Heteronormativity Quotes

She's happy with who she is. Maybe it's not the heteronormative dream that she grew up wishing for, but... knowing who you are and loving yourself is so much better than that, I think.

Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the “right” kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I “made it,” that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let’s be clear: It is not.

I don't say what I'm thinking. I don't tell him how lucky he is, that he can just sit there and admit it, sheepish, but unashamed. Like it's his right. Like it's okay, because she's supposed to belong to someone like him, instead of someone like me.

It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.

Bye bye binary. For gender, for sexuality, for everything. ... Lots of people can like lots of people. And could everyone please get over it and update their idea of normal.

Is having a child actually fundamentally bettering the world as a whole in any way? There is no shortage of children. Wouldn’t it be better to let people who want children have them, and leave everyone else alone?

There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are.

He knew I was gay for ages," he said, his voice soft. "We both did. Since we were, like, ten or eleven, maybe. As soon as we understood what gay was, we knew that's what I was. We... We used to kiss sometimes, when we were kids. When we were alone. Just little childish kisses, little pecks on the lips because we thought it was fun. We were always... really affectionate with each other. We'd cuddle and... we were kind to each other, rather than nasty like most children. I think we were so caught up in each other that we just... missed all the heteronormative propaganda that's thrust at you when you're that age. We didn't really realize it was weird until - yeah, until we were ten or eleven. But that didn't really stop us. I guess... I guess I always felt like it was more romantic than Aled did. Aled always just treated it like it was something that friends did rather than boyfriends. Aled... he's always been weird. He doesn't care what people think. He doesn't even, like, register the social norms... he's just caught up in his own little world.

You’re not really mad that I’m not having children. In fact, I would probably love to one day. You’re mad that I’m expressing autonomy of choice. You’re mad that I’m considering other options. You’re mad that I don’t view that as my ultimate potential. You’re mad that I dare be selfish enough to make choices based on my best interest, something women are not supposed to do. You’re mad that I consider it a choice, and that I, a woman, am exercising choice. You’re not mad that I’m not having babies. You’re mad because I’m acting like a man.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

When you're accustomed to being considered 'normal', difference feels like a perversion.

To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

Heteronormativity: The curious idea that your genitals dictate your behaviour.

The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word.

repeat after me: 1. our immigrant families are not just ‘homophobic’ they are also ‘colonized.’ 2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too. 3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words — i mean the english — to say it) 4. the diaspora responds to racism with heteronormativity 5. trauma seeps through generations

If you think being straight means you're being discriminated against, you're probably misreading your privilege.

Glitched bodies - those that do not align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity - pose a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.

abridged list of things to let go if you want to be happy: old versions of yourself / ideas about who and what you were supposed to be / other people’s expectations of you / societal expectations of you / gender norms / heteronormativity / internalized ideas about what your life is supposed to look like / the idea that romantic love makes you whole / relationships that cause you more grief than they’re worth / people who cross your boundaries / family that makes you feel unsafe or unwelcome / the need to make your happiness look like everyone else’s

Well, I do feel like I should mention that I think virginity in general is an arbitrary construct designed by men as a system of control and fear. And it’s heteronormative. And limiting, because why do certain sexual acts preserve virginity and some destroy it? What if I fucked a dildo every night, but I hadn’t fucked a man? Why doesn’t anal sex count? And what if I was with someone and penetration wasn’t an option, for any number of biological or emotional or identity reasons—would that make our sex less somehow? I’d be a virgin forever?

Persecution complexes are reaffirming to those who benefit from unearned privileges.

The surest way to get a bunch of queers to do anything is to make a rule nonsensically forbidding us from doing it.

It is also evident in their [Social Justice] assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.

It is, understandably, considered gauche to describe bisexuality as transitory, almost as gauche as the word “bisexual” itself. Perhaps it would be better to think of bisexuality as queerly universal—stem cells potent with potential. As long as compulsive heteronormativity exists, queer people will pass through bisexuality at some point, however briefly. Some tear through it on a speedboat, heading for a more monosexual harbor, others circle, content, drinking aperitifs in the sun.

