Heterosexism

Heterosexism is the assumption that there are only two genders, male and female, and that people are attracted only to members of the “opposite” sex. Dichotomous gender roles are naturalized, with the world consisting of masculine men and feminine women. Gender stereotypes—men as intelligent, brave providers and women as nurturing, vulnerable dependents—are essential to heterosexism. Heterosexual romance and the creation of nuclear families are perceived as universal norms. In this worldview, every healthy, right-minded person wants a life organized around the practices and privileges of heterosexual intimacies. Consequently, people who perform sexualities and genders that challenge this worldview are often marginalized, ridiculed, and even subject to physical violence.

In the media, heterosexist representations are characterized by either blindness or hostility to non-heterosexual identities and lifestyles. The prevalence of heterosexism means that gay, lesbian, transgender/transsexual, and intersexual characters and relationships are often ignored or demeaned in popular media texts. Even straight men and women who defy gender stereotypes can be subject to ridicule and discrimination. Identifying, understanding, and disrupting heterosexism are therefore necessary not only for academics and teachers but for every media-literate person as well. To that end, it is important to examine both the history of heterosexist imagery and contemporary challenges to heterosexism as a framework for portraying gender and sexuality.

Heterosexual attraction and love have long been central to Western storytelling traditions; with the advent of consumer culture and the strengthening ideology of individualism over the past century, heterosexual romance has perhaps become an even more important theme in popular culture. In the United States, popular film and television shows provide especially salient examples of heterosexist representations, although magazines, novels, comics, video games, and other texts also portray heterosexual relationships as natural and universally desirable. Since the advent of film and radio in the early decades of the 20th century, numerous genres have featured plots that rely on heterosexual relationships and institutions (such as courtship, marriage, and the nuclear family) to fuel their narrative arcs. Romantic comedies, domestic dramas, and soap operas revolve around heterosexual intimacies, but romance is also frequently inserted, with varying degrees of fit or appropriateness, into other genres, such as adventure stories, science fiction, political dramas, and thrillers. Often, the addition of a heterosexual relationship helps offset and “straighten out” relationships that might otherwise be easily interpreted as queer. This occurs, for example, when the men who share a close same-sex friendship in a buddy movie are both depicted as having girlfriends or wives. The ubiquitous representation of straight romance helps to naturalize heterosexuality and [Page 165]to reduce the possibility that queer love and desire might be read into the relationships featured in media texts. However, heterosexism does not only mean the normalization and promotion of male-female romance; it also refers to the negative depiction of queerness.

Negative portrayals of queerness range in severity. Some depict queer people and relationships as insignificant or humorous. This kind of heterosexism occurs when gay and lesbian characters play second fiddle to straight couples or when queer (usually gay male) characters function primarily to provide comic relief. Casting gay and lesbian characters as “funny” frequently desexualizes them and helps defuse the threat of queer desire. In this vein, drag is occasionally deployed for comic effect. Many theorists observe that through its depiction of feminine men and masculine women as comical and bizarre, drag reasserts heterosexist gender norms; however, theorists also argue that drag unsettles assumptions about the naturalness of gender and straight sexuality. Very negative representations cast queer intimacies and characters as pathetic, miserably unhappy, antisocial, or evil. Within some texts, suicide or murder can function symbolically to punish queer characters for their transgressions against the heterosexual social order. In this way, the menace of nonnormative genders and sexualities can be contained. Despite their frequent negativity, heterosexist representations are also polysemous, and many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, inter-sexual, queer/questioning (LGBTIQ) people enjoy and identify with queer characters from television, film, novels, and other media by “reading against the grain” and understanding these texts differently from the way producers, actors, and writers may have intended.

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