Heteronormativity

This is an opinion piece I've written for the special issue of "Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review" on LGBTI Parenting, Families and Relationships. I don't know if it will be accepted, but I had fun writing it, and I'd love your comments.

Heteronormativity: Psychology’s New (Old) Str8jacket.

We’ve all encountered it a million times. The hotel receptionist or sales assistant who immediately adopts the ‘opposite-sex’ pronoun to talk about your partner. The application forms that ask for gender and offer only two boxes. The recently married couple who are asked when (not if) they’re going to ‘start a family’. From the moment my daughter found out the sex of her unborn child, it kicked in with a vengeance. Her partner started agonising over what age would be appropriate to allow him to ride a trail bike. Baby clothes were purchased, baby accoutrements accumulated, and the nursery decorated in appropriate styles and colours. (The central motif of the latter is frogs, which at least offers some hope of future gonochorism) (Policansky 1982). A gay couple who participated in my research bought a car together; the company’s paperwork showed them as ‘Mr and Mrs Cameron or David Smith Jones1’. After her surgery in Thailand, a friend had to divorce her wife in order to change her birth certificate in Australia; two women cannot be married to each other here. Another friend’s mother vomited in front of him when he first told her about his male partner, so revolted was she by the idea of man-on-man sex.

Heteronormativity. An ugly word for an ugly phenomenon Coined by Michael Warner in 1991, it describes the pervasive but often invisible model of allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, performed gender, and sexual desire, which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect (Jagose 1996: 3). In a heteronormative society, one of only two genders is assigned to an individual at birth depending on their external genitalia. Based on that assignment, a certain range of behaviours and roles are deemed appropriate for that individual, complemented by the choice of sexual partners of the ‘other’ gender. Individuals who do not conform to this model are stigmatised, and come under varying degrees of pressure to correct their deviance from the norm. GLBTIQ2 people are often estranged from their family of origin and social networks. In some countries they may be executed, suffer physical violence, institutionalisation, and find their economic opportunities severely curtailed. In all countries, their civil and political rights are circumscribed to some degree, and they are liable to encounter prejudice and discrimination. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the realm of parenting, families and relationships. The nuclear family is the heteronormative institution par excellence, predicated as it is on the sexual relations between one man and one woman producing their genetic offspring - what Warner calls reprosexuality – the interweaving of heterosexuality, biological reproduction, cultural reproduction, and personal identity (1991, p. 9). While the private sphere of the home has often been considered the only safe and appropriate place for Qwir2 people to express their identity, it is also constructed as the quintessential site of heteronormative ideology and practice (Radford 2001; Mallett 2004).
Psychology’s history in regard to Qwir individuals has not been a happy one. Most psychosexual theories have been based on the belief that male/female pair-bonding is the developmental norm for adult sexual behaviour, giving rise to various ‘treatments’ to ‘cure’ same-sex attracted and gender variant individuals. These ‘reparative therapies’ have included psychoanalytic and behavioural modalities, such as aversion therapy, and have worked in conjunction with medical interventions such as medication, lobotomy, clitoridectomy and castration, sterilisation, and electroshock treatment (Lev 2006). But surely, since 1973 when homosexuality was officially removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), psychology’s understanding and treatment of sexuality and gender issues has become more informed and affirming?

Perlesz and McNair (2004) suggest that, at least in the area of parenting and family in Australia and New Zealand, this is not the case. They reveal the dearth of articles in marital and family therapy journals with any explicit lesbian and gay content, most particularly the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy itself, and they demonstrate the lack of student training to deal with Qwir families and issues. They find these omissions all the more puzzling because lesbian and gay practitioners are well represented among Australian family therapists, and because of the significant rise in the number of families with Qwir members and in the number of lesbian-parented families. They further document studies revealing homophobic and heterosexist attitudes among psychologists and social workers, as well as biased, inadequate or inappropriate treatment of Qwir clients. They suggest that, in this, family therapists are simply reflecting the heteronormative, heterosexist and homophobic attitudes endemic to Australian society (2004, p. 130).

More than merely addressing the deficits mentioned above, their research represents an attempt to transform the lens through which lesbian families, in particular, are viewed. Rather than using heterosexual family models as a ‘benchmark’ for ‘normality’, they attempt to present the lesbian family as a unique, highly diverse, postmodern family structure, with much to teach researchers about the meaning of family and the nature of social change. They foreground the accounts of family members themselves, of how lesbian parents construct their parenting experience, and show how these accounts point to some of the many issues that might arise in everyday therapy practice. They urge therapists to adopt a more grounded and compassionate Qwir-friendly approach in their work, through an increasing awareness of the social and legal issues such families face, and through a deeper understanding of the interface between the private lives of Qwir families and a heteronormative public arena.

