NYU Press Chapter Title: Queer Chapter Author(s): Siobhan B. Somerville Book Title: Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition Book Editor(s): Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287j69.57 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms NYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition This content downloaded from 137.110.33.28 on Mon, 14 Dec 2020 03:40:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms further stretching. Enlarging the scale of international scale of international causal connectedness—that is, 52 bringing these two senses of “public” into congruence Queer with each other—means resetting the boundaries of Siobhan B. Somerville attention, conversation, and opinion so as to match the the relevant moral community so that those who are likely to be affected by a course of action, wherever they “Queer” causes confusion, perhaps because two of its live, are among those invited to debate it. The United current meanings seem to be at odds. In both popular Nations, so-called nongovernmental organizations, and academic usage in the United States, “queer” is transnational television stations such as CNN and Al- sometimes used interchangeably with the terms Jazeera, and the Internet are among the sociotechnical “gay” and “lesbian” and occasionally “transgender” institutions whose impact on the possible constituting and “bisexual.” In this sense of the word, “queer” is of a global public now ought to be under hopeful and understood as an umbrella term that refers to a range suspicious examination. of sexual identities that are “not straight.” In other political and academic contexts, “queer” is used in a very different way: as a term that calls into question the stability of any such categories of identity based on sexual orientation. In this second sense, “queer” is a critique of the tendency to organize political or theoretical questions around sexual orientation per se. To “queer” becomes a way to denaturalize categories such as “lesbian” and “gay” (not to mention “straight” and “heterosexual”), revealing them as socially and historically constructed identities that have often worked to establish and police the line between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” Fittingly, the word “queer” itself has refused to leave a clear trace of its own origins; its etymology is unknown. It may have been derived from the German word quer or the Middle High German twer, which meant “cross,” “oblique,” “squint,” “perverse,” or “wrongheaded,” but these origins have been contested. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that while “queer” seems to have entered English in the sixteenth century, there are few examples of the word before 1700. From that time until the mid-twentieth century, “queer” tended to refer to anything “strange,” “odd,” or “peculiar,” 203 Burget_1p.indd 203 This content downloaded from 137.110.33.28 on Mon, 14 Dec 2020 03:40:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9/29/14 11:37 AM with additional negative connotations that suggested just cos they like cock” (Isambard 2004). On the other something “bad,” “worthless,” or even “counterfeit.” In hand, these class connotations are unstable. “If I have the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the to pick an identity label in the English language,” wrote word “queer” began to be used also as a verb, meaning poet and critic Gloria Anzaldúa, “I pick ‘dyke’ or ‘queer,’ “to quiz or ridicule,” “to puzzle,” “to cheat,” or “to spoil.” though these working-class words . . . have been taken During this time, the adjectival form also began to refer over by white middle-class lesbian theorists in the to a condition that was “not normal,” “out of sorts,” academy” (1998, 263–64). The use of “queer” in academic and political contexts “giddy, faint, or ill.” By the first two decades of the twentieth century, beginning in the late 1980s represented an attempt to “queer” became linked to sexual practice and identity reclaim this stigmatizing word and to defy those who in the United States, particularly in urban sexual have wielded it as a weapon. This usage is often traced cultures. During the 1910s and 1920s in New York City, to the context of AIDS activism that responded to the for example, men who called themselves “queer” used epidemic’s devastating toll on gay men in U.S. urban the term to refer to their sexual interest in other men areas during the 1980s and 1990s. Queer Nation, an (Chauncey 1994). Contemporaneous literary works by activist organization that grew out of ACT UP (AIDS African American writers such as Nella Larsen (1929) Coalition To Unleash Power), became one of the most and Jean Toomer (1923/1969) suggest that the term visible sites of a new politics that was “meant to be could also carry racialized meanings, particularly in confrontational—opposed to gay assimilationists the context of mixed-race identities that exposed the and straight oppressors while inclusive of people who instability of divisions between “black” and “white.” have been marginalized by anyone in power” (Escoffier But it was not until the 1940s that “queer” began to and Bérubé 1991, 14). In subsequent decades, queer be used in mainstream U.S. culture primarily to refer political groups have not always achieved this goal to “sexual perverts” or “homosexuals,” most often in of inclusiveness in practice, but they have sought to a pejorative, stigmatizing way, a usage that reached its transform the homophobic ideologies of dominant U.S. height during the Cold War era and that continues to culture, as well as strategies used by existing mainstream some extent today. In the early twenty-first century, lesbian and gay rights movements, many of which have “queer” remains a volatile term; the American Heritage tended to construct lesbian and gay people as a viable Dictionary even appends a warning label advising that “minority” group and to appeal to liberal models of the use of “queer” by “heterosexuals is often considered inclusion (Duggan 1992). offensive,” and therefore “extreme caution must be The movement to gain legal rights to same-sex taken concerning [its] use when one is not a member marriage demonstrates some of the key differences of the group.” The term has also carried specific class between a lesbian/gay rights approach and a queer connotations in some periods and contexts. On the activist strategy. While advocates for same-sex marriage one hand, as one participant in a 2004 online forum argue that lesbians and gay men should not be excluded put it, “‘Queer’ is a rebellion against those posh middle- from the privileges of marriage accorded to straight class business owners who want to define gaydom as couples, many queer activists and theorists question being their right to enjoy all the privileges denied them why marriage and the nuclear family should be the sites 204 Burget_1p.indd 204 Queer Siobhan B. Somerville This content downloaded from 137.110.33.28 on Mon, 14 Dec 2020 03:40:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9/29/14 11:37 AM of legal and social privilege in the first place. Because been produced in a range of historical and cultural same-sex marriage would leave intact a structure that contexts. disadvantages those who either cannot or choose For this reason, a key concept in queer theory is not to marry (regardless of their sexual orientation), the notion of “heteronormativity,” a term that refers a more ethical project, queer activists argue, would to “the institutions, structures of understanding, and seek to detach material and social privileges from the practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem institution of marriage altogether (Ettelbrick 1989; not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality— Duggan 2004). but also privileged” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548n2). Sometimes in conversation with activist efforts and Heteronormativity, it is important to stress, is not sometimes not, queer theory emerged as an academic the same thing as heterosexuality (though the two field during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing are not entirely separable); indeed, various forms of on the work of Michel Foucault, scholars who are now heterosexuality (adultery, polygamy, and interracial referred to as queer theorists argued that sexuality, marriage, among others) and heterosexual practices especially the binary system of “homosexual” and (e.g., fornication, sodomy) have historically been “heterosexual” orientations, is a relatively modern proscribed in certain contexts rather than privileged production. As Foucault (1976/1990) argued, although (Rubin 1984; C. Cohen 1997; Burgett 2005). Rather, certain acts between two people of the same sex had heteronormativity is a form of power that exerts its long been punishable through legal and religious effects on both gay and straight individuals, often sanctions, these practices did not necessarily define through unspoken practices and institutional structures. individuals as “homosexual” until the late nineteenth Because queer critique has the potential to destabilize century. While historians have disagreed about the the ground on which any particular claim to identity precise periods and historical contexts in which the can be made (though, importantly, not destroying or notion of sexual identity emerged, Foucault’s insistence abandoning identity categories altogether), a significant that sexuality “must not be thought of as a kind of body of queer scholarship has warned against natural given” has been transformative, yielding an anchoring the field primarily or exclusively to questions understanding of sexuality not as a “natural” psychic or of sexuality. Instead, these scholars have argued, we physical drive but as a “set of effects produced in bodies, should dislodge “the status of sexual orientation itself behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment” as the authentic and centrally governing category of of power (105, 127). Moving away from the underlying queer practice, thus freeing up queer theory as a way assumptions of identity politics and its tendency to of reconceiving not just the sexual, but the social in locate stable sexual subjects, queer theory has focused general” (Harper et al. 1997, 1). In local, national, and on the very process of sexual subject formation. If transnational contexts, such a formulation allows us to much of the early work in lesbian and gay studies contest constructions of certain issues as “sexual” and tended to be organized around an opposition between others as “nonsexual,” a distinction that has often been homosexuality and heterosexuality, the primary axis deployed by U.S. neoconservatives and neoliberals alike of queer studies shifted toward the distinction between to separate “lesbian and gay” movements from a whole normative and nonnormative sexualities as they have range of interconnected struggles for social justice. Queer Burget_1p.indd 205 Siobhan B. Somerville This content