There's nothing wrong with you. And I don't like your idea that I can 'fix' you. You aren't broken. There's nothing to fix.

from the outside we looked like a stereotypical heteronormative nuclear family. Later I ruined this image and queered everything to pieces

Heteronormativity likes us to think that the only meaningful relationships we can have are romantic,

The left consistently bullies those who disagree with them by claiming they’re sexist and “heteronormative.

Inspector Cooley, ‘gangs’ is a racist term applied to organic collections of oppressed individuals banding together to defend their rights against a heteronormative white supremacy paradigm.

Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.

The kind of category-defying love Foucault describes is a “problem” only because love is supposed to stay inside the proper social channels in our heteronormative culture. The family you’re born into is the family you’re supposed to be content with—and we are told repeatedly, without any explanation or supporting evidence, that we are meant to “love them no matter what.” To fit into such a culture, your friendships ought to be lesser.

It’s in that moment that pity is the overwhelming thing I feel. I feel sorry for this troglodyte because he has no idea that love doesn’t have to sour over time. I don’t need to be whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage, and I fully believe both partners are responsible for making a relationship romantic, if that’s what they want. Not whatever heteronormative bullshit that tells us guys are supposed to make the first move and pay for dinner and get down on one knee. But I do want something big and wild, something that fills my heart completely. I want a fraction of what Emma and Charlie or Lindley and Josef or Trisha and Rose have, even though they’re fictional. I’m convinced that when you’re with the right person, every date, every day feels that way.

White power works in concert with other forms of power—including capitalism (the dominance of private profit over public benefit); ableism (the dominance of people deemed able-bodied); cisnormativity (the dominance of people who fit a strict male–female gender binary); patriarchy (the dominance of men); and heteronormativity (the dominance of people who, based on the gender binary, only accept heterosexuality as normal)—to create what feminist scholar and author bell hooks describes as “dominator culture.

Like that breeder-woman sitting at the bar, who thinks it's a buzz to go into a gay joint and has no doubt heard somewhere that this is one. Her lurid get-up's a joke, ludicrous. She's the type who dons the camouflage-green combat trousers, wraps a bandanna around her head and paints herself with black lipstick, imagining all the lesbians in the joint'll have the hots for her. Not so much imagining as secretly hoping. Naturally, no one goes and sits with her. She's been here before, and everyone gives the ice-cold shoulder, yet she still turns up again and again. Someone might argue we're zoo animals for her. But I've another theory. For her, we're noble savages, a kind of grey area outside the respectable, minutely organized community, an untamed wilderness it takes a lot of guts to step into. But if you do dare, there's a glorious smell of freedom floating around your trousers and giving the finger to society, making whoever an instant anarchist. Certainly, for her, coming here is like putting a washable tattoo on your shoulder : there's the thrill of deviance with none of the dull commitment - and she'll never have to wonder whether she's too weird to be seen out before dark.

This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void. We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.

For one, I think our friendship blurred a lot of heteronormative lines, and from stories I've heard from other women, this happens a lot. It doesn't even necessarily mean either one of you is queer, but when you're a teenager, there is an overall pressure to be "normal," and spending that much time with someone of the same sex can quickly call "normal" into question. This type of intimacy and closeness is not often socially sanctioned, as we're told it's reserved for your romantic partner, who—in your teen years especially—is "supposed" to be someone of the opposite sex.

So it's actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn't like the hero until he's been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it's just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he's doing. It's a tough spot to be in, but also this is coming from an angry dyke who's also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kinda of misogyny.

Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.

Saying it's hard being straight is like complaining to the poor that it's difficult being wealthy.

Asking us to push away the very walls that are constantly crushing us into small, confined boxes is toxic.

...we are always both seeing and not seeing desire around us, especially when that desire steers clear of the form of a heterosexual couple.

Undoubtedly someone is going to toss the words heteronormative and individualizing the structural at me, and that person should stop reading immediately, not just this book but all books, your mind is broken and it is better suited for TV.  I don't mean you are stupid, only that you are even more a product of the system you hate than the porn you think you reject.

What happened to all those leading men of the great bacchanalia? They either died of AIDS or accepted roles as supporting actors in the middlebrow drama series of hetero culture-you know, if they're to kiss, we must have sunsets in the background. Once they were proud to explore every crevice of life in the margins, now their ambition is just to get along. Color me unimpressed.

