Retrospective – “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Adrienne Rich
revisiting this landmark essay, one of our many fascinating readings during April — our Feminism and Queer Theory month
About the Book
Title: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Author: Adrienne Rich
Genre: Essay
Year of Publication: 1980
Today, the term “comphet” has permeated the cultural consciousness— or at least, within queer circles— enough that it’s the first question encountered by many, many folks (often, those assigned female at birth and hence, socialised as female) who have just begun to question their sexuality. (The most famous instance of it on the Internet, of course, being the Lesbian Masterdoc— passed around ad infinitum to any fledgling sapphic who’s exploring their latent attraction to women.) Women, AFAB, and transfeminine people find themselves contending with this question: when I engage in sexual and romantic relationships with men, is it only because I, as a woman/femme person, am expected to?
After all, when you’re growing up as a girl, everything and everyone around you seems to be telling you how the crux of your existence is to find the man who will be your so-called better half, and thus your happily ever after. It’s the stuff of the fairytales fed to us in our girlhoods, the romcoms we revel in during our adolescence, and the societal pressure that hems us from all sides into the inevitability of marriage in our young adulthood and beyond. Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, even now, is groundbreaking precisely because it dissects this notion of heterosexuality as a natural consequence of womanhood. Instead, in four parts, the essay critically examines heterosexuality in the context of the political institution that Rich recognises it to be.
I. Heterosexuality as the “Normal”
When one thinks of womanhood, or the being of a woman, it is often in relation to woman’s heterosexual relations with man. The genderedness of women, therefore, gets tangled up in their (assumed) dominant heterosexuality. What is womanhood, then, when the men they define themselves in relation to are taken out of the equation? For a long time, the question itself was so inconceivable that various feminist writings of the time completely failed to take stock of it, as Adrienne Rich points out. And when a potential answer to the question arose— in the form of lesbians— all kinds of derogatory commentary were spun to explain this inexplicable phenomenon, a woman that doesn’t feel the need to centre men in any of the usual ways. The stereotype of the bitter, man-hating lesbian is, of course, a perennial one.
We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomies which prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole: “good” versus “bad” marriages; “marriage for love” versus arranged marriage; “liberated” sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape…
Adrienne Rich challenges the then-prevalent notion that if it were not for gender inequality, in a world where “men are nonoppressive and nurturing”, most women would choose heterosexuality as their default. Other entirely fulfilling modes of sexuality and interpersonal relations are available to women, and not merely as a ‘second place’ to relationships with men. As an extension of this thesis, Rich advocates passionately for lesbian existence to be considered in its own right; to neither reduce it to the “mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations”, nor define it merely in terms of a lack of attraction to men but by its centring of other women.
II. The Enforcement of Heterosexuality
Even if if heterosexuality is the dominant sexual preference in women, Adrienne Rich writes, it does not make sense “why species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other, and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.” In other words, women possess a profound capacity to share emotional intimacy (even if not sexually). Yet, they actively turn away from these relationships to emphasise their heterosexual relations with men. This is despite the fact that it is their fellow women they turn to in the face of the breakdown of their heterosexual relationships. Why is this so?
Sex is equated with attention from the male, who is charismatic though brutal, infantile, or unreliable. Yet it is the women who make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each other.
Rich exposes how various social, economic, and political establishments work in tandem to uphold the institution of heterosexuality— ranging from the idealisation of heterosexual relations in popular culture, to the establishment of heterosexual marriage as, often, women’s only path to ensuring economic stability. By extension, all other kinds of relationships that are not heterosexual are seen as ‘less than’. By exposing the intricate machinations behind this seemingly seamless facade, Rich raises the question: is a system that needs to be so actively enforced (women’s heterosexual relations) and policed (women’s relations outside of heterosexuality) really the natural order of things, into which women should otherwise proceed as a matter of course?
Even today, years after the historical backdrop against which this essay was written, the predominant and deeply entrenched social and political forces in India are still working to enforce heterosexuality— under the guise of morality and culture, which upholds the “sacred nature” of the family unit. Even these heterosexual relationships are policed, with heavy penalties suffered by relationships crossing boundaries of caste and religion, or even outside of marriage. Rich's essay does not include this intersectional analysis for heterosexual relationships, even within the Western context. Nevertheless, it goes to show that heterosexuality is just as much institutionally enforced as it stems from women's individual sexual and romantic preferences.
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 fulfillment.
