Compulsory Heterosexuality

“Compulsory heterosexuality” is a term coined by Adrienne Rich, in the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). It refers to the fact that heterosexuality, far from being an innate, natural tendency or a purposeful choice of sexuality, is constructed and enforced as a political institution, much like the institutions of motherhood and family. Rich attempts to deconstruct the power structures that maintain a normative heterosexuality and, in doing so, reveals the underlying supports for male supremacy and heterosexism. Though Rich assumes that identities, including sexual identities, are socially constructed, she also implies that women-centered relationships are more “natural” than male-centered bonds, since the mother-child relationship is primary. She asks “whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women” (1986:35).

Rich theorizes that the institution of heterosexuality legitimizes financial and political control of women and sometimes even normalizes brutality (including rape) and female submission in the process of maintaining and constructing male power. In her view, this institution is responsible for forcing a shift away from female-centered sexuality, toward male-centered sexuality. The institution of heterosexuality normalizes the exploitation of women's domestic labor and the psychological manipulation of the relationship between mothers and daughters. It does so by limiting and controlling knowledge, and by objectifying women and devaluing female experiences and relationships. Rich draws on literature, history, and the social sciences to reinforce her points and to support her claim that liberation can be had only through women-centered relationships.

Rich's notion of heterosexuality as compulsory disrupts the underlying normative structure of “straight” culture and for this reason is important to feminist theory, queer theory, and critical theory. By examining heterosexuality as an institution that is constructed, the judgments of abnormality and deviance directed toward lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals) are also called into question. Compulsory heterosexuality is also a starting point for reexamining allied institutions such as family, motherhood, and male dominance.

Despite its widespread use in the critical social sciences, Rich's term has evoked criticism. One criticism concerns Rich's treatment of identity. Rich shows that hegemonic heterosexual identity is socially constructed but tends to naturalize women-centered identity. This naturalization makes deviant any other constructions of identity, much in the manner that Rich accuses the hegemonic construction of heterosexuality of doing. Thus, in this view, instead of deconstructing a hierarchical power structure, Rich may be read as merely replacing one with another.

A second criticism addresses how Rich gives preference to a specific type of women-centered relationship. She gives primacy to an ideal of female sexuality that valorizes a nearly platonic relationship. She has been accused by some of being antisexual because her formulation of the lesbian continuum rates nonsexual women-identified relationships on the same scale as sexual women-centered relationships. Furthermore, Rich's views of all pornography as male centered, and thus oppressive to women, and of sexual relations that may echo male sexuality as being male identified, and thus oppressive to women, have oppressed many lesbians, gays, and others who practice different types of sexual relations.

One well-known critique is Gayle Rubin's “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984). Rubin argues that Rich's “correct” relationships for women are just as oppressive as those formed within the institution of heterosexuality that Rich is trying to combat. In this essay, Rubin contends that feminist theory has not sufficiently addressed how sexuality is formed within a political context. In leaving unexamined the assumption of “sexual essentialism,” Rich has opened the theoretical door for alternative forms of oppression that will continue to manifest themselves. Rich's assertion of the possibility and preferability of egalitarian women-centered [Page 128]relationships leaves untouched the assumption that sex itself can be dangerous. It also leaves unquestioned the assumption that only those relationships centered on monogamous, long-term bonds free of pornography and sex toys can be liberatory and worthwhile.

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