I like you. I like us. But I don't want you to push yourself to make it romantic or sexual or whatever just because you think we should, because we have matching heart lines, or are bonded by magic, or you think I'm your soulmate. Besides, I'm still figuring things out myself and I don't like the idea that I'm attracted to you only because of magic. Or that I'm attracted to magic itself.

You know, there's this bullshit idea that you just magically know when you like someone romantically or sexually. But that's all it is - bullshit. Emotions are messy. People are messy. I imagine that magic makes it all just messier. And anything that isn't a clear-cut heterosexual romance out of a Disney film or a Hollywood romcom is constantly being put into doubt and questioned, because we are so used to seeing the same simple story repeated over and over again. That being straight or gay are the only options, that one person is right for you your entire life, that you just know you're meant to be, that couples have to be exclusive to be real relationships, that couples need to be couples, that romance always comes with sex. Life is not that easy. People and attraction are way more complicated than that.

It was just heteronormative bullshit, a societal compulsion to thrust independent and perfectly happy individuals together in a socially accepted way, so they could become vulnerable before ultimately growing too familiar with each other’s flaws and engaging in destructive behavior that would result in the heart of at least one party being crushed. Behavior such as, for example, shagging their neighbor and blaming it on their girlfriend’s supposed inattentiveness.

I remember one Fourth of July evening in Philadelphia, about a year after my surgery. I was walking home arm in arm with Lisa, my lover at the time, after the fireworks display. We were leaning in to one another, walking like lovers walk. Coming towards us was a family of five: mom, dad, and three teenage boys. "Look it's a coupla faggots," said one of the boys. "Nah, it's two girls," said another. "That's enough outa you," bellowed the father, "one of 'em's got to be a man. This is America!

But i am a black man whose black mama's body and spirit were terrorized by another black man's hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Hetero-sexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution.

We were always looking for the perfect man. Even those of us who were not signed up for the traditional, heteronormative experience were nevertheless fascinated with the anthropological, unicorn-like search for one. Married or single, we were either searching for him or trying to mold him from one we already had. This perfect specimen would consist of the following essential attributes: He shared his food and always ordered dessert. When we recommended a book, he bought it without needing a friend to second our suggestion first. He knew how to pack a diaper bag without being told. He was a Southern gentleman with a mother from the East Coast who fostered his quietly progressive sensibilities. He said “I love you” after 2.5 months. He didn’t get drunk. He knew how to do taxes. He never questioned our feminist ideals when we refused to squish bugs or change oil. He didn’t sit down to put on his shoes. He had enough money for retirement. He wished vehemently for male-hormonal birth control. He had a slight unease with the concept of women’s shaved vaginas, but not enough to take a stance one way or another. He thought Mindy Kaling was funny. He liked throw pillows. He didn’t care if we made more money than him. He liked women his own age. We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt. Of course, this story isn’t about perfect men, but Ardie Valdez unfortunately didn’t know that yet when, the day after Desmond’s untimely death, Ardie’s phone lit up: a notification from her dating app.

Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables places alongside each other… I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one many sitting by one woman around a ‘round table,’ facing each other 'over’ the table… I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?

The tracks of Christian theology, Nietzsche had complained, wound everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, they led – as they had done in earlier ages – in various and criss-crossing directions. They led towards TV stations in which televangelists preached the headship of men over women; and they led as well to gender studies departments, in which Christianity was condemned for heteronormative marginalization of LBTQIA+. Nietzsche had foretold it all … Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derived from a framework of values that was itself utterly Christian.12

the perversity is not lost on me that the most oft-cited, well-respected, best-selling books about the caretaking of babies—Winnicott, Spock, Sears, Weissbluth— have been and are mostly still by men. On the front cover of The Baby Book—arguably one of the more progressive contemporary options (albeit oppressively heteronormative)—the byline reads “by William Sears (MD) and Martha Sears (RN).” This seems promising(ish), but nurse/wife/mother Martha’s voice appears only in anecdotes, italics, and sidebars, never as conarrator. Was she too busy taking care of their eight children to join in the first-person?

