Stand by Your Man? Telling Heterosexual Stories

Abstract

Heterosexuality occupies a strange position in the scholarship of the erotic. As the norm against which deviant sexual behaviours and identities are measured, it has been (until recently) both unmarked and unproblematised. Nevertheless, precisely because of its unmarked, unproblematised status, it comes to stand for any and all sex and sexualities which are not specifically identified as non-normative. For example, most of what passes for feminist writing on ‘sex’, ‘families’ or ‘relationships’ is no such thing. Rather, it is feminist writing on heterosex, on heterosexual families and on women’s relationships with men. This is a perversely anomalous situation; that form of sexuality most commonly subject to scholarly scrutiny is studied without being named for what it is. There have been recent developments in psychology, queer studies and feminism whereby the study of heterosexuality qua heterosexuality seems at least to have begun (Segal 1992, Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1993, Richardson 1996). However, this literature remains sparse, and it continues to be the case that heterosexuality remains unnamed as such in much of what is written about it.

I thought, from the impression that I got from other women, that what my marriage was like was probably what marriage was like, and there wasn’t much out there that was that much better than that. And that made me quite cynical, because it disappointed me. But I thought, on well, I suppose that’s what life is like. You have to grit your teeth and get on with it. And I had been deluded by reading too much literature into thinking that it’s possible to have a rich, fulfiling companionate marriage that is actually exciting, and sexually exciting and all the rest of it.

(Kate 47)