downloaded from 137.110.33.28 on Mon, 14 Dec 2020 03:40:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 205 9/29/14 11:37 AM The field of queer studies has challenged this approaches has been vigorously argued most recently tendency by using intersectional approaches that in a body of scholarship identified as “queer of color begin from the assumption that sexuality cannot be critique” (Muñoz 1999; Ferguson 2004). separated from other categories of identity and social At the same time that intersectional approaches status. Whereas some early queer theorists found it have become more central to queer studies, the field has necessary to insist on understanding sexuality as a also increasingly turned to the specificities of nation- distinct category of analysis, one that could not be fully based models and the dynamics of globalization and accounted for by feminist theories of gender, it is now imperialism. Scholars have begun to interrogate both clear that sexuality and gender can never be completely the possibilities and the limitations of queer theory for isolated from each other (Rubin 1984; Sedgwick 1990). understanding the movement of desires and identities Indeed, Judith Butler (1990, 5) has shown that our within a transnational frame, as well as the necessity of very notions of sexual difference (male/female) are an attending to the relationship between the methods of effect of a “heterosexual matrix.” A significant body of queer theory and colonial structures of knowledge and scholarship, largely generated out of questions raised power (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999; Manalansan 2003; by transgender identity and politics, has insisted on the Gopinath 2005). The resulting interest in the “nation” pressing need to revisit and scrutinize the relationships and its constitutive role in processes of racialization among sex, gender, and sexuality, with an emphasis and sexualization has raised new questions about the on recalibrating theories of performativity in light of ways that queer theory might usefully interrogate the materialist accounts of gender (S. Stone 1991; Prosser nation’s less charismatic companion—the state (Reddy 1998; Valentine 2007; Spade 2011). 2011). Jacqueline Stevens (2004, 225), for instance, If queer theory’s project is understood, in part, as has envisioned queer theory and activism as a site for an attempt to challenge identity categories that are articulating “a revolution against all forms of state presented as stable, transhistorical, or authentic, then boundaries, . . . the unhindered movement and full- critiques of naturalized racial categories are also crucial fledged development of capacities regardless of one’s to its antinormative project. As a number of critics have birthplace or parentage.” shown, heteronormativity derives much of its power If the origins of the term “queer” are elusive, its from the ways in which it (often silently) shores up future horizons might be even more so. While the term as well as depends on naturalized categories of racial itself has a contested and perhaps confusing history, difference in contexts ranging from sexology and one of the points of consensus among queer theorists psychoanalysis to fiction and cinema (Somerville 2000; has been that its parameters should not be prematurely Eng 2001). Heteronormativity itself must be understood, (or ever) delimited (Sedgwick 1993; Berlant and Warner then, as a racialized concept, since “[racially] marginal 1995). The field of queer studies is relatively young, group members, lacking power and privilege although but as it has made inroads in a number of different engaged in heterosexual behavior, have often found academic disciplines and debates, some critics have themselves defined as outside the norms and values of asserted that the term has lost its ability to create dominant society” (C. Cohen 1997, 454). This insistence productive friction. Pointing to its seeming ubiquity in on putting questions of race at the center of queer popular-cultural venues, others criticize the ways that 206 Burget_1p.indd 206 Queer Siobhan B. Somerville This content downloaded from 137.110.33.28 on Mon, 14 Dec 2020 03:40:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9/29/14 11:37 AM the greater circulation of “queer” and its appropriation emptied out its oppositional political potential. 53 Whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about Race the increasing visibility of “queer” culture remains Roderick A. Ferguson by the mainstream entertainment industries have an open question. Meanwhile, scholars continue to carefully interrogate the shortcomings and the The study of race incorporates a set of wide-ranging untapped possibilities of “queer” approaches to a range analyses of freedom and power. The scope of those of diverse issues, such as migration (Luibhéid and Cantú analyses has much to do with the broad application of 2005), temporality (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; racial difference to academic and popular notions of E. Freeman 2010; Rohy 2009), region (Herring 2010; epistemology, community, identity, and the body. With Gopinath 2007; Tongson 2011), indigeneity (Justice, regard to economic and political formations, race has Rifkin, and Schneider 2010; Morgenson 2011), and shaped the meaning and profile of citizenship and labor. disability (McRuer 2006). Whatever the future uses and In relation to corporeality, race has rendered the body contradictions of “queer,” it seems likely that the word into a text on which histories of racial differentiation, will productively refuse to settle down, demanding exclusion, and violence are inscribed. Analyzed in terms critical reflection in order to be understood in its varied of subjectivity, race helps to locate the ways in which and specific cultural, political, and historical contexts. identities are constituted. Many of these insights are the intellectual effects of antiracist political struggles, particularly ones organized around national liberation and civil rights. In the United States, the minority movements of the 1950s and 1960s fundamentally changed the ways in which racial minorities thought about their identities and cultures and the ways that race worked within U.S. society (Omi and Winant 1986/1994). In doing so, these movements intersected with sociological arguments that displaced notions of race as a strict biological inheritance and forced scholars to confront it as a category with broad political and economic implications. For the first time, there was mass mobilization around the deployment of the linguistic, historical, and artistic elements of minority cultures as a means of challenging racial oppression within the United States. Black, Chicano, and Asian American political and cultural groups emerged out of this context. In addition to cultural recovery, these groups argued for land redistribution, 207 Burget_1p.indd 207 This content downloaded from ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9/29/14 11:37 AM Trish Salah, The Feminist Wire, December 18, 2013 notes toward dropping out (March 1995) This is where I ceased— Not to be too obvious, or in mutation, or distilled, transmogrification Beauty queens don’t do so well in grad school. Even if every body wants one When you assume the shape, austere, assume anything. Thing it, sister, thing itself, thing it loud to last your girl Black Lips Cool and Quelled In the ‘90s every white body wants a theory for becoming, other. Don’t let D & G fool you, nobody wants one to become other. Even if Saturday Night at the Pyramid, BoyBar, ClitClub or just hanging out If you want or do become other, it will be needling you will be falsely accused, charged with falsified access to a rare and dangerous Paramilitary designed by I, Desire grooming rumours and splitting mythoi Trish Salah, The Feminist Wire, December 18, 2013 like rage and glass, sick with genre for fun fun fun not likely. Nobody wants to become nobody. And authentically so, they fear. What if y = just being Yours sincerely Yours truly Yours until the very end of days Yourself? Being, as k. would say, “an edge predicament” ? Beloved, in Kind. There are two kinds of people in this world, binary and non-binary, or Suppose we did say we were a third then that were a word for capping it off, or anything more than the tyranny of the couple, or Momma and Baby and Daddy makes moon enough and time… There are two kinds of love in this world Narcissistic and Anaclitic, or Trish Salah, The Feminist Wire, December 18, 2013 Ana can’t get over how dependent upon Narcissus she’s become lonesome after all these years. Love to love you, baby, in theory but say you do get out of this library, theory, club, how are you gonna make it North of the Wall again? There is a cabin in the woods, a secret way, a drunken ruse time untravelled stolen back So, Mummers and co… children, etc…. Arty or Sexy, etc… Abandoning Incest and Deconstruction no more than your God If you are on the moon, or off the moon? If you are seeking a body or displaying one run off dreaming carny, corny and carnal Still no body wants to become no body. Remember that when you are discovered in all your figura borders of the Real, surrounded clashing arms and legs even sleep is aching with it while Glory bathes our moon with massacre. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence Author(s): Adrienne Rich Source: Signs , Summer, 1980, Vol. 5, No. 4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (Summer, 1980), pp. 631-660 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence Adrienne Rich I Biologically men have only one innate orientation-a sexual one that draws them to women,-while women have two innate orientations, sexual toward men and reproductive toward their young.1 ... I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men. YesIn its first issue (Autumn 1975), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society published Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's now classic article, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America." The following summer appeared Joan Kelly's "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History (Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 4 [Summer 1976]). Among scholarly articles, these two provided, in different ways, a point of departure for my thinking in this essay. I am deeply indebted also to the growing body of lesbian research in other journals, including Blanche W. Cook's "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," Chrysalis 3 (1977): 43-61; and Lorraine Bethel's "'This Infinity of Conscious Pain': Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition," lecture given at the Harlem Studio Museum, May 1978, forthcoming in Black Women's Studies, ed. Gloria Hull, Elaine Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980); by several books published in the last few years: Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979): Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The RoaringInside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Diana Russell and Nicole van de Ven, eds., Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Fem- mes, 1976); and by Susan Cavin's dissertation in sociology, "Lesbian Origins: An Hystorical and Cross-cultural Analysis of Sex Ratios, Female Sexuality and Homo-sexual Segregation versus Hetero-sexual Integration Patterns in Relation to the Liberation of Women" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1978). 