Even if we are married to the same person, and remain faithful to her or him for the rest of our lives, that will still not stop our desires from straying. We will continue to lust after Shah Rukh Khan or Sophia Loren even as we might stay happily married. This is the way desire operates—through fantasy rather than fact.

This poem declares the absence of a Hindu canon. This poem declares itself the Hindu canon. This poem follows the monkey. This poem worships the horse. This poem supersedes the Vedas and the supreme scriptures. This poem does not culture the jungle. This poem jungles the culture. This poem storms into temples with tanks. This poem stands corrected: the RSS is BJP’s mother. This poem is not vulnerable. This poem is Section 153-A proof. This poem is also idiot-proof. This poem quotes Dr.Ambedkar. This poem considers Ramayana a hetero-normative novel. This poem breaches Section 295A of the Indian Penile Code. This poem is pure and total blasphemy.

Adults, whether anti-trans hate groups, trans exclusionary feminists, conservative activists, parents, so-called interested observers, or even allies and advocates, tarry within the dangerously limiting circumstances of a system that continues to assay the value of trans children’s being in terms not of their humanity and personhood but via questions absurd in their abstraction for how they ask us instead to wonder if trans children “prove something” about the biological basis of sex and gender or how identity politics have so injured a cis, white, heteronormative imaginary that cannot fathom the obvious fragility of its claims to universalism in the face of a defiant no.

Some may say asexual people don’t have problems (or the right problems, or enough problems), and therefore they should just go ally with heterosexual people, but this ignores the fact that heteronormative attitudes influence the heterosexual world to also exclude asexual people. If “not LGB” is understood to mean “heterosexual” in queer spaces, those who say so are processing heterosexual as the default, which is an attitude that also hurts them. Even aromantic asexual people, who are less likely to be assumed heterosexual because they are unlikely to have romantic partners, are sometimes told “you don’t belong here because you’re just straight.” Perceived blank spaces being interpreted as heterosexual by default is a heteronormative assumption.

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her. Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.” I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!” I tried to explain what I meant. I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic.

The fact is, however, that in those early days we were not as emancipated as I would like to remember. There was discrimination although at the time few of us were aware of it. I had to unlearn what men in our society are brainwashed throughout our lives to believe, the myth that men are stud football players who bring in the money and women are supposed to stay home and wash dishes! There is sexism among gay males and lesbians just as there is sexism in the non-gay population - because we are all conceived and nurtured by a heterosexual society whose prejudices are reflected in us. We are the children.

Sexual-patriarchal relational systems overwhelm, from media glorifying sexual connection above other forms of intimacy and interaction, to medical, economic, and legal structures that automatically privilege sexual/domestic/romantic dyadic partnerships and genetic family bonds over other chosen platonic relationships and support systems. Oppressive social structures and micro-aggressive interpersonal interactions constantly grate on us, damaging our health and maybe even pushing us to seek care, but often available formal assistance is part of the same harmful system and populated by the same privileged persons.

On Lou's lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the great Lucifer himself, stories told through the night, the tortures, the beatings, the broken bones, every school has its Tigellinus, but his had more than one and each with followers, all-American boys who delighted in discovering how much pain a soul could withstand, two suicide attempts and all his parents and school could do was try to make Lou change his behavior, his behavior, his behavior, his, his, his, to modify his being just a bit. It gets better, Doc, fucking gets better, no one dared suggest that maybe the family and the school should change, or heaven forbid, that it was the all-Americans who should be modifying their beings, no, the homo should grin and bear it dumbly...

Cue thousands of Instagram posts encouraging the no-contact rule and implicitly shaming anyone who continues a relationship with their ex. But the story of relationships and their endings is far too complex for us to apply solution-focused changes aimed at reducing pain. Still, every one of my friends and every therapist on Instagram advises against talking to an ex. No contact, cold turkey, zero—a crazy idea to me. In my work, I’ve noticed that more than half of my clients will continue to communicate with their former partner, maintaining some form of connection. Even a friendship. This happens despite the discouraging advice recommending a complete cutoff. But we, as a society, might be better off trying to understand our need to continue a connection with an ex than condemning or strongly advising against it. Maybe it’s time we reconsidered our attitude toward post-breakup connections. Instead of dismissing them as unhealthy, we could try to understand the motives behind our choice to stay in touch. After all, each relationship and breakup is unique, and the two (or more) people involved in a ruptured relationship are in the best position to judge what serves their emotional needs and personal growth. The idea of cutting an ex out of your life completely is also extremely heteronormative. Many queer people (like me) don’t have their family of origin to fall back on. Our “families” are therefore sometimes our friends, partners, and ex-partners, the people we form deep connections with. Alex was my family for ten years. So, for me, cutting him out of my life entirely wasn’t so simple.

