Abstract
As a reviewer I should probably admit that I arrived at The Tragedy of Heterosexuality already convinced of the title thesis. Straightness has long struck me as utterly lamentable; so much so that I often joke with friends that it should be boycotted. In actuality, Ward’s object of analysis is not heterosexuality per se but rather “straight culture,” which she approaches from a lesbian feminist perspective. Hoping to flip the script of queer suffering and happy heterosexuality, Ward urges us to shift attention away from “what is sad about being gay to what is even sadder about being straight” (p. 3). Or, as she later puts it in one of many eminently quotable lines: “It’s not that it ‘gets better’ for queer people; it’s that heterosexuality is often worse” (p. 6). No doubt Ward is liable to encounter a certain defensiveness if not indignation among straight and queer readers alike. For an author whose previous works have caused controversy, this is not unfamiliar territory.
Ward’s main empirical focus and the subject of the book’s first two chapters is what she terms the “heterosexual repair industry,” encompassing a wide range of instruction and advice promising to aid heterosexual women and men in the management of their intimate relationships. Her survey material—from 20th century marriage manuals to contemporary pickup artist training events—provides a ready catalogue of all that is dull, disappointing, and diminishing about heterosexuality in the United States today. She shows that the purpose of this industry is to reconcile straight people to the inevitable frustrations of a relational structure always already mired in animosity and antagonism.
One of Ward’s key concepts is that of the “misogyny paradox,” which she diagnoses as a central dysfunction of straight culture. Describing the patterning of heterosexual male desire in a society that systematically devalues and debases women, this term gives expression to an all too familiar dynamic that has nevertheless lacked a precise referent. Its relevance will be immediately apparent to anyone who has ever witnessed the readiness with which men’s desire for women can give way to their abuse of women, flirtation shading into threat, romance spilling into coercion, love becoming brutality. For Ward, such dynamics—what she once understood as “feminist problems”—are better regarded as “straight problems.” Explaining this change in emphasis, she argues: “the tragedy of heterosexuality is about men’s control of women, but it is also about straight women’s and men’s shared romantic and erotic attachments to an unequal gender binary, or to the heteroerotic fantasy of binary, biologically determined, and naturally hierarchical gender oppositeness” (p. 22).
A third empirical chapter concerns queer alienation from and aversion to straight culture. Using “witness testimony” collected via friends and acquaintances, Ward illuminates a spectrum of “queer feelings about straight problems” (p. 122). A common concern is the “straightness” of straight culture: its predictable rhythms and tired rituals, and its lack of imagination and creativity. This script not only allows for but seems to presume a certain amount of injury and indignity for women and girls, who are hailed “into heterofemininity through a collective performance of resilience” (p. 137). Of course, problems can arise in relationships of all kinds. But, as Ward notes, queer relationships generally do not take for granted the kind of banal indifference and everyday enmity that so often characterize heterosexual coupledom. It is here that the value of Ward’s conceptualization of heterosexuality as “tragedy” comes to the fore: heterosexuality is a genre and as such has generic conventions—predetermined rules, canned gestures, and coordinated stage cues. The misery it so often induces is not incidental, but is instead an integral part of the drama.
In a final chapter, Ward resists simply “offering queerness to straight people”—as so many others have done—and instead endeavors “to come at straightness with an interest in actualisation, rather than undoing” (p. 157). From here she makes the case for “deep heterosexuality,” based in “strong bonds of identification and deep mutual regard, rather than oppositeness and hierarchy” (p. 158). This argument is chiefly directed at heterosexual men, on the basis that many “do not actually like the very people they have claimed as their object of desire and affection” (p. 158). She cites lesbian feminists as providing a kind of blueprint in this regard, and proposes to “offer these gifts to straight men” (p. 160).
Leaving aside the question of how many lesbian feminists actually embody this ideal, there is the inevitable question of whether or not straight men are interested in such gifts. We might also ponder precisely how such an endowment could be arranged; does Ward have in mind some kind of alternative heterosexual repair industry, perhaps one administered by queer women such as herself? Therein lies the rub for critical men and masculinity studies scholars, many of whom are preoccupied with precisely these issues: how, why, when, and where do heterosexual men embrace more progressive gender and sexual politics? Sharply written and decidedly irreverent, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality re-enlivens an unfinished debate, this time with an acceptance that while heterosexuality isn’t going away, its story might be re-written.