Sep 14, 2019
Stevi Jackson, “Embodied Practices and Sexual Pleasure,” in: Theorizing Sexuality
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Stevi Jackson, “Embodied Practices and Sexual Pleasure,” in: Theorizing Sexuality
I find it depressing that much of what passes as radical these days does not envisage the end of gender hierarchy or the collapse of institutionalized heterosexuality, but simply a multiplying of genders and sexualities or movement between them. It might be argued that this would ultimately have the effect of rendering the difference between women and men as simply part of a fluid continuum of differences and of divesting heterosexuality of its privileged location. But seeking to undo binary divisions by rendering their boundaries more permeable and adding more categories to them ignores the hierarchical social relations on which the original binaries were founded. It fails to address the ways in which heterosexuality and gender are sustained at the macro level of structures and institutions as well as the micro level of our everyday social practices.
Our capacity to undo gender and heterosexuality is constrained by the structural inequalities which sustain them. Our ability to conceptualize their undoing is limited to the extent that our sense of ourselves has been constructed within a heterosexual, patriarchal social order. It may be this which accounts for the lack of vision which, in my view, underpins much queer writing, the failure to imagine a world without gender, without heterosexuality (and without other systematic inequalities deriving from a social order which remains capitalist and imperialist as well as patriarchal). Concern with material inequalities has given way to a preoccupation with difference as something to be valued and affirmed.
Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexuality, Heteronormativity and Gender Hierarchy: Some Reflections on Recent Debates” in Heterosexuality in Question (1999, London: SAGE Publications Ltd)
Such utopian visions are no longer fashionable; most radical intellectuals have abandoned those metanarratives, such as Marxism, which once promised a better future, and have taken to heart Foucaultʼs view that power is inescapable. We can resist, subvert and destabilize, but nothing much will change; or, if it does, there will be new deployments of power to be resisted, subverted and destabilized. This is a politics of resistance and transgression, but not a politics of radical transformation; its goal is permanent rebellion but never revolutionary change. It is ultimately a pessimistic politics. Of course, optimism is difficult to sustain in the political climate prevailing at turn of the millennium. Holding on to utopian ideals may be more than a little crazy when there seems little prospect of their ever being realized. Yet I believe that it is crucially important, both politically and analytically, that we are at least able to imagine social relations being radically other than they are. If we cannot do this we lose the impetus even to think critically about the world in which we live.
Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexuality, Heteronormativity and Gender Hierarchy: Some Reflections on Recent Debates” in Heterosexuality in Question (1999, London: SAGE Publications Ltd)
What is fundamental to heterosexuality, to what sustains it ‘as an identity and an institution, both a practice and a system’, is gender hierarchy. Its ‘inside’ workings are not simply about guarding against the homosexual other, but about maintaining male domination: and these two sides of heterosexuality are inextricably intertwined.
Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexuality, Heteronormativity and Gender Hierarchy: Some Reflections on Recent Debates” in Heterosexuality in Question (1999, London: SAGE Publications Ltd)
However successful heterosexual feminists are in creating space for sexual pleasure, or for ‘queer’ and transgressive sexual activities, this does not necessarily challenge anything beyond our personal lives.
Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexuality, Heteronormativity and Gender Hierarchy: Some Reflections on Recent Debates” in Heterosexuality in Question (1999, London: SAGE Publications Ltd)
An effective critique of heterosexuality – at the levels of social structure, meaning, social practice and subjectivity – must contain two key elements. The first of these is a critique of heteronormativity, of the normative status of heterosexuality which renders any alternative sexualities ‘other’ and marginal. The second is a critique of what some have called ‘hetero-patriarchy’ or ‘hetero-oppression’ (although I dislike both these terms), in other words heterosexuality as systematically male dominated. It follows that a critical stance on heterosexuality should pay attention to its interlinkage with gender, as both division and hierarchy. This is a clear implication of my second point, but also of my first: the hetero/homo binary makes no sense without the existence of gender divisions since desiring ‘the same sex’ or ‘the opposite sex’ requires gender as a social, cultural and subjective reality.
The various critiques which have so far been developed often fall short of including both elements, although there is a long feminist tradition of trying to do so, going back at least to Adrienne Rich (1980), for whom compulsory heterosexuality both kept women in (within its confines) and kept them down, subordinated. Yet feminists – myself included – have often concentrated on one side of heterosexuality at the expense of the other. We have analysed in great detail the myriad ways in which the institutions and practices associated with heterosexuality oppress women and sustain that oppression – but we have not always made it clear that heterosexuality is what we are talking about. Lesbian feminists, rarely guilty of this oversight, have addressed both male domination within heterosexuality and heteronormativity – but their analyses of the latter have been partial as a result of their wariness of male gay and queer agendas. Queer, on the other hand, is centrally concerned with destabilizing the heterosexual norm, but not with heterosexuality as patriarchal. Where Queer takes gender seriously, it is usually as division without hierarchy.
Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexuality, Heteronormativity and Gender Hierarchy: Some Reflections on Recent Debates” in Heterosexuality in Question (1999, London: SAGE Publications Ltd)
Stevi believes theory has to be able to explain our everyday experiences. She criticises those who produce work which “bears absolutely no relation to everyday life”.
It starts when you sink into his arms and ends with your arms in his sink.
Stevi Jackson 1993