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[pb_glossary id=\"840\"]Compulsory heterosexuality[\/pb_glossary]:<\/strong> the enforcement of heterosexuality as a normative system that entrenches men\u2019s access to women physically, economically, and emotionally\n[pb_glossary id=\"841\"]Performative[\/pb_glossary]:<\/strong> an act that through repetition gives power to social and cultural norms and ideals\n[pb_glossary id=\"842\"]Women\u2019s Liberation Movement[\/pb_glossary]:<\/strong> a term used to describe the feminist political and social movement, primarily the one that was based in the United States, which pursued equal rights for women from the 1960s to the 1970s\n\n\n\n
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When we examine love, sex, and marriage, we\u2019re looking at key building blocks of a heteronormative patriarchy that in western societies is also typically a white, capitalist system. Whether you treat these phenomena as three separate blocks or as one big block, they have been key instruments in perpetuating the gender binary that has often cast women as “the other” and lesser.<\/p>\n
Radical feminists, especially those who were part of the Women\u2019s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1960s and 1970s, argued that the root of women\u2019s oppression and the foundation of gender inequality was biological sex difference. They observed that, to secure economic sustenance in this system, women\u2019s role in life was to enhance their value as a female object. To improve their social status, women had to trade on their femininity and sex to make their way in the world because they are denied the resources to be self-sufficient.\u00a0Feminist scholars, writers, activists, advocates, and change-makers also started to question heterosexuality itself arguing that it is not an innate \u201cnatural\u201d sexuality for all humans, but a normative compulsion and imposed standard that is maintained by force.\u00a0However, despite the inequalities this system has created for women over the centuries, the allure of love and marriage persists. Why?<\/p>\n
If we study heterosexuality more closely, especially through the lens of popular culture and media, we can start to see how gender and sexual norms come to be experienced as “natural” and never-changing. Gender and sexual norms acquire power through being repeated over and over in our social contexts and environments, to the point where we begin to experience them as \u201cjust the way things are.\u201d\u00a0Visual signs of heterosexuality in popular media act as \u201cperformatives,\u201d which repeat and reinforce heterosexuality as a norm and an ideal. However, heterosexuality is also often pictured as \u201cunhappy\u201d in media representations, and these \u201cunhappy performatives\u201d reveal discomfort with and a reaction against heterosexual norms.<\/p>\n
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Some of the most frequently repeated performatives around marriage in popular culture are those that represent weddings and brides. Take a television show such as Say Yes to the Dress<\/em> (SYTTD) for example. It reinforces the essential fantasy of the happy bride, or even just the idea of bride, as key to a woman\u2019s life. It smooths out things like:<\/p>\n The other thing that shows like SYTTD do is limit the feminist imagination. It drops the horizon for women to one moment and to one event and it disguises the need to look further, to tackle the unfamiliar. When choosing a blush dress over a white one is \u201coooh trouble\u201d or seen as a \u201cradical\u201d act, the horizon for feminist aspirations has not only been lowered, but it\u2019s also been obscured by tulle, bling, silk, satin, and bows.<\/p>\n If one\u2019s horizon is limited to bride and wife, then it\u2019s less likely that the need to change the world remains as a priority. It\u2019s important to understand and reiterate that it\u2019s perfectly acceptable to be a bride and a wife. It just becomes an issue when that one path through life is represented as every woman\u2019s dream, and as the natural, good, and proper course for her life. That makes all other experiences unnatural, bad, and improper and paints any non-marital path as a path to unhappiness, disorderliness, and destruction.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n
\nCompulsory heterosexuality:<\/strong> the enforcement of heterosexuality as a normative system that entrenches men\u2019s access to women physically, economically, and emotionally
\nPerformative:<\/strong> an act that through repetition gives power to social and cultural norms and ideals
\nWomen\u2019s Liberation Movement:<\/strong> a term used to describe the feminist political and social movement, primarily the one that was based in the United States, which pursued equal rights for women from the 1960s to the 1970s<\/p>\n
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