1. Alice Rossi, "Children and Work in the Lives of Women" (paper delivered at the University of Arizona, Tucson, February 1976). [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1980, vol. 5, no. 4] ? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0097-9740/80/0504-0001$01.00 631 This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 632 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality something like that. I was an Anna who invited defeat from men without ever being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become-but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time, that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary. Yes, that Anna during that time was ... [Another blank line across the page:]2 The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many other texts than the two just preceding. The assumption made by Rossi, that women are "innately sexually oriented" toward men, or by Lessing, that the lesbian choice is simply an acting-out of bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone; they are widely current in literature and in the social sciences. I am concerned here with two other matters as why women's choice of women as passionate com co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalida ing and disguise; and second, the virtual or total n tence in a wide range of writings, including femin ously there is a connection here. I believe that muc criticism is stranded on this shoal. My organizing impulse is the belief that it is not enough for feminist thought that specifically lesbian texts exist. Any theory or cultural/ political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less "natural" phenomenon, as mere "sexual preference," or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations, is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of "lesbianism" as an "alternative life-style," or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue. In this exploratory paper, I shall try to show why. I will begin by way of examples, briefly discussing four books that have appeared in the last few years, written from different viewpoints and political orientations, but all presenting themselves, and favorably reviewed, as feminist.3 All take as a basic assumption that the socia 2. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam Books [1962] 1977), p. 480. 3. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Press, 1978); Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 633 Signs relations of the sexes are disordered and extremely problem disabling, for women; all seek paths toward change. I have l from some of these books than from others; but on this I am one might have been more accurate, more powerful, more t for change, had the author felt impelled to deal with lesbian a reality, and as a source of knowledge and power available t with the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachh dominance.4 In none of them is the question ever raised, wh different context, or other things being equal, women would erosexual coupling and marriage; heterosexuality is presume ual preference" of "most women," either implicitly or explic of these books, which concern themselves with motherin relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, is comp erosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully these; or the idea of "preference" or "innate orientation" ev questioned. In For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, the authors' superb pamphlets, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, and Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, are developed into a provocative and complex study. Their thesis in this book is that the advice given American women by male health professionals, particularly in the areas of marital sex, maternity, and child care, has echoed the dictates of the economic marketplace and the role capitalism has needed women to play in production and/or reproduction. Women have become the consumer victims of various cures, therapies, and normative judgments in different periods (including the prescription to middle-class 4. I could have chosen many other serious and influential recent books, including anthologies, which would illustrate the same point: e.g., Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Boston Women's Health Collective's best-seller (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), which devotes a separate (and inadequate) chapter to lesbians, but whose message is that heterosexuality is most women's life preference; Berenice Carroll, ed., Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), which does not include even a token essay on the lesbian presence in history, though an essay by Linda Gordon, Persis Hunt, et al. notes the use by male historians of "sexual deviance" as a category to discredit and dismiss Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, and other feminists ("Historical Phallacies: Sexism in American Historical Writing"); and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), which contains three mentions of male homosexuality but no materials that I have been able to locate on lesbians. Gerda Lerner, ed., The Female Experience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1977), contains an abridgment of two lesbian/feminist position papers from the contemporary movement but no other documentation of lesbian existence. Lerner does note in her preface, however, how the charge of deviance has been used to fragment women and discourage women's resistance. Linda Gordon, in Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Viking Press, Grossman, 1976), notes accurately that: "It is not that feminism has produced more lesbians. There have always been many lesbians, despite high levels of repression; and most lesbians experience their sexual preference as innate . . ." (p. 410). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 634 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality women to embody and preserve the sacredness of the home-the "scientific" romanticization of the home itself). None of the "experts"' advice has been either particularly scientific or women-oriented; it has reflected male needs, male fantasies about women, and male interest in control- ling women-particularly in the realms of sexuality and motherhoodfused with the requirements of industrial capitalism. So much of this book is so devastatingly informative and is written with such lucid feminist wit, that I kept waiting as I read for the basic prescription against lesbianism to be examined. It never was. This can hardly be for lack of information. Jonathan Katz's Gay American History5 tells us that as early as 1656 the New Haven Colony prescribed the death penalty for lesbians. Katz provides many suggestive and informative documents on the "treatment" (or torture) of lesbians by the medical profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent work by the historian Nancy Sahli documents the crackdown on intense female friendships among college women at the turn of the present century.6 The ironic title, For Her Own Good, might have referred first and foremost to the economic imperative to heterosexuality and marriage and to the sanctions imposed against single women and widows-both of whom have been and still are viewed as deviant. Yet, in this often enlightening Marxist-feminist overview of male prescriptions for female sanity and health, the economics of prescriptive heterosexuality go unexamined.7 Of the three psychoanalytically based books, one, Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women, is written as if lesbians simply do not exist, even as marginal beings. Given Miller's title I find this astonishing. However, the favorable reviews the book has received in feminist journals, including Signs and Spokeswoman, suggest that Miller's heterocentric assumptions are widely shared. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise, Dorothy Dinnerstein makes an impassioned argument for the sharing of parenting between women and men and for an end to what she perceives as the male/female symbiosis of "gender arrangements," which she feels are leading the species further and further into violence and self-extinction. Apart from other problems that I have with this book (including her silence on the institutional and random terrorism men have practiced on women-and children-throughout history, amply documented by 5. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976). 6. Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: Women's Relationships before the Fall," Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture 8 (1979): 17-27. A version of the article was presented at the Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 11, 1976. 7. This is a book which I have publicly endorsed. I would still do so, though with the above caveat. It is only since beginning to write this article that I fully appreciated how enormous is the unasked question in Ehrenreich and English's book. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 635 Signs Barry, Daly, Griffin, Russell and van de Ven, and Brownmille obsession with psychology to the neglect of economic and oth realities that help to create psychological reality), I find utter Dinnerstein's view of the relations between women and men as "a collab- oration to keep history mad." She means by this, to perpetuate social relations which are hostile, exploitive, and destructive to life itself. She sees women and men as equal partners in the making of "sexual arrangements," seemingly unaware of the repeated struggles of women to resist oppression (our own and that of others) and to change our condition. She ignores, specifically, the history of women who-as witches, femmes seules, marriage resisters, spinsters, autonomous widows, and/or lesbians-have managed on varying levels not to collaborate. It is this history, precisely, from which feminists have so much to learn and on which there is overall such blanketing silence. Dinnerstein acknowledges at the end of her book that "female separatism," though "on a large scale and in the long run wildly impractical," has something to teach us: "Sepa- rate, women could in principle set out to learn from scratch- undeflected by the opportunities to evade this task that men's presence has so far offered-what intact self-creative humanness is."9 Phrases like "intact self-creative humanness" obscure the question of what the many forms of female separatism have actually been addressing. The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence, to the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the "only ones" ever to have done so. They have undertaken it even though few women have been in an economic position to resist marriage altogether; and even though attacks against unmarried women have ranged from aspersion and mockery to deliberate gynocide, including the burning and torturing of millions of widows and spinsters during the witch persecutions of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in Europe, and the practice of suttee on widows in India.10 Nancy Chodorow does come close to the edge of an acknowledg- ment of lesbian existence. Like Dinnerstein, Chodorow believes that the fact that women, and women only, are responsible for child care in the sexual division of labor has led to an entire social organization of gender inequality, and that men as well as women must become primary carers for children if that inequality is to change. In the process of examining, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how mothering-by-women affects the psychological development of girl and boy children, she offers documentation that men are "emotionally secondary" in women's lives; that 8. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). 9. Dinnerstein, p. 272. 10. Daly, pp. 184-85; 114-33. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 636 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality "women have a richer, ongoing inner world to fall back on.... men do not become as emotionally important to women as women do to men."'' This would carry into the late twentieth century Smith-Rosenberg's findings about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's emotional focus on women. "Emotionally important" can of course refer to anger as well as to love, or to that intense mixture of the two often found in women's relationships with women: one aspect of what I have come to call the "double-life of women" (see below). Chodorow concludes that because women have women as mothers, "The mother remains a primary internal object [sic] to the girl, so that heterosexual relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive, second relationship for her, whereas for the boy they recreate an exclusive, primary relationship." According to Chodorow, women "have learned to deny the limitations of masculine lovers for both psychological and practical reasons."'2 But the practical reasons (like witch burnings, male control of law, theology, and science, or economic nonviability within the sexual division of labor) are glossed over. Chodorow's account barely glances at the constraints and sanctions which, historically, have enforced or insured the coupling of women with men and obstructed or penalized our coupling or allying in independent groups with other women. She dismisses lesbian existence with the comment that "lesbian relationships do tend to re-create mother-daughter emotions and connections, but most women are heterosexual" (implied: more mature, having developed beyond the mother-daughter connection). She then adds: "This heterosexual preference and taboos on homosexuality, in addition to objective economic dependence on men, make the option of primary sexual bonds with other women unlikely-though more prevalent in recent years."'3 The significance of that qualification seems irresistible-but Chodorow does not explore it further. Is she saying that lesbian existence has become more visible in recent years (in certain groups?), that economic and other pressures have changed (under capitalism, socialism, or both?), and that consequently more women are rejecting the heterosexual "choice"? She argues that women want children because their heterosexual re- lationships lack richness and intensity, that in having a child a woman seeks to re-create her own intense relationship with her mother. It seems to be that on the basis of her own findings, Chodorow leads us implicitly to conclude that heterosexuality is not a "preference" for women; that, for one thing, it fragments the erotic from the emotional in a way that women find impoverishing and painful. Yet her book participates in mandating it. Neglecting the covert socializations and the overt forces which have channelled women into marriage and heterosexual romance, 11. Chodorow, pp. 197-98. 12. Ibid., pp. 198-99. 13. Ibid., p. 200. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 637 Signs pressures ranging from the selling of daughters to postindus nomics to the silences of literature to the images of the televi she, like Dinnerstein, is stuck with trying to reform a institution-compulsory heterosexuality-as if, despite prof tional impulses and complementarities drawing women towar there is a mystical/biological heterosexual inclination, a "pref "choice" which draws women toward men. Moreover, it is understood that this "preference" does not need to be explained, unless through the tortuous theory of the female Oedipu complex or the necessity for species reproduction. It is lesbian sexualit which (usually, and, incorrectly, "included" under male homosexuality) is seen as requiring explanation. This assumption of female heterose uality seems to me in itself remarkable: it is an enormous assumption have glided so silently into the foundations of our thought. The extension of this assumption is the frequently heard assertion that in a world of genuine equality, where men were nonoppressive an nurturing, everyone would be bisexual. Such a notion blurs and sen timentalizes the actualities within which women have experienced sexu ality; it is the old liberal leap across the tasks and struggles of here an now, the continuing process of sexual definition which will generate i own possibilities and choices. (It also assumes that women who hav chosen women have done so simply because men are oppressive an emotionally unavailable: which still fails to account for women who co tinue to pursue relationships with oppressive and/or emotionally un satisfying men.) I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like motherhood needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution-even, o especially, by those individuals who feel they are, in their personal ex perience, the precursors of a new social relation between the sexes. II If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic re- lationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. I doubt that enough feminist scholars and theorists have taken the pains to acknowledge the societal forces which wrench women's emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and other women and This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 638 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality from woman-identified values. These forces, as I shall try to show, range from literal physical enslavement to the disguising and distorting of possible options. I do not, myself, assume that mothering-by-women is a "sufficient cause" of lesbian existence. But the issue of mothering-by-women has been much in the air of late, usually accompanied by the view that increased parenting by men would mninimize antagonism between the sexes and equalize the sexual imbalance of power of males over females. These discussions are carried on without reference to compulsory heterosexuality as a phenomenon let alone as an ideology. I do not wish to psychologize here, but rather to identify sources of male power. I believe large numbers of men could, in fact, undertake child care on a large scale without radically altering the balance of male power in a maleidentified society. In her essay "The Origin of the Family," Kathleen Gough lists eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary societies which I would like to use as a framework: "men's ability to deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to control their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments."14 (Gough does not perceive these power-characteristics as specifically enforcing heterosexuality; only as producing sexual inequality.) Below, Gough's words appear in italics; the elaboration of each of her categories, in brackets, is my own. Characteristics of male power include: the power of men 1. to deny women [our own] sexuality [by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against masturbation; denial of maternal and postmenopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence]; 2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them [by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that male sexual "drive" amounts to a right;15 idealization 14. Kathleen Gough, "The Origin of the Family," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna [Rapp] Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 69-70. 15. Barry, pp. 216-19. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 639 Signs of heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, ad etc.; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; th psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgas nographic depictions of women responding pleasurably violence and humiliation (a subliminal message being th heterosexuality is more "normal" than sensuality betwe en)]; 3. to command or exploit their labor to control their produce [by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, and childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping; female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of wom- en]; 4. to control or rob them of their children [by means of father-right and "legal kidnapping";16 enforced sterilization; systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts; the malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as "token torturer"17 in genital mutilation or in binding the daughter's feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage]; 5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement [by means of rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah; foot-binding; atrophying of women's athletic capabilities; haute couture, "feminine" dress codes; the veil; sexual harassment on the streets; horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for "full-time" mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives]; 6. to use them as objects in male transactions [use of women as "gifts"; bride-price; pimping; arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals, e.g., wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation, call girls, "bunnies," geisha, kisaeng prostitutes, secretaries]; 7. to cramp their creativeness [witch persecutions as campaigns against midwives and female healers and as pogrom against independent, "unassimilated" women;'8 definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural values become embodiment of male subjectivity; restriction of female self- fulfillment to marriage and motherhood; sexual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers; the social and economic 16. Anna Demeter, Legal Kidnapping (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), pp. xx, 126-28. 17. Daly, pp. 132, 139-41, 163-65. 18. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973); Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hat- ing (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 118-54; Daly, pp. 178-222. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 640 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality disruption of women's creative aspirations;'9 erasure of female tradition];20 and 8. to withholdfrom them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments [by means of noneducation of females (60% of the world's illiterates are women); the "Great Silence" regarding women and par- ticularly lesbian existence in history and culture;21 sex-role stereotyping which deflects women from science, technology, and other "masculine" pursuits; male social/professional bonding which excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions]. These are some of the methods by which male power is manifested and maintained. Looking at the schema, what surely impresses itself is the fact that we are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property possession, but a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness, which suggests that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained. Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others. Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage, and sexual orien tion toward men, are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive com ponents of their lives. The chastity belt; child marriage; erasure of le bian existence (except as exotic and perverse) in art, literature, fi idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage-these are som fairly obvious forms of compulsion, the first two exemplifying physi force, the second two control of consciousness. While clitoridectomy h been assailed by feminists as a form of woman-torture,22 Kathleen Bar first pointed out that it is not simply a way of turning the young girl into a "marriageable" woman through brutal surgery: it intends that wom in the intimate proximity of polygynous marriage will not form sex relationships with each other; that-from a male, genital-fetishi perspective-female erotic connections, even in a sex-segregated sit tion, will be literally excised.23 19. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), and Th Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., [1938] 1966); Tillie Olsen, Silences (Boston: Delacorte Press, 1978); Michelle Cliff, "The Resonance of Interruption," Chrysalis: A Ma zine of Women's Culture 8 (1979): 29-37. 20. Mary Daly, Beyond God theFather (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 347-51; Olse pp. 22-46. 21. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 93. 22. Fran P. Hosken, "The Violence of Power: Genital Mutilation of Females," Heresies: A FeministJournal of Art and Politics 6 (1979): 28-35; Russell and van de Ven, 194-95. 23. Barry, pp. 163-64. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 641 Signs The function of pornography as an influence on consciou major public issue of our time, when a multibillion-dollar in the power to disseminate increasingly sadistic, women-degra images. But even so-called soft-core pornography and advert women as objects of sexual appetite devoid of emotional conte individual meaning or personality: essentially as a sexual com be consumed by males. (So-called lesbian pornography, creat male voyeuristic eye, is equally devoid of emotional context o personality.) The most pernicious message relayed by por that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentiall tic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But alo message comes another, not always recognized: that enfor sion and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexua sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, incl mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either porn itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality o bondage.24 Pornography does not simply create a climate in and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior acceptablefrom men in heterosexual intercourse-behavior which r strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potenti the potential of loving and being loved by women in mu integrity. In her brilliant study, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, Catharine A. MacKinnon delineates the intersection of compulsory heterosexuality and economics. Under capitalism, women are horizontally segregated by gender and occupy a structurally inferior position in the workplace; this is hardly news, but MacKinnon raises the question why, even if capitalism "requires some collection of individuals to occupy low-status, low-paying positions ... such persons must be biologically female," and goes on to point out that "the fact that male employers often do not hire qualified women, even when they could pay them less than men suggests that more than the profit motive is implicated" [emphasis added].25 She cites a wealth of material documenting the fact that women are not only segregated in low-paying, service jobs (as sec- retaries, domestics, nurses, typists, telephone operators, child-care workers, waitresses) but that "sexualization of the woman" is part of the job. Central and intrinsic to the economic realities of women's lives is the requirement that women will "market sexual attractiveness to men, who 24. The issue of "lesbian sadomasochism" needs to be examined in terms of the dominant cultures' teachings about the relation of sex and violence, and also of the ac tance by some lesbians of male homosexual mores. I believe this to be another example the "double-life" of women. 25. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Se Discrimination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 15-16. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 642 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality tend to hold the economic power and position to enforce their pre- dilections." And MacKinnon exhaustively documents that "sexual harassment perpetuates the interlocked structure by which women have been kept sexually in thrall to men at the bottom of the labor market. Two forces of American society converge: men's control over women's sexuality and capital's control over employees' work lives."26 Thus, women in the workplace are at the mercy of sex-as-power in a vicious circle. Economically disadvantaged, women-whether waitresses or professors-endure sexual harassment to keep their jobs and learn to behave in a complaisantly and ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because they discover this is their true qualification for employment, what- ever the job description. And, MacKinnon notes, the woman who too decisively resists sexual overtures in the workplace is accused of being "dried-up" and sexless, or lesbian. This raises a specific difference between the experiences of lesbians and homosexual men. A lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life; her job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual but a heterosexual woman, in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of "real" women. MacKinnon raises radical questions as to the qualitative differences between sexual harassment, rape, and ordinary heterosexual intercourse. ("As one accused rapist put it, he hadn't used 'any more force than is usual for males during the preliminaries."') She criticizes Susan Brownmiller27 for separating rape from the mainstream of daily life and for her unexamined premise that "rape is violence, intercourse is sexuality," removing rape from the sexual sphere altogether. Most crucially she argues that "taking rape from the realm of'the sexual,' placing it in the realm of 'the violent,' allows one to be against it without raising any questions about the extent to which the institution of heterosexuality has defined force as a normal part of 'the preliminaries."'28 "Never is it asked whether, under conditions of male supremacy, the notion of 'consent' has any meaning."29 The fact is that the workplace, among other social institutions, is a place where women have learned to accept male violation of our psychic and physical boundaries as the price of survival; where women have been educated-no less than by romantic literature or by 26. Ibid., p. 174. 27. Brownmiller (n. 8 above). 28. MacKinnon, p. 219. Susan Schecter writes: "The push for heterosexual union at whatever cost is so intense that ... it has become a cultural force of its own that creates battering. The ideology of romantic love and its jealous possession of the partn property provide the masquerade for what can become severe abuse" (Aegis: Magazine Ending Violence against Women [July-August 1979], pp. 50-51). 29. MacKinnon, p. 298. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 643 Signs pornography-to perceive ourselves as sexual prey. A woman escape such casual violations along with economic disadvanta turn to marriage as a form of hoped-for-protection, while b marriage neither social or economic power, thus entering tha also from a disadvantaged position. MacKinnon finally asks: What if inequality is built into the social conceptions of female sexuality, of masculinity and femininity, of sexine erosexual attractiveness? Incidents of sexual harassme that male sexual desire itself may be aroused by female ity. ... Men feel they can take advantage, so they want to, Examination of sexual harassment, precisely because t appear commonplace, forces one to confront the fact intercourse normally occurs between economic (as well a unequals ... the apparent legal requirement that violation en's sexuality appear out of the ordinary before they wi ished helps prevent women from defining the ordinary of their own consent.30 Given the nature and extent of heterosexual pressures, the daily "eroticization of women's subordination" as MacKinnon phrases it,31 I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective (suggested by such writers as Karen Homey, H. R. Hayes, Wolfgang Lederer, and most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein) that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotionaltherefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix. The means of assuring male sexual access to women have recently received a searching investigation by Kathleen Barry.32 She documents extensive and appalling evidence for the existence, on a very large scale, of international female slavery, the institution once known as "white slavery" but which in fact has involved, and at this very moment involves, women of every race and class. In the theoretical analysis derived from her research, Barry makes the connection between all enforced conditions under which women live subject to men: prostitution, marital rape, father-daughter and brother-sister incest, wife-beating, pornography, bride-price, the selling of daughters, purdah, and genital mutila- tion. She sees the rape paradigm-where the victim of sexual assault is held responsible for her own victimization-as leading to the rationaliza30. Ibid., p. 220. 