ABSTRACT
From the beginning of first-wave feminism on, feminists have produced searing critiques of heterosexuality, pointing in particular to the abuses associated with heterosexual sex: child sexual abuse, rape in marriage, clitoridectomy, wife-beating, sexual slavery; and to the compulsory nature of heterosexuality in a society which systematically inculcates and rewards heterosexuality while punishing and rendering invisible lesbianism. Many feminist theorists have analyzed the extent to which sex is eroticized power differences and have critiqued the phenomenon that Sheila Jeffreys labels ‘heterosexual desire’, by which she means not just desire between women and men, but the eroticizing of dominance and submission. Extrapolating from queer theory more generally, ‘queer heterosexuality’ would, at least, have to be a form of heterosexuality which ‘fucks with gender’, i.e., actively transgresses, parodies and subverts the ‘woman subordinate’, ‘male dominant’ sexual equation. ‘Virgin’ and ‘queer’ theories simply ignore, in equal measure, the ‘compulsory’, ‘abusive’ and ‘radical’ critiques of heterosexuality.