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

What’s going on?’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’ ‘I …’ I looked down. I didn’t want her to see me. But Rooney was looking at me, eyebrows furrowed, so many thoughts churning behind her eyes, and it was that look that made me start spilling everything out. ‘I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ ‘B-but … that’s not how the world works, people always put romance over friendships –’ ‘Says who?’ Rooney spluttered, smacking her hand on the ground in front of us. ‘The heteronormative rulebook? Fuck that, Georgia. Fuck that.’ She stood up, flailing her arms and pacing as she spoke. ‘I know you’ve been trying to help me with Pip,’ she began, ‘and I appreciate that, Georgia, I really do. I like her and I think she likes me and we like being around each other and, yep, I’m just gonna say it – I think we really, really want to have sex with each other.’ I just stared at her, my cheeks tear-stained, having no idea where this was going. ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

I don’t feel like I’ve been lying to anyone, though. I mean, since I was little, everyone’s told me that I like girls. Think about it—even when you’re in kindergarten, there are all sorts of messages that eventually you’ll grow up to like girls. Man, when you’re barely able to walk people make these cutesy comments about your girlfriends and how you’re going to be a lady killer and all sorts of crap like that. You were an ugly little kid, Derek, so perhaps you didn’t get that sort of attention, but I’ve always been told that I’m straight. And that’s the story I was trying to make happen. I didn’t come up with the lie. It wasn’t mine. They handed the lie to me, and I tried like hell to make it work for a while. No one meant any harm, but I’ve spent some long nights unable to sleep, worrying about how it’s all going to work out and blaming myself for being some sort of pervert. You know, I was lying in bed at night worrying when I was in, like, eighth grade. That ain’t right.

Yes, LGBTQ folks are less stigmatized, and more visible, but only when safely celibate, coupled off, and mirroring heteronormative values - standards that present heterosexuality as the preferred, or "normal," identity.

I break into heterosexual houses so I can masturbate in their heterosexual kitchens

One's privilege can make it harder to get critical insights into the things affected by that privilege, for the simple reason that the workings of privilege are usually far easier to notice and understand when you are not their beneficiary. Beneficiaries of privilege often are not even aware of its existence: they have never needed to be. To compound this problem, it can be deeply uncomfortable to regard one's own favorable position within a social structure as due to privilege rather than solely one's own merits and efforts. So the beneficiaries of privilege can be strongly motivated to ignore it. If you are trying to figure out how romantic love works at a time when it is intimately bound up with sexism, heteronormativity, and other systematic oppressions, privilege is a philosophical hindrance.

As women, we’re told we’re not supposed to initiate things. That it’s more romantic for the guy to do it. Aside from how outdated and heteronormative that is, how else are you going to feel like you have any semblance of equality in a relationship? I never want to wait around, hoping someone else will decide to take control when I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.

The agenda of juvenile court, then, for queer and trans youth at least, often becomes to 'rehabilitate' youth into fitting heteronormative and gender-typical molds. Guised under the 'best interest of the child,' the goal often becomes to 'protect' the child - or perhaps society - from gender-variant or non-heterosexual behavior.

I fully believe both partners are responsible for making a relationship romantic, if that’s what they want. Not whatever heteronormative bullshit that tells us guys are supposed to make the first move and pay for dinner and get down on one knee.

In an attempt to make things less difficult for LGBTQIA+ individuals, we encourage them to "be who they are," but to also align themselves as closely as possible with heteronormative happiness scripts. This means you can be whatever you want, but if you really want to be happy, you still need to get married, have children, and get a job.

The men's needs are strong and overwhelming. They need the faggots and their friends in order to know who they are not. But the faggots and their friends will no longer need the men. They can sit and produce high, invisible love energy or they can do anything. But they will not need. And when the faggots and their friends cease being the faggots and their friends, the deathly dance of the men will begin to wane and a new dance will begin to emerge. Then the third revolutions will engulf us all.

