Thinking straight - heteronormativity, the belief system underlying institutionalized heterosexuality - constitutes the dominant paradigm in Western society. It secures a division of labor and distribution of wealth and power that requires gender, racial categories, class, and sexual hierarchies as well as ideological struggles for meaning and value. In this chapter, I argue that the preoccupation with gender in feminist scholarship obscures the significance of heterosexuality as a primary institution complete with organizing rituals and disciplining practices that regulate acting bent. While gender is a central feature of heteronormativity, it is institutionalized heterosexuality that is served by dominant or conventional constructions of gender, not the other way around. Shifting the focus from ...
3.5Rita Felski (1997) explicitly attributes difference theory's turning away from gender to a rejection of sociological conceptualisations of it which, she claims, reduce it to externally imposed roles to be overcome through some notion of androgyny. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of a sociological accounts of gender, at least in their feminist variants. By the early 1980s feminist sociologists were already modifying and critiquing the older tradition of sex or gender 'roles' from two quite separate directions. Some pointed out that the idea that we 'internalised' external roles denied the complexity and variability of gender as it is lived and our active engagement in the social practices which sustain it (Stanley and Wise 1983). Others suggested that, rather than being a role, gender was a social division in which women and men were located and defined by the hierarchical relation between them, so that neither could exist without the other (Delphy 1984). In this latter view doing away with hierarchy does not produce androgyny - and it certainly does not make women like men, since neither masculinity nor femininity can have any meaning outside the social relations which create them (see Delphy 1993). These more sophisticated understandings of gender were by-passed by the cultural turn. In fact it is difference theory and, as we shall see, other more deconstructive approaches to gender which perpetuate the fallacy on which the idea of androgyny is based: that the only human possibility is some combination of femininity and masculinity (a view which did indeed underpin older 'sex roles' perspectives [see Delphy 1993]).
stevi jackson heterosexuality heteronormativity and gender hierarchy
5.8The most neglected aspect of the social construction of sexuality is the structural, where sexuality is both constituted and regulated through the institutionalisation of heterosexuality bolstered by law, the state and social convention. The institution of heterosexuality is inherently gendered, it rests upon the assumed normality of specific forms of social and sexual relations between women and men and hence intersects with gender hierarchy and gendered divisions of domestic and waged labour. At the level of meaning sexuality is constituted as an object of discourse and through the specific discourses on the sexual in circulation at any historical moment. However, meaning is also deployed within and emergent from social interaction and hence finds its expression at yet another level - that of our everyday social practices, through which each of us negotiates and makes sense of our own sexual lives. Here, too, sexuality is constantly in the process of being constructed and reconstructed by what embodied individuals actually do. Finally, sexuality is socially constructed at the level of subjectivity, through complex social and cultural processes by which we acquire sexual and gendered desires and identities (Jackson 1999: 5-6).
6.3This is not to say that Gagnon and Simon's work was without flaws. Although they place a great deal of emphasis on gender, they tend to focus primarily on socially constructed differences between women and men, without sufficient emphasis on the power relations between them. Since the concept of scripts was developed within a broadly symbolic interactionist framework, it was not conducive to thinking about issues of power and inequality, about the privileging of male dominated heterosexuality except at the level of meaning and interpersonal conduct. Yet this work was radical for its time and still provides a framework for thinking about sexuality which is worth building on. It was not, however, a perspective which attracted legions of disciples and only a few feminist and gay theorists took it up (Plummer, 1975; Jackson 1978). This in part explains why it was disappeared by later forms of social, or cultural, constructionism. I still find it highly ironic that when sociologists generated a critique of repression, most feminist and other radical thinkers took no notice, yet as soon as Foucault (1981) did so many adopted this position as a virtual dogma.
