ABSTRACT
Rich (1980) first coined the term compulsory heterosexuality to highlight the way “women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, [and] forced into hiding and disguise” (p. 632). Through the exploration of the literature in which this phenomenon operated, Rich demonstrated the culturally embedded assumptions on the supposed naturalness—and thus the centrality and validity—of heterosexuality. Further, Rich demonstrated that the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality came at the cost of lesbian existence, which had been largely constructed “as a less ‘natural’ phenomenon, as mere ‘sexual preference,’ or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations” (p. 632). Later, Butler (2006) discussed compulsory heterosexuality as a by-product of the ongoing cultural centrality of heterosexual practices, experiences, and activities. Furthermore, she was concerned with, among other things, exploring “to what extent . . . gender identity, constructed as a relationship among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire, [was] the effect of a regulatory practice that can be identified as compulsory heterosexuality” (Butler, 2006, p. 24). Thus, for Butler, there was a link between the cultural notion of compulsory heterosexuality and one’s gender identity. This link, which she described as a “matrix of intelligibility” (p. 24) involved the cultural linking of binary notions of sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire in ways that deemed any transgressive practices of gender socially abhorrent, abject, deviant, and impossible.