Maybe it's not the heteronormative dream that she grew up wishing for, but... knowing who you are and loving yourself is so much better than that, I think.

It is difficult for me to not consider the connection here to queer people, who so often do not have access to a life where they get to be themselves. Homophobia, especially internalized homophobia, demands we craft heteronormative versions of ourselves and erase any trace of our queerness. Other people are put inside of us. We're both there and not there.

If the history of modern democracy in the Euro-American world has also been the history of the genocide of indigenous populations and of their “dreams” (according to Black Elk’s powerful description), of slavery and its institutional prolongations, of imperialism and colonization, of the subjugation of women and the persistence of the patriarchy, of xenophobia and the oppression of immigrants, of the exclusion of the disabled, of heteronormativity and queer- and transphobia, and of the vast and various damaging effects of capitalism including the unbridled destruction of the biosphere, then why draw the conclusion that this is the best form of government, or even the sole and unique historical possibility? If one replies, very rightly, that movements proclaiming themselves to be democratic have fought body and soul against such practices and have often won, one is still forced to admit that the reverse is equally true and that this concept in struggle has frequently been pulled in the other direction, as we shall see. It is therefore necessary to ask why, when references are made to the numerous stains on this history, one so often responds by invoking progress toward an idea of something to come, toward an immaculate notion standing above the effective history of actually existing democracy. And most of the time this happens without inquiring into the possibility of a deep complicity between this idea and the numerous forms of oppression at work in real democracy. What are the affects, so powerful yet so under-studied, that bind us implacably to this Idea, and from whence do they come?

Female-headed households challenge the dominant idea of a heteronormative `family’ in a deeply conservative society.

Certainly there were formations of gender norms and heterosexuality prior to colonization but what colonialism did was officially establish the gender binary and heteronormativity. What colonialism did was criminalize people for transgressing from these gender and sexual norms.—Alok Vaid-Menon & Janani Balasubramanian, trans Indian poets and organizers, Darkmatter (The Cake, 2015)

The greatest barriers that we face in this historic moment are not born of our unique identities and experiences as 2SLGBTQIA+ people, but rather stem from the systems of power that have ignorantly and arrogantly assumed to be “normal”.

The more I write openly into the space of sexual sovereignty, the more I hear from humans desperate for a safe space to share. Those who have nowhere to be fully honest and real about the whys and hows and whats and whos of their body and its desire. ⁠ What turns us on? What brings us pleasure? What completely normal and natural variation of human sexuality have we labeled deviant simply because it does not fit within the prescribed heteronormative, vanilla narrative for what we are permitted to experience? Where do we berate ourselves because we like what we like and we want what we want?⁠ It's a fucking shame that we've driven so much into the shadows. It's a travesty that we are forced to squeeze the entire spectrum of desire into such a tightly constructed box. ⁠ You've got 22 square feet of skin covering your holy human body—of course, there's a hell of a lot of different ways to make that skin feel good. ⁠ Coincidentally, 22 square feet is approximately the size of a standard closet door., and we all know a closet is a terrible place to live. When we force people into the closet, we cause harm. We create an experience of othering based on our own discomfort and unwillingness to expand our notions of acceptability.⁠ We NEED to start having way more honest, open, and raw conversations about sex, desire, and kink.⁠ We need to blow the remaining closets to smithereens. ⁠ We need to talk about how to embrace the power of full, enthusiastic consent and expand our sex-positivity and our ability to say 'that's so not for me, but GO YOU and your bad self feeling all that pleasure'. We need to start really thinking about how, as long as we bring no harm to others in the fulfillment of desire, we aren't fucking wrong for the wanting. ⁠ Embrace your queerness or your kink or your fetish in your journal or to your bestie or to an internet stranger. Hell, start by whispering it out loud in an empty room and then breathe the power of that back into your being. ⁠ You are human. You get to want. You get to feel good. Anything else is blasphemy.

