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by Daryl Croke
Picture this, one-day in the not too distant future. You're gazing at the magazines in the newsagency and the headline from New Scientist screams out at you "Straight gene discovered". In amazement you pick up the magazine and start reading about the latest startling discovery.
"Genetics scientist Harry Stonewall announced this week that after exhaustive DNA cross-referencing of 10,000 heterosexual twins the gene sequence or code believed responsible for causing heterosexuality has been isolated. ‘I believe that our research will prove once and for all that the cause of heterosexuality is genetic.’ Mr Stonewall refused to be drawn on the possible moral or ethical issues raised by his research.
"Civil libertarian Ms Worrysome did raise serious concerns. ‘Already there are reports of lesbian couples phoning sperm banks requesting information about Mr Stonewalls findings. With IVF breeding facilities due to open nationwide and current social prejudice it appears the that heterosexual is doomed.’
"The usually outspoken Mary Whichway, convenor of BiNet, was short of words. She simply said ‘I’m shocked, I don’t know where this leaves us now.’"
Holding a mirror to heterosexual prejudice and reflecting it back onto the oppressor is an interesting exercise. It proves how illogical many assumptions of social oppression really are. All too often though, queers haven’t sought to undermine the dominant ideology but instead have celebrated and affirmed their right to a "deviant" status.
The acceptance of homosexuality as a minority experience deliberately emphasises the ghettoisation of homosexual experience and by implication fails to interrogate the inevitability of heterosexuality. [Jeffrey Weeks]
Nothing innate about sexuality
As Alfred C. Kinsey pointed out 50 years ago, the degree to which "homosexuality" is practiced is dependent on the social mores of a particular society. There is nothing normal or abnormal, innate or fixed about either "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality". Yet still today some 50 years after Kinsey and 30 years after Stonewall there is an "inevitability of heterosexuality". Why is this so? What makes heterosexuality the concept, the institution, the practice so popular?
In so far as heterosexuality is even discussed by the left the answer is usually "capitalism and the family". The Trotskyist tradition that I’ve come from explains that "sexual deviancy is a threat to the family and the family is crucial for social oppression under capitalism. Therefore the ruling class oppresses gays."
This seductive argument suggests that tear away non-straight sexualities pose an alternative to heterosexual coupling in the family. If everyone were free to pursue a queer lifestyle who would raise the next generation of wage slaves for the bosses? Why would women slave at home for nothing if there were a viable alternative? Capitalism needs the family to keep the cost of the social wage down and to ensure stability.
As the nuclear family became increasingly important to capitalism, it became increasingly important to portray it as the only possible living arrangement and to ensure that the sexual divisions this entailed were passed on to future generations of workers. The family, in other words, became a means not only of social control over workers, but also of ideological control...Gay sexuality challenges the idea of the monogamous family as the only possible way of living - it also challenges the idea that sex is only for reproduction. [Noel Halifax]
Social constructionists tend agree on the crucial period in capitalism’s development when "Gay oppression" became systemised, the period from around 1860-1900. It was in this period that the "homosexual as a social type" was created. Oppression of "homosexuality", the argument goes, was not unique to capitalism. But under capitalism sexuality was now not a "private affair regulated by...traditions and prejudices of the community" but become "a public matter for the state".
Heterosexuality in this argument is treated as an a-historical given, what changed during the Industrial Revolution was how society defined and dealt with deviancy. Capitalism, as it always does, presented a paradox. The breakdown of feudalism created "the conditions in which...gay sexuality [could] develop and flourish." But simultaneously "gay oppression became systematised as a necessary defence of the nuclear family." Gays were oppressed but "for the first time in history it was possible to fight for gay liberation."
The implication of the Marxist argument is that although heterosexuality isn’t particularly new, it is absolutely necessary for capitalism’s survival. This means that the full development of human sexuality can not take place under the present system. Heterosexuality therefore should be thoroughly analysed and criticised, but whenever sexuality is discussed we only seem to defend and explain the so-called "minority" activity. Only through mediation is heterosexuality present; its causes - capitalism/the family; and its effects - homophobia & women's oppression. How heterosexuality actually works in practice is rarely discussed.