III. Women Loving Women
The question that haunts Adrienne Rich, who herself embraced her lesbianness late in life, is “how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding”. Rich documents how women have always acknowledged the importance of the other women in their life, even besides their heterosexual relationships; she cites someone who writes, “I am trying to find my strength through women— without my friends, I could not survive.” And yet, due to the compulsion of heterosexuality, women have succumbed to a “doublethink” in which no matter how significant female support networks are to their lives, men are still considered to be the lynchpin around which women’s existence revolves.
If we think of heterosexuality as the natural emotional and sensual inclination for women, lives [outside of] these are seen as deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived. …
… Lesbian existence is also represented as mere refuge from male abuses, rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women.
This is why the very acknowledgement of lesbian existence is significant, as a mode of interpersonal relations that is entirely outside of heterosexuality. However, as Adrienne Rich writes, while “we may first begin to perceive [lesbian existence] as a form of naysaying to patriarchy, an act of resistance”, it is also a celebration of all the roles that women play in each other’s lives— everything that women mean to each other. It's about the richness of passion and emotion that can exist in relationships between women— a depth that often goes unexpressed in heterosexual relationships, or is disregarded in non-heterosexual relationships. Rich proposes the term lesbian continnum to denote the full spectrum of what she calls “women-identified experiences”— expanding beyond lesbian sexuality to encompass even the relationships that self-identified heterosexual women have with each other.
IV. The Future is Femme
Whether they identify as heterosexual, lesbian, or otherwise, compulsory heterosexuality has caused “an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other.” Lesbian women, in particular, find themselves suffering from the double whammy of compulsory heterosexuality and plain old misogyny— from their lack of economic and cultural privilege in comparison to men, to being forced to masquerade as heterosexual in their personal and professional lives. This is another reason why it is imperative to establish lesbians’ political existence in its own right, instead of merely treating their presence as a complement to that of male homosexuals.
United in their common goal— women’s liberation from the patriarchy— women share various emotional intimacies with each other, whether in lesbian relationships or otherwise. In undertaking these intimacies more consciously, women can more effectively de-center men in their existences, and thus make more effective use of the energy they otherwise invested in upholding their perceived heterosexuality— to organise, to agitate, to resist.
[While] women may, indeed, must be one another’s allies, mentors, and comforters in the the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other’s company and attraction to each other’s minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others’ strengths.
In essence, Adrienne Rich makes a compelling case for how the heterosexual mode of being has come to be so entrenched, particularly in women’s existences— so much so that to be a woman is taken to also be heterosexual and engage in primary relationships with men. What is more stunning is how this is relevant even today, with bisexual women and even lesbians assuming that they must be heterosexual by default, and having to undergo a painful process of unlearning and de-centering men in order to embrace their sapphic attraction. In this, Rich succeeds admirably and effectively in putting across what she set out to convey.
However, Rich seems to invalidate women/femme people’s autonomy in acting upon their attractions to men— even bisexual people, whose attraction to men is just as much part of their sexuality as their attractions to other genders— as well as the more diverse spectrum of gender that we’re familiar with today. It has to be noted that Rich has responded to the latter criticisms of her essay, acknowledging that her intent was only to encourage women to question the pervasiveness of heterosexuality in their lives, and its status as the “normal” (i.e., heteronormativity).
Moreover, the masculinity that is usually conflated with maleness need not always be a negative force; even lesbian spaces have always been a hub for female masculinities, whether in butch-femme relationships or transmasculine lesbians in general. And although all women have cause to soldier against the patriarchy, as those most directly affected by it, they don’t always share the same aspirations, motivations, or experiences (points raised by an excellent analysis of the same essay here).
This article was meant to be a critical summary of Rich’s original essay, and despite this author’s best efforts, they can’t fully encapsulate the sheer depth and scale of Rich’s ideas and arguments. Hopefully, this has only been even more of an enticement to read the full essay, which can be found here.
About the Event
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence was part of our readings during April 2024, in which we focused on Feminist and Queer Theory. Every week, we read two to three chapters of a collectively chosen book, and meet virtually to discuss. Our current weekly read is Field Guide To Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit, and our upcoming weekly read (starting June 22) is Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, by Micha Frazer-Carroll.
You can also find us on our Instagram page at @ourfeministreadinggroup, where you can keep track of other upcoming events, and sign up to join in on our latest reads.
If you’d like to read more of our thoughts on the books we read and/or want to make sure you never miss an update from Our Feminist Reading Group, click below to subscribe to our Substack!