There are a lot of great things about immortality. Though vampires have never held the same obsessions with gender binaries or heteronormative nonsense as western human societies, it's been nice to witness the mortal world's evolution. This decade has been so much better for humans who love like Wyn and I do, who experience gender the way Wyn does. There's language for us, now. Pockets of community that feel so much like home, even if those moments are fleeting for vampires.

One of the things I like about Cyber World is that it shows cyberpunk has left its heteronormative boy’s club roots behind in the dust.

Roses are red / Gender is performative / Mass-market romance / Is heteronormative

heteronormativity.

Being exception isn't revolutionary, it's lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the "right" kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I "made it," that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let's be clear: It is not.

Out in Africa examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same sex desire, as it is at odds with an apparent context of heteronormativity and emphasis on reproduction, in a pan-African context, from the nineteenth century to the present.

two—queerness and toxicity—have an affinity. They truck with negativity, marginality, and subject-object confusions; they have, arguably, an affective intensity; they challenge heteronormative understandings of intimacy. Both

I know Jack will be accepting of this, and I’ve always taught my son to accept love in every shape and form. But there’s no denying that the world around him has taught him there is only one right way to be in a relationship. Every day, as his mother, I have to fight that heteronormative brainwashing. And he will have to fight that battle with me, with us. But at the end of the day, it’s still love. And my son deserves nothing less.

I like how heteronormative culture is now adopting this concept of authenticity. Different cultures and different tribes within society are now adopting authenticity: women, people of color, body acceptance. Self-expression is power. I don’t know what else is more powerful than self-expression.

Il rifiuto di mangiare carne non è solo un rifiuto del patriarcato, ma un fallimento e un’interruzione dell’eteronormatività fondata sulla trasmissione identitaria. Dichiarare di essere vegan funziona come un vero e proprio coming out (tanto che esiste la vegefobia), e la persona vegana che rifiuta l’uccisione degli animali è considerata una killjoy perché <> la felicità della famiglia, i suoi ruoli e tradizioni, ma anche il futuro al quale ruoli e tradizioni saranno tramandati.

Il rifiuto di mangiare carne non è solo un rifiuto del patriarcato, ma un fallimento e un’interruzione dell’eteronormatività fondata sulla trasmissione identitaria. Dichiarare di essere vegan funziona come un vero e proprio coming out (tanto che esiste la vegefobia), e la persona vegana che rifiuta l’uccisione degli animali è considerata una killjoy perché “uccide” la felicità della famiglia, i suoi ruoli e tradizioni, ma anche il futuro al quale ruoli e tradizioni saranno tramandati.

Parfois, j'ai le sentiment que l'on m'a volé du temps. Ce temps passé à tenter de me fondre dans le monde hétéro sans comprendre le mien.

Brownmiller writes that Plath’s violent relationship was one cause of her suicide, offering Plath as a high-profile example of the masochism women in heteronormative relationships were required to possess to endure them. This masochism had “gotten out of hand” for Plath by the time she killed herself.

There is something decidedly queer in all of this—the orchids and aspens and strawberries and antplants and ginkgoes—a sense of sensual entanglement that disregards binaries, runs across the species boundary, and almost gleefully defies heteronormative modes of reproduction. This lens might also help us escape the idea that everything in nature is a battle, with a clear winner. Sometimes it may be an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely. WHEN

Ironically, the heteronormative vision of a unitary racial identity that would suppress sexual difference among African Americans does not exorcise the specter of white supremacy from the body of black America, but rather reincorporates white racism’s phobic conceptions of black sexuality in the denigrated figure of the colored homosexual.

Still, both Rent and Spring Awakening ultimately use gay characters to bolster heteronormativity. Angel serves as the emotional touchstone of Rent, endlessly generous and hopeful, caring and sensitive. All mourn his death, which compels the other characters to look at their lives and choices. That Angel’s death enables the other characters to learn about themselves replicates a typical (tired) trope in which an Other (usually a person of color or a person with a disability) aids in the self-actualization of the principal character. Also, Collins and Angel have the most loving and healthy relationship, which the musical needs to eliminate so as not to valorize the gay male couple above all else. In addition, Joanne and Maureen sing a lively number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” but the musical doesn’t take their relationship seriously. Maureen is presented as a fickle, emotionally abusive, yet irresistible lover (Joanne and Mark’s duet, “The Tango Maureen”) and a less-than-accomplished artist (her “The Cow Jumped over the Moon” is a parody of performance art).15 In contrast, Mimi and Roger’s relationship lasts through the end of the musical, since Mimi comes back to life. This choice, one of the few that differs from Puccini’s La Bohème (which provides the primary situational basis for Rent), shows how beholden twentieth-century musicals—even tragedies—are to the convention of a heterosexually happy ending.