One person who is prepared to tackle the heterosexual bull by the horns is Jonathan Ned Katz the author of The Invention of Heterosexuality. Katz argues that heterosexuality was actually invented in the late nineteenth century and has continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. Linking the nuclear family with the social dominance of heterosexuality is dubious. Other societies pre-dating industrial capitalism had an even greater stake in reproduction inside a stable family but those societies where not homophobic.
Katz uses the example of New England settlers in colonial America to illustrate this point.
In these formative years, the New England organization of the sexes and their erotic activity was dominated by a reproductive imperative. These fragile, undeveloped agricultural economies were desperate to increase their numbers, and their labor force. So the early mode of procreation was structured to optimize the production of New Englanders...The operative contrast in this society was between fruitfulness and barrenness, not between different sex and same sex eroticism...Individuals might lust consistently toward one sex or another and be recognized, sometimes, as so lusting.
But this society did not give rise to a subject defined essentially by an attraction to a same sex or an appetite for a different sex.
The defining feature of Heterosexuality is the idea that there are two types of sexual behaviour, normal and abnormal. Indeed that there are two types of people on earth, straight and gay. This idea has no basis in science. There is only one species of human roaming the earth today. I don't believe that Heterosexuality is about breeding. That "sex is only for reproduction". It is the glorification of sex between men and women, sex for sex's sake.
The big problem with both Marxist and Postmodernist theories is that they view heterosexuality as both automatically repressive and static. It is as if heterosexuality was born fully formed, became the dominant ideology overnight, remained unchanged throughout the 20th century and will be overthrown, hopefully, in the 21st century.
It should be remembered that when psychoanalysts first talked about heterosexuality it was viewed as a sickness, an individual who takes an unhealthy interest in sex! Only over time did it evolve into what we know today. It should also be remembered that throughout the 20th century there was an argument between science and the church over sex, thankfully science won! Science freed us from sin, our task today is to free ourselves from bad science.
Sexuality is a dynamic system
I see heterosexuality as a dynamic system that is both progressive and repressive. Progressive because it validates sex outside the family, glorifies sex for sex sake and frees us from sin, a huge step forward. Repressive because it only validates sex between men and women and treats women as secondary in that union.
Jonathan Katz, sees Heterosexuality as being a product of class struggle in the 19th century. As capitalism came to dominate the world a new class, the urban middle class, became self-aware. They viewed themselves as modern and distinct from the decaying feudal ruling class. Also they believed themselves to be above the morally degenerate working class.
The urban middle class desperately wanted an ideology to justify the new courtship rituals and possibilities that emerged under capitalism. They needed to free themselves from the church, enter Freud. Watch the latest film of Oscar Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband" it's all there.
3000 Years of sexual repression
There was considerable historically inertia though, over 3000 years of sexual repression, and the emergence of heterosexuality was a slow and painful process. It was not until the well into the 1960's and 70's that the battle was won.
In the last third of the 20th century there was considerable effort amongst progressive forces in promoting homosexuality. This was a correct and revolutionary task. The task of the new century is to bring the whole heterosexual edifice tumbling down.
Marxist's view Capitalism as a dynamic but unstable system. We point to its contradictions and seek to exploit its weakness in order to bring its fall. The same intellectual vigour needs to be applied to heterosexuality. What are its weaknesses, its contradictions, how does it fail to meet the expectations of most of the population.
In 1812 the great English poet Shelley wrote the following verse in his poem "The Mask of Anarchy".
Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.
We have to understand that we are engaged in a struggle far more profound than the fight over dollars and cents, the bitter allocation of resources. We are engaged in struggle over the meaning of life itself. The control of our own bodies, the ability to act on desire.
The task of the left is not only to fight for a better world but demonstrate how we can derive pleasure from that world as well.
Some books used:
Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meaning and Myths of Modern Sexualities, Routledge, London [1991].
Noel Halifax, Out Proud & Fighting: Gay liberation and the struggle for socialism, Socialist Workers Party, London [1988].
Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, Plume, New York [1996].