The reason why I prefer heterosexism is that, like the word sexism, it's intended to capture the _structural_ operations of this particular oppression. It's not some culturally induced fear (phobia) that is to be gotten rid of through proper education (which is the hallmark of a liberal approach to political theory). Rather, it's a phenomenon that manifests itself at the micro, meso, and macorlevels of social organization and, thus, demands solutions that address the issue at those levels. I pointed Brian to a link which quotes me as saying this, which I think is an example of the interaction between the micro and macrolevel operation of heterosexism, enacted in a specific meso-level social organization,
^^^^^^ CB: Yes, I understand the "ism" over the "phobia". My problem is with putting heterosexuality in the same category as capitalism, male supremacy or racism, structurally, even by analogy.
The first thing that always comes to mind is that sexual liberation includes heterosexual liberation from the long history of religious and other sexual repressions. So, when one uses a term - heterosexism - that stigmatizes heterosexual sex, even if indirectly, I put you in the same bag with the church. Different motive, but same result: contributing to sexual repression.
I am in favor of celebrating and "improving" sex between women and men. The main critique and change of it has to do with male supremacy, in an overall feminist program. That's a liberation movement too, nothing against gay liberation, just I don't see subordinating heterosexual liberation to homosexual liberation (!)
Sex acts are mainly about people having orgasms. A variety of "aesthetics" trigger or help different people have orgasms. The conventional hetero aesthetic preference is ok politically.
What verges on a contradiction in this is that for heterosexuals to discard prejudice against other people having gay sex does not mean heterosexuals have to discard their own subjective aversion to sex with the same sex. It is politically ok for heteros to have an "ick" sensation at the idea of same sex sex. Ergo, heterosex can be celebrated and affirmed fully by hets, and same is not politically incorrect.
Secondly, I haven't quite specified and "quantified" it, but the history and present of oppression of same-sex is not of the same order of magnitude as the big three, a mon avis.
I think it is interesting that you are part of a trend to declare strongly for lesbian/gay by choice. This of course is more logically consistent with social constructionist theory. My guess would be that some people arrive at it more socially constructed and some people arrive at it more from biological tendencies , though all are a mixture of both, just in different "proportions". Same would be true of heterosexuality.
I have to think the historic gay ideological critique of natural causes of sexuality is a response to the old characterization of homosexuality as "unnatural". Gay ideologists, like Foucault, went overboard and thrw out natural cause explanations of EVERYTHING in fighting the claim that het is natural and homo unnatural. Marx didn't reject attention to all natural causes of human conduct. He emphasized that capitalism isn't just "natural", but postmods overgeneralize this to no "essentialist" explanations of anything.
Social constructionists who want to claim Marx have much trouble with the sexually essentialist passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There he suggests that sexual relations between women and men _are_, have been in human history, a locus of a special unity of the social and the natural.
That we are especially cultural ( social and socially constructed) in general, not just with respect to sex, does not mean that culture utterly obliterates or overcomes all of our natural instincts.
^^^^^^^^
an
elist:
[W]hy do glbt activists feel compelled to frame their sexuality in what is, ultimately, a het[ero]sexist frame in which one's sexuality is natural, biological, given, outside of the social? Why do they feel that this is the only way to present the issue on the lit they write-especially for PFLAG, an organization addressing itself to people who aren't glbt, who they think they have to convince of the "okay-ness" of their loved one's "sexuality"
because, by gum, it's the only way they can be? Why is this? Why this political strategy that asks for 'acceptance' and tolerance rather than a fucking change in a social system that demands that sexuality be framed in this way, as either/or. AND
i can't recall which [email] list it was, but a woman wrote in to a list recently, obviously a bit confused and uncertain, looking for some help.
she wrote something about wondering if she wanted to become a lesbian, detailed her "history" and reasons why she was thinking about lately-why she was starting to allow herself to explore her feelings re a friend, but not really sure because she did enjoy being with men, and wasn't sure how she'd feel about a "relationship" as opposed to the obvious interest she had in having sex with a woman she was interested in, blah blah. you know the rave. i unsubscribed because the avalanche of responses was something on the order of "you don't just decide you want to be a lesbian" "women who are bi-curious make me sick" "you're just horny and want to get laid."
"don't use another woman because you want to be 'cool'" and "lipstick lesbians are hip these days" ad nauseum. i unsubbed after the 100th flame of this poor woman. seems to me that the dominant response was to demand that sexuality be framed as natural, a force that exerts a power over you beyond all reason, ad nauseum . . . queerness or whatever you want to call it has to fall into the same patterns as het normativity-you either are or you aren't and no room for anything in between or anything that doesn't follow the het/homo by nature reasoning.
-Kelley, in a post to the LBO-Talk mailing list (Left Business Observer), February 7, 2000