31. Ibid., p. 221. 32. Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (see unnumbered n. above). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 644 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality tion and acceptance of other forms of enslavement, where the woman is presumed to have "chosen" her fate, to embrace it passively, or to have courted it perversely through rash or unchaste behavior. On the contrary, Barry maintains, "female sexual slavery is present in ALL situations where women or girls cannot change the conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions, e.g., social pressure, economic hardship, misplaced trust or the longing for affection, they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation."33 She provides a spectrum of concrete examples, not only as to the existence of a widespread international traffic in women, but also as to how this operates-whether in the form of a "Minnesota pipeline" funneling blonde, blue-eyed midwestern runaways to Times Square, or the purchasing of young women out of rural poverty in Latin America or Southeast Asia, or the providing of maisons d'abattage for migrant workers in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. Instead of "blaming the victim" or trying to diagnose her presumed pathology, Barry turns her floodlight on the pathology of sex colonization itself, the ideology of "cultural sadism" represented by the vast industry of pornography and by the overall identification of women primarily as "sexual beings whose responsibility is the sexual service of men."34 Barry delineates what she names a "sexual domination perspective" through whose lens, purporting objectivity, sexual abuse and terrorism of women by men has been rendered almost invisible by treating it as natural and inevitable. From its point of view, women are expendable as long as the sexual and emotional needs of the male can be satisfied. To replace this perspective of domination with a universal standard of basic freedom for women from gender-specific violence, from constraints on movement, and from male right of sexual and emotional access is the political purpose of her book. Like Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, Barry rejects structuralist and other cultural-relativist rationalizations for sexual torture and antiwoman violence. In her opening chapter, she asks of her readers that they refuse all handy escapes into ignorance and denial. "The only way we can come out of hiding, break through our paralyzing defenses, is to know it all-the full extent of sexual violence and domination of women. ... In knowing, in facing directly, we can learn to chart our course out of this oppression, by envisioning and creating a world which will preclude female sexual slavery."35 "Until we name the practice, give conceptual definition and form to it, illustrate its life over time and in space, those who are its most obvious victims will also not be able to name it or define their experience."36 33. 34. 35. 36. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., p. p. p. p. 33. 103. 5. 100. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Si.ns Summer 1980 645 But women are all, in different ways and to different d victims; and part of the problem with naming and con female sexual slavery is, as Barry clearly sees, compulsor uality. Compulsory heterosexuality simplifies the task of th and pimp in worldwide prostitution rings and "eros centers the privacy of the home, it leads the daughter to "accept" in her father, the mother to deny that it is happening, the bat stay on with an abusive husand. "Befriending or love" is a m the procurer whose job it is to turn the runaway or the co girl over to the pimp for seasoning. The ideology of het mance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, tele advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool procurer's hand and one which he does not hesitate to u amply documents. Early female indoctrination in "love" as a may be largely a Western concept; but a more universal ide cerns the primacy and uncontrollability of the male sexual one of many insights offered by Barry's work: As sexual power is learned by adolescent boys throug experience of their sex drive, so do girls learn that t sexual power is male. Given the importance placed on th drive in the socialization of girls as well as boys, early ad probably the first significant phase of male identificatio life and development. ... As a young girl becomes aware increasing sexual feelings . . . she turns away from her primary relationships with girlfriends. As they become s her, recede in importance in her life, her own identity a a secondary role and she grows into male identification.3 We still need to ask why some women never, even te "turn away from heretofore primary relationships" with oth And why does male-identification-the casting of one's socia and intellectual allegiances with men-exist among lifelon bians? Barry's hypothesis throws us among new questions, b the diversity of forms in which compulsory heterosexuality self. In the mystique of the overpowering, all-conquering m the penis-with-a-life-of-its-own, is rooted the law of male women, which justifies prostitution as a universal cultural as the one hand, while defending sexual slavery within the fa basis of "family privacy and cultural uniqueness" on the adolescent male sex drive, which, as both young women 37. Ibid., p. 218. 38. Ibid., p. 140. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 646 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality taught, once triggered cannot take responsibility for itself or take no for an answer, becomes, according to Barry, the norm and rationale for adult male sexual behavior: a condition of arrested sexual development. Women learn to accept as natural the inevitability of this "drive" because we receive it as dogma. Hence marital rape, hence the Japanese wife resignedly packing her husband's suitcase for a weekend in the kisaeng brothels of Taiwan, hence the psychological as well as economic imbalance of power between husband and wife, male employer and female worker, father and daughter, male professor and female student. The effect of male-identification means internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one's self and one's sex. . .. Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation. ... Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.39 What deserves further exploration is the double-think many women engage in and from which no woman is permanently and utterly free: However woman-to-woman relationships, female support networks, a female and feminist value system, are relied on and cherished, indoctrination in male credibility and status can still create synapses in thought, denials of feeling, wishful thinking, a profound sexual and intellectual confusion.40 I quote here from a letter I received the day I was writing this passage: "I have had very bad relationships with men-I am now in the midst of a very painful separation. I am trying to find my strength through women-without my friends, I could not survive." How many times a day do women speak words like these, or think them, or write them, and how often does the synapse reassert itself? Barry summarizes her findings: ... Considering the arrested sexual development that is understood to be normal in the male population, and considering the numbers of men who are pimps, procurers, members of slavery gangs, corrupt officials participating in this traffic, owners, operators, employees of brothels and lodging and entertainment facilities, por39. Ibid., p. 172. 40. Elsewhere I have suggested that male identification has been a powerful source of white women's racism, and that it has been women who were seen as "disloyal" to male codes and systems who have actively battled against it (Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966- 1978 [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979]). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Signs Summer 1980 647 nography purveyors, associated with prostitution, wife be molesters, incest perpetrators, johns (tricks) and rapists, o but be momentarily stunned by the enormous male popu gaging in female sexual slavery. The huge number of men in these practices should be cause for declaration of an int emergency, a crisis in sexual violence. But what should be alarm is instead accepted as normal sexual intercourse.41 Susan Cavin, in her rich and provocative, if highly specu sertation, suggests that patriarchy becomes possible when the female band, which includes children but ejects adolescent m comes invaded and outnumbered by males; that not patriarchal marriage, but the rape of the mother by the son, becomes the first act of male domination. The entering wedge, or leverage, which allows this to happen is not just a simple change in sex ratios; it is also the mother-child bond, manipulated by adolescent males in order to remain within the matrix past the age of exclusion. Maternal affection is used to establish male right of sexual access, which, however, must ever after be held by force (or through control of consciousness) since the original deep adult bonding is that of woman for woman.42 I find this hypothesis extremely suggestive, since one form of false consciousness which serves compulsory heterosexuality is the maintenance of a mother-son relationship between women and men, including the demand that women provide maternal solace, nonjudgmental nurturing, and compassion for their harassers, rapists, and batterers (as well as for men who passively vampirize them). How many strong and assertive women accept male posturing from no one but their sons? But whatever its origins, when we look hard and clearly at the extent and elaboration of measures designed to keep women within a male sexual purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to address as feminists is, not simple "gender inequality," nor the domination of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against homosexuality," but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access.43 One of many means of enforcement is, of course, the rendering invisible of the lesbian possibility, an engulfed continent which rises fragmentedly to view from time to time only to become submerged again. Feminist research and theory that contributes to lesbian invisibility or marginality is 41. Barry, p. 220. 42. Cavin (see unnumbered n. above), chap. 6. 43. For my perception of heterosexuality as an economic institution I am indebted to Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, who allowed me to read their unpublished manuscript, "Redefining Economics" (1980). See their article: "Towards a Feminist Economics: A Global View," Second Wave 5, no. 3 (1979): 23-30. