Reflections on "Compulsory Heterosexuality"

Adrienne Cecile Rich

Journal of Women's History, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp.

9-11 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2004.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/53008

[131.130.169.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-25 10:47 GMT) Vienna University Library

 2004 ADRIENNE RICH 9
REFLECTIONS ON
“COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY”
Adrienne Rich

O ver the twenty-three years since it was written, I probably became

more critical of my essay than any other possible reader. I stopped
giving permission for its inclusion in anthologies and college readers be-
cause I felt it flawed, outdated, and in certain important ways no longer
representative of my thinking and the thinking I respected. It also seemed
to me that the ensuing years produced more grounded scholarship, more
refined critical thinking, and, simply, more witnesses than were available
to me in 1979–1980 when I was writing it. “Compulsory Heterosexuality”
was an effort of the 1970s explosion of lesbian and feminist consciousness
in the United States, revolutionary in its activism and spirit, still groping
for historical, intellectual, and analytic tools.
It was also part of the writing catalyzed by newly emerging feminist
publishing venues: newspapers, magazines, presses, pamphlets, some
cranked out on workplace mimeograph machines, some financed by indi-
vidual women’s personal or collective assets, some funded by academic
institutions. Of the latter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
was the most institutional, first established as a publication of the Univer-
[131.130.169.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-25 10:47 GMT) Vienna University Library

sity of Chicago, then transferred regularly to different universities under

different editors.1
I undertook “Compulsory Heterosexuality” at Signs’ invitation to
contribute to an issue on sexuality, from any perspective I chose. I thought
I was writing an exploratory piece, an essay in the literal sense of “at-
tempt”: a turning the picture—the presumption of female heterosexual-
ity—around to view it from different angles, a hazarding of unasked ques-
tions. That it should be read as a manifesto or doctrine never occurred to
me. When it began to be reprinted as a pamphlet by small lesbian-femi-
nist presses here and abroad, I was agreeably surprised. When I began to
hear that it was being claimed by some separatist lesbians as an argument
against heterosexual intercourse altogether, I began to feel acutely and
disturbingly the distance between speculative intellectual searching and
the need for absolutes in the politics of lesbian feminism.
Along with the elation—intellectual but also emotional—of that time
went, as I recall, a defensiveness, an impulse to label and condemn rather
than seek engagement and possible synthesis of views and positions. There
had never been a monolithic, unitary women’s movement. Yet the specter
of “splits” often led to blank non-engagement or public accusations of

© 2004 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY, VOL. 16 NO. 1

10 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY

“divisiveness.” (Through it all, of course, groups of women—the Combahee

River Collective being one notable example—were working seriously and
conscientiously to build alliances and define a viable, coherent multi-issue
politics.) In framing a “lesbian continuum” I was trying—somewhat clum-
sily—to address the disconnect between heterosexually-identified and les-
bian feminists.
There are moments of insight—the feminist identifying of institutional
patriarchy was one of them—that can seem to draw confirmation from
every direction, iron filings pulled to a magnet. Such moments can be elec-
trifying—and dangerous. To perceive human relationships in a different
pattern, to imagine new social possibility, is an extraordinary sensation.
But precisely at that point the self-critical function needs to come into play,
where, as contributors to the issue on my essay have pointed out, history,
context, supporting sources, need to be scrutinized.
What I believe has had lasting usefulness is the critique of the pre-
sumption that heterosexuality is “beyond question.” That new genera-
tions of young women have met with that critique for the first time in my
essay only indicates how deeply the presumption still prevails.
The essays by Judy Wu and Mattie Richardson draw on Asian and
African American studies and analysis developed over the past quarter-
century. The existence of such studies is owed to scholars and activists in
the queer and academic communities, and in the ongoing antiracism
struggle. Racialism is still the great bulging theme pushing at all political
and social movements—and underlying most discourse—in this country.
If my essay has lent any momentum to the work of such younger femi-
nists of color as Wu and Richardson, I am grateful to know it.
I would not have used the word “queer” in the late 1970s, and I use it
today to allude to many kinds of sexual disenfranchisement. But in writ-
ing “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” I was writing specifically about women
and feminism: hence “lesbian” was my term of choice.
Alison Kafer raises important questions as to definitions and
sexualizations around “disability.” Having lived with rheumatoid arthri-
tis for over half a century, I am incalculably indebted to the disability ac-
tivists—some of them lesbian/gay friends of mine—whose movement has
produced many kinds of changes, from cut-out curbs to heightened con-
sciousness on many scores. The movement for disability justice is a neces-
sary ongoing political and social process. I am also aware of the complexi-
ties of defining oneself as “disabled.” Kafer’s essay sharpened my sense
of our culture’s glorifications of “fitness” ranging from the marketing of
“perfect” bodies to huge monetary rewards for athletes to promotion of a
body builder as governor of California. Yet lack of universal health insur-
ance in the United States impinges on disabled people and on the “tempo-
2004 ADRIENNE RICH 11

rarily able-bodied” alike so that health itself is a luxury in this land of

wealth and poverty.
Joan Nestle’s integrity, courage, and concern for history and language
have been a challenge and inspiration to me for years, and her eloquent
essay in the Journal of Women’s History is no exception. I thank her for her
continuing honesty, her thinking in times of war, her memories of West
92nd Street, for the hospitality she and Deborah Edel extended to me at
the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and for their founding of that institution
dedicated to lesbian memory and witness.
Since “Compulsory Heterosexuality” was written, many changes have
taken place on the political and economic scene. I will mention only a few:
The cynical “trickle-down” economics of the Reagan administration and
the increasing bondage of both political parties to the protection of pri-
vate wealth have produced an ever-growing and deadly economic abyss
unlike any that existed earlier, despite class inequalities of the past. Fun-
damentalist religious ideology, along with blatantly criminal corporate
practice, has become incorporated into the highest councils of government.2
While more and more Americans feel disenfranchised and disempowered,
and more and more of our citizens are incarcerated, our government is
feared and hated throughout the world. The feminist search for justice
and freedom is inseparable from the concept of a truly integrated world
society. Its horizons have been and must go on being expanded to a de-
gree I did not yet envision when I wrote “Compulsory Heterosexuality.”

NOTES

1
The first “Lesbian Issue” of Signs was published at Stanford University as
Vol. 9, No. 4, Summer 1984, under the managing editorship of Barbara Charlesworh
Gelpi.
2
We now have a “born-again” President who professes to be God-appointed.
As Joan Didion has pointed out (New York Review of Books, vol. L, no. 17, November
6, 2003) it matters little if he is a true believer or cynically placating the Christian
Right: the effects on our polity—and specifically on foreign policy and women’s
freedom—are the same.