Heterosexism, Role of Power in

Heterosexism refers to what is often articulated as a heterosexual bias inherent in the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic systems of many Western societies. As a socially regulated predisposition toward heterosexuality, and therefore heterosexual people and heterosexual behaviors, heterosexism implies the presence of intimate and pervasive, but also institutionalized and highly politicized, relations of power at the social, personal, organizational, and international levels of human interaction.

Heterosexist relations of power are particularly common to politically liberal cultures and societies, which depend on the assumption of a foundational distinction between private and public, moral and amoral. Embodying the privileging of normative heterosexuality, heterosexist practices and processes [Page 318]are the result of heteronormative institutions, structures of understanding and practical orientations that (as is particularly well articulated by Louise Berlant and Michael Warner) render heterosexuality not only coherent, but also privileged. Herein, reproductive heterosexuality is classified, analyzed, and regulated as the only normal, natural, or appropriate standard for human relations. The human body, its behaviors, and sexual practices are thus only understood as “natural” when measured against a socially reproduced norm of reproductive heterosexuality. All nonheterosexual behaviors and practices are thus considered unnatural, abnormal, deviant, or abhorrent.

Heterosexism is related to but not, therefore, interchangeable with heterocentrism because it is perhaps more perniciously policed than the often-unconscious heterocentrist assumption (made usually by heterosexual people) that everyone is heterosexual. The two are linked because the naturalization of heterosexuality would necessarily have some impact on people's “automatic,” unconscious (but socially constructed) beliefs. The difference here is that heterocentrism is one effect of intentionally heterosexist practices, processes, and structures that may have become so normalized in human relations that they seem entirely “natural.”

Studies in heterosexism and heterosexist bias have a significant intellectual heritage in historical analyses of the means and functions of mechanisms of social control over the body. To understand the concept of heterosexism, one need also conceptualize the social production and reproduction of power. Analyzing power as productive and reproductive (of social identities, regulatory apparatuses, and mechanisms of control) is a practice particularly embraced by postmodern and queer theories of power.

French scholar Michel Foucault examined the effects of social discourses of sex (embodied in historically contingent discourses of science, medicine, and technology) to reveal the extent to which bodies are constrained and controlled by repressive moral discourses emanating from political, economic, and judicial institutions of social authority. In societies based on the market economy, it was and is essential that people keep producing (economically) and reproducing (similarly productive offspring but also the rules of society itself). Herein, one of the most expedient ways by which people can be distinguished and assigned different but mutually complementary roles is through the imposition of a rigid, but apparently “biologically true,” female-male distinction. This is how the category “sex” is conventionally understood. For Foucault, at a time when the industrialization of Europe demanded a vast, willing, and malleable workforce, sexuality became monitored and regulated by powerful, historically specific apparatuses of state control. Mechanisms were established and maintained to control, for example, conjugal relations, to monitor women's sexual physiology, to regulate birthrates, and to supervise children's sexuality. The state would oversee, regulate, and discipline through social institutions such as medicine and medical advice, psychiatry, schools and teaching curricula, labor regulations, and legal, judicial, and penal requirements. These institutions would scrutinize and compel socioeconomic order through fixed hierarchies of individual behavior imposed according to, and symbolized by, strict (and restrictive) man/woman, normal/deviant binaries.

...