[senseofmonachopsis]

[senseofmonachopsis]

The Fallacy of Compulsory Heterosexuality Theory: Radical Feminism's Homophobic Politicization of Female Homosexuality

I've copied & pasted various quotes from the hot topic "Compulsory Heterosexuality" essay by Adrienne Rich.

Whatever is highlighted in red is what I consider to be clear evidence of the homophobia in her theory.

Whatever is highlighted in purple is what I feel people (particularly those biased towards feminism) would think sounds good, and therefore is evidence of Rich having good intentions and/or a sound argument. But when taken into the context of her denying heterosexual attraction in women as natural; thinking all women exist on a lesbian continuum to the benefit of feminism; seeing definitions of lesbian that specifically refer to sexual attraction as limiting; and making multiple homophobic statements about gay men.... none of it holds up.

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"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."

"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 none of these books, which concern themselves with mothering, sex roles, relationships , and societal prescriptions for women, is compulsory heterosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully affecting all these; or the idea of 'preference' or 'innate orientation' even indirectly questioned."

"I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like mother-hood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution."

"We still need to ask why some women never, even temporarily 'turn away from heretofore primary relationships' with other females. And why does male-identification-- the casting of one's social, political, and intellectual allegiances with men--exist among lifelong sexual lesbians?"

"One of many means of enforcement is, of course the rendering invisible of the lesbian possibility, an engulfed continent that rises frequently to view from time to time only to become submerged again. Feminist research and theory that contributes to lesbian invisibility or marginality is actually working against the liberation and empowerment of women as a group."

"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."

"I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring."

"I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range--through each woman's life and throughout history--of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the "haggard" behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings "intractable," "willful," "wanton," and "unchaste" "a woman reluctant to yield to wooing")45--we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of "lesbianism."

"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."

"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" [she places this in quotes] or "gay" [and also this] from the complex continuum 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 community, have shared a kind of social life and common cause with homosexual men."

"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."

"[...] 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 sexual attractiveness, and so forth. In defining and describing lesbian existence, I would hope to move toward a dissociation of lesbian from male homosexual values and allegiances."

"If we consider the possibility that all women--from the infant suckling her mother's breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother's milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women--exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not."

"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."

"The work that lies ahead, of unearthing and describing what I call here lesbian existence, is potentially liberating for all women. It is work that must assuredly move beyond the limits of white and middleclass Western women's studies to examine women's lives, work, and groupings within every racial, ethnic, and political structure."

"[...] woman-identification untarnished by romanticism."

"There is a nascent feminist political content in the act of choosing a woman lover or life partner in the face of institutionalized heterosexuality."

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Below are the introductions made by the source of two pdfs (which you can easily find via Google btw):

"If the first erotic bond is to the mother, she asks, could not the "natural" sexual orientation of both men and women be toward women?"

"Does lesbianism incorporate all support systems and intense interactions among women, or is it a specifically erotic choice? What is gained and what is lost with the second, narrower definition?"

"This article questions the assumption that the majority of women are naturally heterosexual."