What Marx considered a divisive ploy is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats: to turn black and brown against white, female against male, gay and lesbian and transgender people against “heteronormativity.” In 2020, Democrats intend to use these multiple lines of division to create the majority coalition that will implement their new form of identity socialism across the economic and cultural landscape.

One way to sidestep such guilt is to make our objects of envy boys rather than men. There is a definitive boyishness to the litany of masc aspirational figures I opened this chapter with, and it's not at all incidental. They are all safe boys to love: non-threatening, gentle, empathic, features that are amplified by the nexus of youth and whiteness. This is, indeed, what makes them popularly palatable teen heartthrobs, and what makes transmasc cathodes to them ones that don't threaten to devour. Awkward-Rich, in a brilliant criticism of what he calls "the boys of queer trans theory," suspects that the figure of the boy (as theorized in the work of Jack Halberstam, Bobby Noble, and others) emerges as central to these strains of trans masculine theorizing because he stands for a kind of "masculinity without phallic power" that "fashions masculinity for the [feminist] movement." In halberstam's work, the boy—and, specifically, the paradigmatic boy that is Peter Pan—signals a refusal to grow up and into the staid gender stereotypes associated with heteronormative adulthood.

The isolated village makes for a pretty postcard of rural England, filled with old houses, National Trust halls and heritage-status buildings. On the flipside it’s very heteronormative and traditional, which didn’t suit me one bit.

The imperative placed on queer people to account for ourselves is a discriminatory act that demeans our human dignity. It is not a demand made of heterosexuals, they do not need to account for themselves, their desire does not need to be reduced to the language of politics or stance. As Greenwell told me; art is the realm in which contradictions can be held and not resolved, but held in a kind of beneficent statsis, that is like sexuality, desire like art, a creative act that reveals something of us anew in each act of desiring. Anything less is a compromise, a distortion of ourselves and the rights we should be afforded. I will not accept that the heteronormative may love in the language of art, but that I may only love in the language of politics.

Rent creates new possibilities for characters’ sexualities in musicals by representing multiple gay and lesbian characters with frank and casual openness. Rent is peopled with a gay male couple (Angel and Collins) and a lesbian couple (Maureen and Joanne) and it takes those sexualities for granted in the musical’s world of NYC’s East Village circa 1990. Rent’s structure—a single protagonist, Mark, surrounded by a close-knit community—borrows formal conventions of ensemble musicals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Hair, Company, Godspell, and A Chorus Line. This structure enables the musical to nod to nonheterosexual identities and relationships, an ideological gesture that speaks to its (successful) intention to address musical theater’s wide range of spectators and even make them feel politically progressive. This device of including a few gay characters in a community-based story is repeated with the gay male couples in Avenue Q and Spring Awakening, and perhaps foretells a musical theater future with a more consistent nod to gay people (or gay men, at least).14 Still, both Rent and Spring Awakening ultimately use gay characters to bolster heteronormativity. Angel serves as the emotional touchstone of Rent, endlessly generous and hopeful, caring and sensitive. All mourn his death, which compels the other characters to look at their lives and choices. That Angel’s death enables the other characters to learn about themselves replicates a typical (tired) trope in which an Other (usually a person of color or a person with a disability) aids in the self-actualization of the principal character. Also, Collins and Angel have the most loving and healthy relationship, which the musical needs to eliminate so as not to valorize the gay male couple above all else. In addition, Joanne and Maureen sing a lively number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” but the musical doesn’t take their relationship seriously. Maureen is presented as a fickle, emotionally abusive, yet irresistible lover (Joanne and Mark’s duet, “The Tango Maureen”) and a less-than-accomplished artist (her “The Cow Jumped over the Moon” is a parody of performance art).15 In contrast, Mimi

At the core of Lacanian ethics if therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why the act opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).