6.5Queer and feminist perspectives, despite the theoretical differences within and between them, do have some common concerns. Both question the ways in which male dominated heterosexuality is routinely normalised and both assume that neither gender divisions nor the heterosexual/homosexual divide are fixed by nature. Beyond this, however, their emphases diverge. Whereas feminists have historically focused on male dominance within heterosexual relations, queer theorists have directed their attention the ways in which 'heteronormativity' renders alternatives to heterosexuality 'other' and marginal. I would suggest that an effective critique of heterosexuality - at the levels of social structure, meaning, social practice and subjectivity - must address both heteronormativity and male dominance. Such a critique necessarily entails a sociological understanding of gender as a hierarchical social division, since heterosexuality is by definition ordered by gender polarity. Moreover, 'same sex' desire also requires the social, cultural and subjective recognition of gender categories. Without the distinction of gender, heterosexuality, lesbianism and homosexuality would have no meaning, no social existence (Jackson 1976;1999).
6.6I am suggesting that sociology can potentially offer more to feminism than the primarily cultural perspectives associated with queer theory and will try to demonstrate this by engaging briefly with the work of Judith Butler, a theorist whose work is usually read as both feminist and queer. Like most queer theorists, Butler seeks to destabalise heterosexual normativity; as a feminist, she takes gender seriously, although gender figures in her work more as a cultural difference than a social hierarchy. She does, however, reveal the artificiality of gender, its status as a construction with no necessary relationship to particular bodies or sexualities (Butler 1990). She has also contested those readings of her work in which gender appears to be ephemeral, a voluntaristic performance, something to be taken on or discarded at will and has thus emphasised the constraining effects of gender, its imposition upon us (Butler 1993). Yet she discusses this enforced 'materialisation' of 'sexed' bodies almost entirely in terms of norms - but with no sense of where these norms come from and how they are constituted (Ramazanoglu 1995), and with no discussion of how they intersect with everyday social relations and practices. The social is thus reduced to the normative and what is normative goes unexplained.
6.8Nowhere does Butler consider the possibility that gender and heterosexuality might be structurally related to male dominance, despite her reliance on the work of Monique Wittig for whom the heterosexual contract is fundamental to the maintenance of the patriarchal order. Whereas Wittig sees heterosexuality as founded upon the appropriation of women's bodies and labour, Butler reads her account largely in terms of the narrowly sexual and thus misses much of its materialist import. In so doing she fails to address heterosexuality itself and the gender hierarchy internal to it; instead she seems to find heterosexuality and gender interesting only as norms against which the destabalising possibilities of gender and sexual transgression can be asserted (Jackson 1995; 1999). There seems to be an enormous gulf in her theorising between heterosexuality's functions (for capitalism), the norms which enforce it (asserted but never fully explicated) and the performativity through which gender is produced in everyday life.
6.9Here Butler's inability to conceptualise the social limits her perspective. She is aware of the need to bridge the gap between the coercive imposition of gender and the surface appearance of it effected through performance and the necessity, therefore, of accounting for subjectivity. She does so by turning to psychoanalysis 'guided by the question of how regulatory norms form a "sexed" subject in terms which establish the indistinguishability of psychic and bodily formation' (1993: 22). What can be exteriorised and thus performed, she tells us, is limited by the opacity of the unconscious 'by what is barred from the signifier and the domain of corporeal legibility'. Here we have the familiar idea that the unconscious shapes conscious thought and action in mysterious, unknowable ways. What forces Butler back on psychoanalysis is her refusal to countenance any conception of a reflexive social self in interaction with others. Even for those less sceptical of psychoanalysis than I am, there must surely be space for conscious, reflexive thought and action between unconscious depths and the surface appearance of gender - a space Butler conveniently fills through the Derridean notion of the 'undecidability' of the relation between inner psyche and exterior performance. What is lacking here, aside from any sense of the historically and culturally specific ways in which gender and heterosexuality are routinely institutionalised, is an account of the ways in which embodied, social individuals interact with each other and reflexively with themselves, in producing, sustaining and sometimes subverting everyday understandings of gender and sexuality.
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