Critical Inquiry

Winter 1995

Volume 21, Number 2

Excerpt from "Feminist Heterosexuality and its Politically Incorrect Pleasures" by Jane Gaines:

"Straight people, however, are both closer to deviance than they really want to be and further than they can imagine. As Jonathan Katz has reminded us, the medical profession first invented the term heterosexual. around the turn of the century to describe the double deviance of pursuing pleasure without regard for either procreation or gender. Heterosexuality, then, has not always been synonymous with normality, and queer theory slyly specifies this with the term heteronormative. What is more accurate to say is that heterosexuality and homosexuality have historically implicated one another, and in queer theory the two are suddenly seen together as the couple they have always been, seductively brushing up against each other...

Maybe I want to say that the politically incorrect pleasures of feminist heterosexuality should be taken seriously after all. As the heroine [of Vanalyne Green's Spy in the House That Ruth Built. (video, 1989)] reminds us, to be a het is to be endangered as a woman, often in the position of bringing it all on yourself. To like it is to ask for it. But in the somewhat different case of the feminist. heterosexual, to know that to like it is to ask for it and to still want it is to be perverse. Perhaps not nice girls need to appreciate how queer they really are."