed that heterosexuality has ‘been permitted to masquerade ... as History itself’.

Heterosexuality invented ‘Like the typewriter and the light bulb, the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s’.

Heterosexuality invented Heterosexuality is only ‘one historically specific way of organizing the sexes and their pleasures’. ‘heterosexuality became the ruling ghost, the absent presence, that haunted ... modern sex texts.’

Heterosexuality as homosexuality’s ‘other’ The work of 20th century scientific and medical experts continued to construct heterosexuality as the ‘other’ to the homosexuality that they were mainly concerned with. For them, homosexuality was a pathological condition, but their comments on the problems and abnormality of homosexuality were nearly always an endorsement and stressing of the normality of heterosexuality. So-called cures for homosexuality lay with adjusted heterosexuality: for example, if heterosexual men were better lovers their wives would not become lesbian. By commenting on what was considered perverse homosexuality, scientists and medical experts were automatically defining what was correct and acceptable heterosexual behaviour. If an expert was condemning lesbianism and male homosexuality, he or she was automatically confirming what was seen as its opposite: heterosexuality. That is why it is artificial to separate the histories of the two: Jennifer Terry’s history of American scientific thinking about homosexuality, a book called An American Obsession, is as much a history of the making of American heterosexuality as it is of homosexuality.

An absent presence It is interesting the way in which the characteristics of heterosexuality were impressed without use of the word itself. The medical literature of the 1950s and 1960s, used by doctors of the period, and extensively quoted in Carolyn Lewis’s book Prescription for Heterosexuality (2010), advised on correct courtship and marriage behaviour, the essential elements of heterosexuality, without actually using the words ‘heterosexual’ or ‘heterosexuality’.

Heterosexuality actually named The Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality, the most famous sex surveys of the twentieth century, form quite a contrast with the medical literature’s silence on its usage of the word. Kinsey’s publications had a major impact in the late 1940s and early 1950s, becoming a media sensation, indeed impacting on popular culture, even though most of his ideas were reaching the public second hand. Ironically, Kinsey was critical of a simple division of sexuality into hetero and homo, yet his survey did much to cement the division. His constant use of the terms; his categorisation of sexual behaviour as heterosexual and homosexual, even when he was trying to show flexibility, must have done much to shape notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality in American sexual culture. If we refer to the construction of heterosexuality in terms of actually employing the word, Kinsey played an important role in that making.

Heterosexuality/Homosexuality in Google Ngram

Heterosexuality: 1940s families. An instructional film about correct family life: Your Family (1948)

Heterosexuality: 1950s weddings and little boxes

Heterosexuality: 1950s advertisements. 1950s Brylcreem Advertisement.

Heterosexuality: 1950s advertisements. 1950s Pepsi Advertisement.

But do people even know what heterosexuality is? A clip from the documentary Framed Youth – The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts (1982).

But do people even know what heterosexuality is? A clip from What Would You Do if You Find Out Your Kids Are Heterosexual? (2012).