Compulsory Heterosexuality Plum Bun Professor Mc Farlane Harris

Compulsory Heterosexuality + Plum Bun Professor Mc. Farlane Harris ENGL 205 April 1 and 4, 2016

Sexuality Studies: What is “Sexuality”? Three intertwining strands of sexuality: » Sexual desire, attractions, or fantasies § To whom (or in some cases what) someone is attracted (physically and emotionally) » Sexual activity or behaviour § What a person does or likes to do sexually » Sexual identity § How someone describes their sense of self as a sexual being (e. g. heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, homosexual) (No clear boundaries between these terms; also, difficult to separate out sexuality and gender) 2

Sexuality: A Social Construction • Human sexuality is not a transhistorical phenomenon. • Concepts that appear to be biological and therefore unchanging are actually defined by human beings and can vary, depending on social and historical contexts. • Sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically predetermined. • Ideas about human sexuality and even ways of being “sexual” have developed and changed over time.

The New Institutions of Heterosexuality • Dating (instead of courting) • Choice in mate selection • Learning to be intimate with the “opposite” sex • But don’t lose virginity • Note father’s intervention • Importance of the automobile • “Petting”

Angela in Plum Bun • Compulsory Heterosexuality: What inducements and/or punishments does Angela face in her decisions about heterocoupling and potential marriage? • Remember the epigraph, this nursery rhyme: To market, to market, To buy a plum bun: Home again, home again, Market is done.

Angela and Roger Finally her attitude reduced itself to this: she would have none of the relationship which Roger urged so insistently, not because according to all the training which she had ever received, it was unlawful, but because viewed in the light of the great battle which she was waging for pleasure, protection and power, it was inexpedient. (199 -200)* *Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (Boston: Beacon, 1990).

She could only stare at him, his words echoing in her ears: “You knew perfectly well what you were letting yourself in for. ” The phrase had the quality of a cosmic echo; perhaps men had been saying it to women since the beginning of time. Doubtless their biblical equivalent were the last words uttered by Abraham to Hagar before she fared forth into the wilderness. (231)

Genesis 16. 1 -4 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the LORD has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her. ” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.

Annette Gordon-Reed The Hemingses of Monticello (2008) Thomas Jefferson describes a trip to an art museum in Dusseldorf: “I surely never saw so precious a collection of paintings. Above all those of Van der Werff affected me the most. His picture of Sarah delivering Agar to Abraham is delicious. I would have agreed to have been Abraham through the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years. ” (282)

Sexuality continues to be Racialized “…African or Black sexuality becomes constructed as an abnormal or pathologized heterosexuality…. regardless of individual behavior, being White marks the normal category of heterosexuality. In contrast, being Black signals the wild, out-of-control hyperheterosexuality of excessive sexual appetite. ” —Patricia Hill Collins, “The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood” (p. 129, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2 nd ed. ; New York: Routledge,

The Political Dimensions of Erotic Life Like gender, sexuality is political. It is organised into systems of power, which reward and encourage some individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing others. Gayle Rubin (1984: 309) 13

How often had she heard the expression—“he’s ready to settle down, so he’s looking around for a wife. ” If that were the procedure of men it should certainly be much more so the procedure of women since their fate was so much more deeply involved…. (262 -3)

What does sexuality have to do with the gender binary? Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” (1975): The Sex/Gender system is “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” resulting in the: Idea of the “opposite” sex Sexual division of labor Obligatory heterosexuality “Division of the sexes has the effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually everyone, women and men… …We are not only oppressed as women, we are oppressed by having to be women, or men as the case may be. ”

Remember: Angela in Plum Bun • Compulsory Heterosexuality: What inducements and/or punishments does Angela face in her decisions about heterocoupling and potential marriage? • Remember the epigraph, this nursery rhyme: To market, to market, To buy a plum bun: Home again, home again, Market is done.

Poet and Feminist Theorist: Adrienne Rich “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) » Women’s Liberation era theorist and poet whose work was influential in the development of lesbian and gay studies Her argument: heterosexuality is not a natural outcome of sex difference » It is a social institution maintained by a series of inducements & punishments for women » Key question: ‘What social forces stop women from expressing their sexual and emotional attraction to other women? ’ 17

Compulsory Heterosexuality (Rich, 1980) • Assumption that women and men are innately attracted to each other emotionally and sexually • Rich asks: Perhaps both are oriented toward women because of bonds between mothers and children? • Institutionalization of heterosexuality entails inequality • Male power over women enforces heterosexuality: e. g. prevalence of rape, eroticization of male violence • Gay men and lesbians are either invisible or stigmatized

Inducements & punishments INDUCEMENTS Material The marriage contract (historically: the legalised sexual subordination of women) Financial and material support (husband) Reduced earning capacity for women compared with their male partners Special sphere of influence for women (the domestic) Symbolic or ideological Romance and love – made complete with a man (heterocoupling) Female beauty as an ideal of female worth Motherhood within marriage as female self-fulfilment Women valued only insofar as they are valuable to men 19

Inducements & punishments PUNISHMENTS Women who are sexually independent face steep judgement Social ostracism for unmarried mothers, women who leave their husbands and financially independent women Criminalization, pathologization and abuse of lesbians and women who are not exclusively heterosexual A system of gendered sexual violence that keeps women (and their sexuality) in its proper place 20