While I accept the possibility that social theory can affect a profoundly transformative effect on a person’s beliefs, ideas and preconceptions, it has been my experience that such theory is rare. Therefore, it was with no small amount of shock and awe that I found myself deeply moved by Adrienne Rich’s (1980) article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”*.
The premise of Rich’s theory is deceptively simple: All women exist on a continuum of female intimacy and bonding. This continuum of “woman-identified experience” (p.648) is normal and natural for women, but it becomes stunted and thwarted by patriarchal systems of socialization. These systems and structures isolate women from each other and push them towards hetronormativity in the service of male power, as evidenced in procreation, property and security. Women, however, are not conscious of the oppression inherent to their sexual choice, however, and therefore deny themselves the full potential richness of a female-centric life.
Given my own preoccupation with ideas of choice, agency and power, I suppose it should not surprise me that I had such a reaction to her work. Because she deals with the issue of women’s awareness (or lack thereof) of the knowledge of their potential for alternate ways of being, her argument strikes me as having a rather Foucaldian slant. Akin to his twinning of the concepts of power/knowledge, Rich seems to be saying that the lack of knowledge of choice itself is what disempowers women. I see a link, too, between knowledge and consciousness in her writing, or a lack thereof in the lives of women. I find this argument persuasive – In the distractions of modern life and the multiple demands to which a woman submits, there is often, sadly, little to help her to understand the nature of her own subjective oppression.
I find that Rich muddies her theoretical waters through her use of the term lesbian, however. At times, she seems to want to reclaim the term from its subordination to an implication of sexuality, in order that she may use it as a sign for a deep and apparent asexual universal bond between women. Yet, at other times, she links it very directly with woman-woman sexuality and buts it up against the term “erotic”. Juxtapose this ambiguity or contradiction with her argument about a pervasive socially-ingrained revulsion towards sexual lesbianism in many people, and I can now better understand my fellow classmates’ strong initial reactions and widespread rejection of her central thesis in our classroom discussion of Rich’s work. I see now how and why it centred around the term lesbian.
Also, as provocative as Rich’s argument seems, and despite her token discussions of particular ethnicities and their experiences of womanhood, her argument still seems overly universalistic. In her desire to generalize her argument out to include all women, she ignores the other determinants at work in “sex colonization” (p644). Finally, at times, her argument has the texture and tone of a manifesto, evident whether she is calling women to bestir themselves to action against hegemonic heterosexuality, pointing out what is wrong with existing feminist theory or simultaneously exalting and bemoaning the courage it takes to be a self-defined lesbian in a patriarchal world.
Despite these criticisms, I still find myself profoundly affected by her ideas and argument. The article led me face-to-face, as it were, with the unconscious blindness inherent in my own apparent heterosexuality. While I found many passages noteworthy in this article, the passage that stuck out for me in particular was Rich’s discussion of the imposition of a female “double life”:
Nor can it be assumed that women…who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly female emotional and passional [sic] world, “preferred” or “chose” heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal”, and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty and fulfilment (p.654)
I see much of myself in this passage. And so I am left questioning myself. Given my own troubled background, given my long history of struggle between wanting to stop the bullying and just be normal versus wanting to be able to walk my own self-defined life path and normality be damned, between wanting to rejoice in being female and not trusting my femininity to get me what I want out of life, have I been living the double life of which Rich speaks? I have always prided myself on my own ability to live a conscious life and be aware of the reasons and factors that have influenced my being. But how conscious have I been, really? Where am I on the continuum? Given my life choices to date, am I even on the continuum?
Rich’s theory has affected me. In doing so, she has perhaps fulfilled her ultimate intent behind the article: to sound a clarion call to women everywhere that jolts them into awareness of the extent of their unconscious duplicity in their own sexual submission. I hear that call. I am aware now. If social theory is truly about affecting social change in any degree, Rich’s theory is a compelling example of just how possible that can be.
*Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.
Signs, 5(4), 631-660.
