Week 2 The Hegemony of Heterosexuality HS3018 PRESENTATION SCRIPT Introduction In this article which came out in 1986, Adrienne

ne Rich examines societys assumptions about heterosexuality and she believes that it is a political institution which disempowers women. She observes that conservative political parties have continuously brought ideas to women that they are the sexual and emotional property of men. She also makes a brief list of the major institutions in society by which women have traditionally been controlled patriarchy, motherhood, economic exploitation, nuclear family. To this she adds that of compulsory heterosexuality. Part 1 In this first part, Adrienne begins by stating that men have a single sexual orientation while women have 2. She questions the bias of compulsory heterosexuality where alternative sexual orientations such as the lesbian experience are labelled as deviant or rendered invisible. In this section, she also criticises feminist literature for omitting lesbian existence and presuming that heterosexuality is the sexual preference of most women; even in circumstances where an author states that mothers are the primary internal object to the girl, she laments that the author still states that most women are heterosexual. So, given the prevailing feminist literature, Adrienne argues that heterosexuality needs to be studied as a political institution. Part 2 In the second section, Adrienne poses the central question which lays the foundation for her premise. Since women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, then it would be logical that the search for love and tenderness in both sexes should originally lead to women rather than to men. Before proceeding, Adrienne lists 8 sources of male power which she believes add to the cluster of forces which enforce compulsory heterosexuality. She then goes on to analyze culture production and uses pornography as an example to show how it creates a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable. Next she analyzes the sexualisation of women in the work place and writes that women learn to behave in a heterosexual manner and perceive themselves as sexual prey. This is because to do otherwise would jeopardize their access to resources that are important to their daily survival. Going further, Adrienne identifies an important source of compulsory heterosexuality to be male identification where the woman is dispensable so long as the sexual and emotional needs of the male are identified and girls are socialized in a way that women place men over women. Although one may argue that on the grounds of mother-son relationships, Adrienne refutes this and states that it is a form of false consciousness since the maintenance of the relationships includes the demand the the mother provide maternal solace and nurturing. Part 3 After laying out the evidence of compulsory heterosexuality and acknowledging its prevalence in society, Adrienne proposes the notion of a lesbian continuum which includes a range of woman-identified experience that is not centred on desired sexual experience of another woman. Through acknowledging lesbian experience, Adrienne hopes to break the taboo and then reject a compulsory way of life; this is an attack on the male right of access to the woman. To elaborate, she comments that women have always resisted male tyranny and women who marry in order to survive economically end up living a double life instead of expressing their true desires; to her, sex may be equated to attention from the male but it is women who make life endurable for each other.

Week 2 The Hegemony of Heterosexuality Part 4 For the last section, the concept of women identification serves as the opposition to male identification and builds up her argument for a lesbian continuum. Because the denial of reality and visibility of womens passion for women, there is an incalculable loss of power for women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate themselves and each other. She admonishes that several lies in Western tradition help to perpetuate compulsory heterosexuality; they are the belief that women are inevitably drawn to men and that women only turn to other women out of hatred for men. In this light, the lesbian existence is represented as a refuge from male abuse rather than as an empowering charge between women. Thus, women have to identify with other women and this will provide a source of energy; it will be a potential springhead of female power that will help to liberate women from the chains of compulsory heterosexuality.