Monday, September 25, 2006

Is there anything more tedious than heteronormativity?

No.

5 comments:

K. Ross Hoffman said...

oh dear

Anonymous said...

i'll see your heteronormativity and raise you a whole century's worth of declarations of the closure of metaphysics.

Mark said...

heteronormativity

heteronormativity

I just don't know where to start with that concept, it just seems to be so damn stupid. I made a meager attempt to understand it:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/6780.html

but damn't I can't just wrap my head around it. 95+% of us are hetero, its pretty clear evidence of what nature intended. The creation and use of the term seems propagandish to me, as if there isn't an attempt to really discover the truth, but rather an attempt to foist a POV upon others through the insidious iron law of euphamism (that being weak/vague terms drive out strong ones)

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

Hi Sco--

What stronger term does "heteronormativity" force out, in your mind?

I heard the word "chauvinism" used today, and that was one I hadn't thought about for a while. Might be close enough, and not put off those who don't like theoretical jargon. What heteronormativity adds to chauvinism is a collective sense of the neutrality of a behavior, that it's okay or "just the way things are."

Perhaps most importantly, when I get frustrated with what I'm calling heteronormativity, it's NOT heterosexuality that I'm getting frustrated with. In this case, I wasn't even feeling frustrated with homophobia. What I was feeling frustrated with is what I feel to be the limiting and binding culture -- expectations for behavior and appearance -- of heterosexuality. Specifically, I was feeling frustrated with two events:

(1) Men making comments about passing women to each other, which, to my mind, expresses an attitude that a woman can be treated like an object, manipulated without her knowledge, because she is not an individual, with equal worth and status to men. The main priority of this culture is to maintain the identity between a woman and a sexual object AS CONCEIVED BY a particular heterosexual male perspective.

(2) A spoof article about a little boy who looks like a little girl and who spawns a high fashion trend. The obvious point of the article was that he was actually a "helpless little nancy boy."
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/my_life_in_the_times/genderbending_gradeschooler_attracts_notice.php

In other words, he was looking too gay. The fact that a supposedly progressive web digest out of Brooklyn was pulling this kind of tired -- and repressive -- "If you don't look gendered in the way our society wants you too, you deserve to be mocked publicly," pissed me off. That's exactly the kind of casual but deadly behavior that keeps people afraid of being themselves.

In the end, I have a harder time getting along with straight men when they participate in behaviors like this, because I think it implicitly threatens me. Or explicitly. Someone give me some data on what percentage of college-age women have eating disorders.

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

P.S. The guy who wrote that article about heteronormativity teaches at my college. Never took a class with him, though.