Feminist Theory

Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience
Adrienne Rich

Initial questions: 

Why doesn’t the search for love and tenderness lead to women?  Why did species survival, impregnation and emotional/erotic relationships become so rigidly identified with one another?  Why were “violent strictures” found to be necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men?
 

What violent strictures?  What other things is she assuming/revealing in asking these questions??
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

She is revealing some of the assumptions of Radical Feminism

     That patriarchy has been imposed upon women by force

         Through physical and sexual violence

Through a system of laws that empowers men, gives them the right to property, to women’s bodies, to their wives and children as their property

Through barring them from the means of supporting themselves, through practicing their own professions, ownership of property, etc.

That in the absence of the violence and systems of control imposed upon women, relations among women (and men) would be more loving, authentic, equal

 

Rich’s 8 Characteristics of Male Power (she extrapolates on these, derived by Kathleen Gough in “The Origin of the Family”)

1) to deny women their own sexuality [through what means???]

2) or to force (male sexuality) upon them [means??]

3) to command or exploit their labor to control their produce [means??]

4) to control or rob them of their children [means??]

5)  to confine them physically and prevent their movement [means??]

6)  to use them as objects in male transactions [means??]

7) to cramp their creativeness [means??]

8)  to withhold from them large areas of society’s knowledge and attainment [means??]
 
 

 
What is lesbian existence for Rich? 

 

**continuum of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.

Lesbian existence as an attack on male right of access to women. An act of resistance.
 

**To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to erase female reality once again.

 

Lesbianism: “a profoundly female experience”

“Just as the term parenting serves to conceal the particular and significant reality of being a parent who is actually a mother, the term gay may serve the purpose of blurring the very outlines we need to discern, which are of crucial value for feminism and for the freedom of women as a group.”

 

Women need to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself;

 
Do women turn to women out of hatred for men??

 

No.
 
 

Why is this an important, powerful myth??

 

 

**Because it keeps men in power by demonizing women, especially powerful women, those who don’t need men