ABSTRACT
Historically, Sex Has Been a compelling issue for the left. In the past twenty years alone there has been an enormous outpouring of theoretical, scholarly, and activist work on sexual difference, sexual identity, and sexuality as a field of power, a category of identity, or a site of critique. But attention to sexuality, like the very notion of “the left” itself, has been mixed and contradictory. Nowhere is this uneven terrain more in evidence than on the topic of heterosexuality. While gay, lesbian, and feminist social movement leaders and intellectuals have had a defining influence on the New Left since the late sixties, only a small portion of their work has explicitly dealt with heterosexuality. The theoretical and historical analyses of lesbian and gay scholars in the past two decades have not ignored heterosexuality, of course, but their interventions for the most part have been aimed more toward legitimizing sexuality as a political concern, authorizing gays and lesbians as social actors with complex histories and cultures, or historicizing the social construction of sexual identities rather than developing sustained critical assessments of heterosexuality as a social practice and institution. In claiming “the personal is political,” some second-wave feminists joined forces with the gay liberation movement in putting sexuality on the left’s political agenda, but heterosexuality has also been a persistent blind spot in feminist debates through the seventies and eighties. 1 One reason for this “oversight” is that much of the scholarly and activist intellectual work of building knowledges about sexuality for a broad-based oppositional social movement has been premised primarily on variant forms of identity and cultural politics.