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 648 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality actually working against the liberation and empowerment of woman as a group.44 The assumption that "most women are innately heterosexual" stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women. It remains a tenable assumption, partly because lesbian existence has been written out of history or catalogued under disease; partly because it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic; partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a "preference" at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force, is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and "innately" heterosexual. Yet the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. To take the step of questioning heterosexuality as a "preference" or "choice" for women-and to do the intellectual and emotional work that follows-will call for a special quality of courage heterosexually identified feminists but I think the rewards will be gr a freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shatterin another great silence, new clarity in personal relationships. III I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuu because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring. Lesbian tence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians an continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the t lesbian continuum to include a range-through each woman's lif throughout history-of woman-identified experience.; not simpl fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual ex ence with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more f of primary intensity between and among women, including the sh 44. I would suggest that lesbian existence has been most recognized and tole where it has resembled a "deviant" version of heterosexuality; e.g., where lesbian like Stein and Toklas, played heterosexual roles (or seemed to in public) and ha chiefly identified with male culture. See also Claude E. Schaeffer, "The Kuterai Berdache: Courier, Guide, Prophetess and Warrior," Ethnohistory 12, no. 3 (Su 1965): 193-236. (Berdache: "an individual of a definite physiological sex [m. or assumes the role and status of the opposite sex and who is viewed by the commu being of one sex physiologically but as having assumed the role and status of the o sex" [Schaeffer, p. 231].) Lesbian existence has also been relegated to an upp phenomenon, an elite decadence (as in the fascination with Paris salon lesbians s Renee Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney), to the obscuring of such "common wom Judy Grahn depicts in her The Work of a Common Woman (Oakland, Calif.: Diana 1978) and True to Life Adventure Stories (Oakland, Calif.: Diana Press, 1978). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 649 Signs of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the receiving of practical and political support; if we can also he associations as marriage resistance and the "haggard" behavio by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings: "intractable," "willful," "w "unchaste"... "a woman reluctant to yield to wooing")45-w grasp breadths of female history and psychology which hav reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definit bianism." Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women. But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act of resistance. It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we roman- ticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning. The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.46 Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence through "inclusion" as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to deny and erase female reality once again. To separate those women stigmatized as "homosexual" or "gay" from the complex con- tinuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history. Part of the history of lesbian existence is, obviously, to be found where lesbians, lacking a coherent female com- munity, have shared a kind of social life and common cause with homosexual men. But this has to be seen against the differences: women's lack of economic and cultural privilege relative to men; qualitative differences in female and male relationships, for example, the prevalence of anonymous sex and the justification of pederasty among male homosexuals, the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of 45. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 15. 46. "In a hostile world in which women are not supposed to survive except in relation with and in service to men, entire communities of women were simply erased. History tends to bury what it seeks to reject" (Blanche W. Cook," "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979]: 719-20). The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City is one attempt to preserve contemporary documents on lesbian existence-a project of enormous value and meaning, still pitted against the continuing censorship and obliteration of relationships, networks, communities, in other archives and elsewhere in the culture. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 650 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality sexual attractiveness, etc. In defining and describing lesbian existence I would hope to move toward a dissociation of lesbian from male homosexual values and allegiances. I perceive the lesbian experience as being, like motherhood, a profoundlyfemale experience, with particular oppressions, meanings, and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences. Just as the term "parenting" serves to conceal the particular and significant reality of being a parent who is actually a mother, the term "gay" serves the purpose of blurring the very outlines we need to discern, which are of crucial value for feminism and for the freedom of women as a group. As the term "lesbian" has been held to limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial."47 In another context, writing of women and work, I quoted the autobiographical passage in which the poet H.D. described how her friend Bryher supported her in persisting with the visonary experience which was to shape her mature work: ... I knew that this experience, this writing-on-the-wall before me, could not be shared with anyone except the girl who stood so bravely there beside me. This girl had said without hesitation, "Go on." It was she really who had the detachment and integrity of the Pythoness of Delphi. But it was I, battered and dissociated . . . who was seeing the pictures, and who was reading the writing or granted the inner vision. Or perhaps, in some sense, we were "seeing" it together, for without her, admittedly, I could not have gone on. 48 If we consider the possibility that all women-from the infant suck- ling her mother's breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasm sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother' 47. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Out & Out Books Pamphlet no. 3 (New York: Out & Out Books [476 2d Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215], 1979). 48. Adrienne Rich, "Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women," in On Lies, Secrets and Silence (p. 209); H. D., Tribute to Freud (Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971), pp. 50-54. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 651 Signs milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Olivia, who share a laboratory;49 to the woman dying at ninet and handled by women-exist on a lesbian continuum, we selves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether w ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-frien eight- or nine-year olds and the banding together of those w twelth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who "shar rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room- cheap subdivided houses in the artisans' area of town," who " Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply sociating with men," who earned their livings as spinners, bak or ran schools for young girls, and who managed-until t forced them to disperse-to live independent both of mar conventual restrictions.50 It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated "Lesbians" of the women's school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resis- tance sisterhoods-communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands-the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women's strikes in the silk mills.51 It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father's house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to 49. Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 126. 50. Gracia Clark, "The Beguines: A Mediaeval Women's Community," Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1975): 73-80. 51. See Denise Paulme, ed., Women of Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1963), pp. 7, 266-67. Some of these sororities are described as "a kind of defensive syndicate against the male element"-their aims being "to offer concerted resistance to an oppressive patriarchate," "independence in relation to one's husband and with regard to motherhood, mutual aid, satisfaction of personal revenge." See also Audre Lorde, "Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving," Black Scholar 9, no. 7 (1978): 31-35; Marjorie Topley, "Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung," in Women in Chinese Society, ed. M. Wolf and R. Witke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 67-89; Agnes Smedley, Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, ed. J. MacKinnon and S. MacKinnon (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 103-10. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 652 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success, and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as "apolitical." Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the on-going fascination and sustenance of life. If we think of heterosexuality as the "natural" emotional and sensual inclination for women, lives such as these are seen as deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived. Or, in more recent and permissive jargon, they are banalized as "life-styles." And the work of such women-whether merely the daily work of individual or collective survival and resistance, or the work of the writer, the activist, the reformer, the anthropologist, or the artist-the work of selfcreation-is undervalued, or seen as the bitter fruit of "penis envy," or the sublimation of repressed eroticism, or the meaningless rant of a "manhater." But when we turn the lens of vision and consider the degree to which, and the methods whereby, heterosexual "preference" has actually been imposed on women, not only can we understand differently the meaning of individual lives and work, but we can begin to recognize a central fact of women's history: that women have always resisted male tyranny. A feminism of action, often, though not always, without a theory, has constantly reemerged in every culture and in every period. We can then begin to study women's struggle against powerlessness, women's radical rebellion, not just in male-defined "concrete revolutionary situations"52 but in all the situations male ideologies have not perceived as revolutionary: for example, the refusal of some women to produce children, aided at great risk by other women; the refusal to produce a higher standard of living and leisure for men (Leghorn and Parker show how both are part of women's unacknowledged, unpaid, and ununionized economic contribution); that female antiphallic sexuality which, as Andrea Dworkin notes, has been "legendary," which, de- fined as "frigidity" and "puritanism," has actually been a form of subversion of male power-"an ineffectual rebellion, but ... rebellion nonethe- less."53 We can no longer have patience with Dinnerstein's view that women have simply collaborated with men in the "sexual arrangements" of history; we begin to observe behavior, both in history and in individual biography, that has hitherto been invisible or misnamed; behavior which often constitutes, given the limits of the counterforce exerted in a given time and place, radical rebellion. And we can connect these re- 52. See Rosalind Petchesky, "Dissolving the Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist Groups 1-5," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 387. 53. Andrea Dworkin, Chains of Iran, Chains of Grief (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., in press). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 653 Signs bellions and the necessity for them with the physical passion for woman which is central to lesbian existence: the erotic which has been, precisely, the most violently erased fact of f perience. Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty. "Compulsory heterosexuality" was named as one of the "crimes against women" by the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976. Two pieces of testimony, from women from two very different cultures, suggest the degree to which persecution of lesbians is a global practice here and now. A report from Norway relates: A lesbian in Oslo was in a heterosexual marriage that didn't work, so she started taking tranquillizers and ended up at the health sanatorium for treatment and rehabilitation. ... The moment she said in family group therapy that she believed she was a lesbian, doctor told her she was not. He knew from "looking into her ey he said. She had the eyes of a woman who wanted sexual interco with her husband. So she was subjected to so-called "couch thera She was put into a comfortably heated room, naked, on a bed, a for an hour her husband was to ... try to excite her sexually The idea was that the touching was always to end with sexual in course. She felt stronger and stronger aversion. She threw up an sometimes ran out of the room to avoid this "treatment." The more strongly she asserted that she was a lesbian, the more violent the forced heterosexual intercourse became. This treatment went on for about six months. She escaped from the hospital, but she brought back. Again she escaped. She has not been there since the end she realized that she had been subjected to forcible rape six months. (This, surely, is an example of female sexual slavery according to Barry's definition.) And from Mozambique: I am condemned to a life of exile because I will not deny that I am a lesbian, that my primary commitments are, and will always be to other women. In the new Mozambique, lesbianism is considered a left-over from colonialism and decadent Western civilization. Les- bians are sent to rehabilitation camps to learn through self-criticism the correct line about themselves.... If I am forced to denounce my own love for women, if I therefore denounce myself, I could g back to Mozambique and join forces in the exciting and hard strug gles of rebuilding a nation, including the struggle for the emancipa tion of Mozambiquan women. As it is, I either risk the rehabilitatio camps, or remain in exile.54 54. Russell and van de Ven, pp. 42-43, 56-57. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 654 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality Nor can it be assumed that women like those in Carroll Smith- Rosenberg's study, who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in foundly female emotional and passional world, "preferred" or heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in to survive economically, in order to have children who would not economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain resp in order to do what was expected of women because coming "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because erosexual romance has been represented as the great female adven duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obe institution, but our feelings-and our sensuality-have not been or contained within it. There is no statistical documentation of the num- bers of lesbians who have remained in heterosexual marriages for most of their lives. But in a letter to the early lesbian publication, Ladder, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry had this to say: I suspect that the problem of the married woman who would prefer emotional-physical relationships with other women is proportionally much higher than a similar statistic for men. (A statistic surely no one will ever really have.) This because the estate of woman being what it is, how could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their "natural" destiny-AND- their only expectation for ECONOMIC security. It seems to be that this is why the question has an immensity that it does not have for male homosexuals.... A woman of strength and honesty may, if she chooses, sever her marriage and marry a new male mate and society will be upset that the divorce rate is rising so-but there are few places in the United States, in any event, where she will be anything remotely akin to an "outcast." Obviously this is not true for a woman who would end her marriage to take up life with another woman.55 This double-life-this apparent acquiescence to an institution founded on male interest and prerogative-has been characteristic of female experience: in motherhood, and in many kinds of heterosexual behavior, including the rituals of courtship; the pretense of asexuality by the nineteenth-century wife; the simulation of orgasm by the prostitute, the courtesan, the twentieth-century "sexually liberated" woman. Meridel LeSueur's documentary novel of the Depression, The Girl, is arresting as a study of female double-life. The protagonist, a waitress in a St. Paul working-class speakeasy, feels herself passionately attracted to 55. I am indebted to Jonathan Katz's Gay American History (n. 5 above) for bringing to my attention Hansberry's letters to Ladder and to Barbara Grier for supplying me with copies of relevant pages from Ladder, quoted here by permission of Barbara Grier. See also the reprinted series of Ladder, ed. Jonathan Katz et al. (New York: Arno Press); and Deirdre Carmody, "Letters by Eleanor Roosevelt Detail Friendship with Lorena Hickok," New York Times (October 21, 1979). This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Summer 1980 655 Signs the young man Butch, but her survival relationships are wi older waitress and prostitute, with Belle, whose husband ow and with Amelia, a union activist. For Clara and Belle and the protagonist, sex with men is in one sense an escape from th misery of daily life; a flare of intensity in the grey, relentless, web of day-to-day existence: ... It was like he was a magnet pulling me. It was ex powerful and frightening. He was after me too and whe me I would run, or be petrified, just standing in front of zany. And he told me not to be wandering with C Marigold where we danced with strangers. He said he wo the shit out of me. Which made me shake and tremble, better than being a husk full of suffering and not knowi Throughout the novel the theme of double-life emerges inisces of her marriage to the bootlegger Hoinck: You know, when I had that black eye and said I hit it on board, well he did it the bastard, and then he says don't t . .. He's nuts, that's what he is, nuts, and I don't see why him, why I put up with him a minute on this earth. But she said, I'm telling you something. She looked at me an was wonderful. She said,Jesus Christ, Goddam him I lov why I'm hooked like this all my life, Goddam him I love After the protagonist has her first sex with Butch, friends care for her bleeding, give her whiskey, and compa My luck, the first time and I got into trouble. He gave m money and I come to St. Paul where for ten bucks th huge vet's needle into you and you start it and then y your own.... I never had no child. I've just had Hoinck and a hell of a child he is.58 Later they made me go back to Clara's room to lie down ... Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself. She said she started it when she was twelve with a bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had paid any attention to her before and she became very popular.... They like it so much, she said, why shouldn't 56. Meridel LeSueur, The Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: West End Press, 1978), pp. 10-11. LeSueur describes, in an afterword, how this book was drawn from the writings and oral narrations of women in the Workers Alliance who met as a writers' group during the Depression. 57. Ibid., p. 20. 58. Ibid., pp. 53-54. This content downloaded from 137.110.38.43 on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:13:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 656 Rich Compulsory Heterosexuality you give it to them and get presents and attention? I never cared anything for it and neither did my mama. But it's the only thing you got that's valuable ... 59 Sex is thus equated with attention from the male, who is charismatic though brutal, infantile, or unreliable. Yet it is the women who make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each other. (I am trying tofind my strength through women-without my friends, I could not survive.) LeSueur's The Girl parallels Toni Morrison's remarkable Sula, another revelation of female doublelife: Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. ... Nel was one of the reasons [Sula] had drifted back to Medallion. ... The men ... had merged into one large personality: the same language of love, the same entertain- ments of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings and goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be-for a woman. But Sula's last thought at the second of her death is, "Wait'll I tell And after Sula's death, Nel looks back on her own life: "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude." An loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat was girls together," she said as though explaining somethin Lord, Sula," she cried, "Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl!" It was a fine loud and long-but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circ and circles of sor...
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