What they fail to do, in my opinion, is to urge therapists to consider the impact of heteronormativity on clients who do not identify as Qwir. Michael Warner talks about a ‘queer’ politics that is no longer content to carve out a buffer zone for a minority constituency, but seeks to challenge the heteronormativity of modern societies (1991, p. 3). This is the challenge that confronts Psychology. Rather than simply seeking to understand and work with the dynamics of Qwir behaviours and institutions in a subcultural context, contemporary Psychology should be calling into question the sex and gender scripts and stereotypes that constrain so many people who do not identify as Qwir, impoverishing their lives and relationships. The gentle boy who violates heteronormative understandings of masculinity, incurring his father’s wrath and the harassment of his peers. The young man, like my son at the time of my divorce, who has to weather personal crisis with no meaningful support from his mates because they’re all are so unequipped and unwilling to talk about their feelings and to give and receive emotional support. The married man desperately trying to reconcile his overwhelming desire for sex with men, with his genuine love and commitment to his wife and children. The woman who finds herself in a heterosexual partnership after years as a lesbian, vilified and excluded by her former lesbian community, her identity universally ‘read’ as straight by virtue of her relationship with a man. The couple who choose not to have children and are forced to give an account of this decision to a myriad of hostile critics accusing them of ‘selfishness’. The list could go on and on.

Psychology should also be interrogating the ideological foundations of human institutions themselves, such as ‘marriage’, ‘family’, ‘community’ and even ‘identity’, to render those institutions more legible and liveable for 21st century human beings. This is not, as the politicians would have it, ‘social engineering’; it is simply catching up with people’s lived experience rather than trying to shoehorn them into social discourses and institutions which no longer fit. Sedgwick (1990, p. 1) asserts that an understanding of virtually any aspect of Western culture must be inadequate and in fact damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition (emphasis added). Further, I would argue that sexuality and gender are so inextricably entwined that together they must be seen as a primary category for the critical analysis of practices and institutions, even those that do not initially seem to involve issues of gender and sexuality.

These are not ‘Gay and Lesbian’ concerns, this is not a ‘Special Issue’, this is a Human Issue, that applies to us all. It embraces notions of gender, family, individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, production and reproduction, politics, fantasy, class and ethnicity, ethics and morality, trust, integrity, integration and individuation, censorship, intimacy, self/other relations, terror and violence, health, the body. There is no domain of human experience unaffected by heteronormativity, no aspect of human life that wouldn’t be enriched by liberation from its strictures. It’s time for Psychology to cast off the str8jacket of heteronormativity and challenge its constraints on the human condition.


Notes.


1. These are pseudonyms.

2. A word on terminology. (Warning: this will satisfy no-one, least of all myself).
GLBTIQ: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Qwir.
Gay – a person who identifies as male, and as primarily same-sex attracted.
Lesbian – a person who identifies as female, and as primarily same-sex attracted.
Bisexual – a person who identifies as being both-sex attracted.
Trans – a kind of shorthand term I use to cover persons who identify as transgender, transsexual, transvestite, M2F, F2M, gender variant, genderqueer, gender outlaw, gender-fucked, cross-dresser, gender-dysphoric, butch woman, effeminate man, androgyne, drag queen, people who would prefer to answer to new pronouns or to none at all, and members of non-Western European indigenous cultures who claim such identities as the Native American berdache or two-spirit status, Brazilian travesti, Indian hijras, Polynesian mahu, Omani xanith, African "female husbands," and Balkan "sworn virgins." This list is neither exhaustive nor fully justifiable. It is important to remember that these terms are highly contested, especially among those who so identify.
Intersex – persons who identify as having sex chromosome configuration, external genitalia or internal reproductive systems that fall outside the norms for ‘male’ or ‘female’ bodies. May also be known as hermaphrodites.
Qwir (a variant of ‘queer’, which I have appropriated for my own purposes from Minning, 2004) – a term I use in the context of academic discourse to connote any person who identifies as differing from heteronormative understandings of sexuality and/or gender. I use this variant spelling, much as some feminists have used the variant spelling of wymmyn, to signify a rupture with the word’s original meaning whilst still finding it useful as a descriptor of a segment of the population.
Again, it is important to remember that all of these terms are highly contested, and in all but the last, I try to be guided by how individuals choose to identify. For example, I would only refer to both-sex attracted individuals as ‘bisexual’ if they themselves actually embrace this identity category. I have adopted the term qwir as defined above solely for ease of communication, fully cognisant of the fact that the term is repugnant to many I would describe in this way. For this I apologise, and welcome any suggestions of a better way to negotiate the highly contested terrain of terminology.
I have arranged the terms in this order because that is the order in which I have most frequently encountered them, and not to rank them in importance, numbers, or prestige.


Reference List

Lev, A. I. (2006). Psychotherapy. glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture. Chicago: glbtq, Inc.
http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/psychotherapy.html

Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review, 52 (1) 62-88.

Minning, H. (2004). Qwir-English Code-Mixing in Germany: Constructing a Rainbow of Identities. In W. L. Leap and T. Boellstorff (Eds.) Speaking in Queer Tongues : Globalization and Gay Language (pp. 46-71). Urbana : University of Illinois Press.

Perlesz, A. and McNair, R. (2004). Lesbian Parenting: Insiders’ Voices. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 25 (2) 129-140.

Policansky, D. (1982). Sex Change in Plants and Animals. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 13, 471-495.

Radford, N. A. (2001). Wolfenden, John Frederick. In R. Aldrich and G. Wotherspoon (Eds.) Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History, p. 455. London, Routledge.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet. Social Text, 29, 3-17.