gltb fufqueer futur

 https://www.euronews.com/culture/2021/01/21/podcast-coming-out-a-dilemma-for-homosexuals-in-patriarchal-societies

Compulsory Sexuality For Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay People https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

The Dworkin quote above also suggests that compulsory heterosexuality might be incompatible with non-heterosexual communities. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Patriarchy is flexible, adapting to fit its circumstances, and many non-heterosexual spaces have taken this “gotta fuck” mandate and created their own versions.

Those revisions could be described in non-hetero, homo/bi-normative terms such as “men gotta fuck men”, “women gotta fuck women”, “people gotta fuck people”, etc. But patriarchy can’t be prised from our minds or bedrooms that easily. It’s MacKinnon again, this time in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, who supplies us with a pithy definition of the male-supremacist meaning of ‘fuck’:

Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Male-supremacist heterosexuality is more than just the man-woman relationship – at its most basic, it is the subject-object relationship. To understand how compulsory heterosexuality affects non-heterosexual spaces, we must ask who are the subjects of the fuck and who are the objects of the fuck? Are the subjects masculine or assertive or enthusiastic or popular or experienced or on top or otherwise privileged? Are the objects feminine or passive or reluctant or unpopular or new to the scene or on the bottom or otherwise marginalised?

There is a reason why heterosexual people are obsessed with asking similar-sex couples, “So, who’s the man?” They want to know who fucks and who, as it were, is fucked. Because sex is power – specifically, the exercise of male power upon women – then any time power is exercised, it invokes the spectre of male and female roles. When sex is defined by power, determine who has the power in the fuck and who does not, or who gains social status in the fuck and who loses it, and you will discover who must compulsorily be fucked by whom.

This is one way in which heterosexuality can be said to be ‘compulsory’ even to non-heterosexual people. Another is the way in which non-heterosexual sexualities may be coopted into the service of male right of sexual access, as described by Kathy Miriam in Toward a Phenomenology of Sex-Right: Reviving Radical Feminist Theory of Compulsory Heterosexuality:

… it’s important to note the extent to which lesbianism itself has been refigured by heteronormativity today as central to the heterosexual norm, that is, for the pleasure of men… there is a great likelihood that today, the sexual agency of lesbianism, rather than simply foreclosed by heteronormativity, is refigured in terms of men’s access to women.

(Miriam goes on to give several examples of this, which can be found in her article, but are not the main point of this piece.)

The impact of compulsory heterosexuality on bisexual people was covered in a special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on “Bisexuality and Queer Theory: Intersections, Diversions, and Connections”, in the article, “Compulsory Bisexuality?: The Challenges of Modern Sexual Fluidity”, in which researcher Breanne Fahs found that:

Women frequently reported that they felt pressure to accommodate their male partner’s sexual fantasies that they engage sexually with other women; further, all of the young women reported that they were aware of, and had witnessed, some form of performative bisexuality either on television or in person. Pressure to perform as bisexual appeared for heterosexual-identified women and for bisexual and lesbian-identified women, though heterosexual women reported more pressure from their sexual partners whereas bisexual and lesbian women reported feeling pressure from men who were strangers and/or nonpartners.

…

Compulsory heterosexuality, however challenged by increasing acceptance of, and performance of, bisexual behavior, is still alive and well. This fact is notable in women’s descriptions of minimizing the significance of their same-sex feelings, attractions, behaviors, and experiences, and it exists when describing the ways in which same-sex eroticism often requires the literal and figurative presence of men in the sexual exchange. Women may engage in same-sex sexual behavior, but this often occurs in the presence of men, with men’s approval, and for men’s sexual arousal. Women are classically heterosexual even while performing as bisexual.

For all queers and other non-heterosexual people, I believe that compulsory heterosexuality is not just a displacement of sexual activity towards heterosexual expression. It is a coupling of sexuality with the “gotta fuck” power structures of heterosexuality which then enables power to be exerted according to those structures, compelling more sexuality than if the coupling did not exist. Queer people are cool if they are “getting some” or “putting out”, and the ‘coolness’ of those two positions derives from the value assigned to men and women participating ‘correctly’ in compulsory heterosexuality.