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Straights:
Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted
Culture
James Joseph Dean
“Chapter 1: Thinking Straight:
Gender, Race, and
(Anti)homophobias”
Research Questions and Design
• Reversing the focus on how lesbian women’s and gay men’s
coming-out stories affect and change straight men and
women and the larger American society, Dean asks,
instead, how straight men’s and women’s attitudes and
actions accommodate, resist, or paradoxically support gay
equality yet remain homophobic in post-closeted contexts.
• That is, how do straights project and establish their straight
identity status in everyday life in post-closeted contexts?
• And how do gender (masculinities and femininities) and
race (blackness and whiteness) reshape and change the
meaning of straight identities?
Defining Heterosexualities
• Heterosexual identities need to be situated within the
context of the rise of an out and visible lesbian, gay, and
queer culture. The concept of a heterosexual identity aims
to capture both one’s sense of self and the group that one
identifies with on its basis. In its simplest form, a
heterosexual identity is constructed by individuals taking on
the attribution heterosexual or straight themselves.
• Analytically, heterosexualities are configurations of practice
and discourse that refer to the identity category
heterosexuals and generally, but not necessarily, align with
sexual behaviors and desires orientated to the other—as
opposed to the same—gender.
Defining Heterosexualities
• However, an individual may claim a heterosexual identity but
engage in same-sex behaviors and experience same-sex desires.
• The fluidity and situational character of sexualities mean that
individual factors (e.g., a person-based definition of sexual desire),
social contexts (e.g., college life, a prison term, employment in the
porn industry), and historical events (e.g., second-wave feminism)
shape and are shaped by heterosexualities
• This study of heterosexualities is less about sexual behaviors and
desires and more about the identity practices or the words and
deeds that straights use in social interactions and situations to
project themselves as straight.
• For example, the traditional practice of wearing a wedding band,
claiming a marital status as a husband or wife, and simply
expressing sexual or romantic interest in the other gender are acts
meant to indicate a straight status.
Key Sociological and Sexualities
Studies Concepts
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Straight identities are established through social norms that make up our society’s
social structures, such as government bureaucracies, economic systems, and legal
orders.
These social structures, along with our social institutions, such as marriage, the
family, schools and colleges, corporations, political parties, and the armed forces,
create both individual and institutional privileges (unearned advantages,
resources, and rights given without any effort on an individual’s part) that favor
straight persons, relations, marriages, and families over nonstraight ones.
This creates what is referred to as heteronormativity (the privileging of
heterosexuality as normal, natural, and right over homosexuality) in daily life and
social institutional settings.
Living in a heteronormative society, heterosexual individuals are accorded
heterosexual privilege. This privilege is often invisible. It is enacted by the view
that heterosexuality is “normal,” social-psychologically healthy, and complex, as
well as through entitlements to “first-class” citizenship. The institutional
legitimation of heterosexual identities is the linchpin of its hierarchical dominance
over homosexualities. For example, heterosexual families are automatically viewed
as better, healthier, and more “normal” than lesbian and gay families.
Heterosexual identities
• Heterosexual identity, though, varies in strength for
individuals: some individuals realize that heterosexual
is merely an ascriptive category that one falls into,
while others have a strong investment in the
identity in their daily interactions. Paradoxically,
individuals with normative identities (e.g.,
heterosexuals, whites, men) often experience the
sense that they lack an identity since they serve as the
standard by which others (e.g., nonheterosexuals,
nonwhites, women) are measured and marked by their
difference (Connell 1995; Perry 2002; Richardson
1996).
The Social Co-construction of
Sexualities and Gender
• Straight identities, like sexual identities in
general, are always and already constructed in
part through gender norms and identities.
This is because gender is a routine,
methodical, and recurring accomplishment of
daily life, and it is central to being viewed as
an intelligible human being (West and
Zimmerman 1987; Glick and Fiske 1999).
The Social Co-construction of
Sexualities and Gender
• Gender norms and conventional displays construct and reinforce
straight identity statuses, and heteronormativity affirms sex and
gender binary conceptions of male/female, masculine/feminine,
and man/woman as opposite but complementary pairings,
although lesbians and gay men are increasingly embodying
traditional gender norms and presentations while straights are
taking on nontraditional gender conventions, complicating the use
of gender displays as clear indicators of sexual identities.
• While a gendered social order enforces the construction of men’s
and women’s gender identities as binary and supposedly “natural,”
complementary opposites, heteronormativity establishes, sustains,
and bolsters a gender order where men and women are meant only
for each other. This ideological construction naturalizes straight
sexual relations, reproduction, and identities as outside social
norms and historical time.
Modern and Postmodern
Forms of Power
• In postmodern societies, however, power is neither simply
group-based (e.g., heterosexuals over homosexuals) nor
only the effect of macro-social structures (e.g., economics
or the state) on a population.
• Although this form of modern juridical power, defined by
the sociologist Max Weber as “the chance of a man or of a
number of men to realize their own will in a communal
action, even against the resistance of others who are
participating in the action,” still operates in societies today,
it fails to conceptualize the more refined, slippery, and
invisible techniques through which power circulates as part
of the micro-processes of identity formations.
Postmodern Power
• Following the French theorist Michel Foucault
(1978), micro-power politics of social identities
are viewed as constructed through norms,
practices, discourses, and institutions that escape
the machinations of any one group of people.
Micro-power processes are normalizing and
coextensive with social identity formation.
• Historicizing Foucault, though, is important, as
the macro form of juridical power that structured
homosexual life existed from the 1930s to 1960s.
Foucault’s thesis
• The effect of the repressive closet was not to eliminate
homosexuals but to contain and overwhelmingly
stigmatize their existence. It formed a homosexual self
based on anxieties of exposure, shame, and selfloathing. Ironically, this repressive power of
containment and stigmatization led to the
development of gay social worlds that would grow into
powerful social movements that “reversed” the
discourse of their stigmatization into a politics and
discourse of rights, recognition, and visibility.
• Symbolically, the Stonewall riots of 1969 signal the
historical triumph of homosexuals as they reversed the
discourse of stigma.
Foucault’s thesis
• This idea is shown by Foucault in the following oftenquoted passage in his book The History of Sexuality,
Volume One (1978, 101),
“There is no question that the appearance in nineteenthcentury psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole
series of discourses on the species and subspecies of
homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic
hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance of social
controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made
possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse:
homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand
that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in
the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it
was medically disqualified.”
From Foucault’s Normalizing Power to
Butler’s Performative Identities
• This reverse discourse that explains the normalization of
homosexuality does not mean unregulated freedom
• Normalizing power builds on the sociohistorical conditions it
inherits. In a post-Stonewall context, this means the further
entrenchment of the view that sexuality is an essential, core part of
one’s self-identity. Sexual desire and identity are consolidated into
the master categories of a binary divide: homosexuality and
heterosexuality. Sexual desire is now seen as organizing not only
one’s choice of a partner but a wide range of aspects unrelated to
sexual desire, ranging from one’s personality and taste in cultural
products like clothing styles and grooming habits to leisure
activities and occupational pursuits
• Following Foucault, the philosopher Judith Butler (1990, 1992,
2004) argues that the notion of identity as the container of
liberation is a ruse of normalizing power.
Butler’s Performative Identities
• In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity, Butler (1990) argues that identity
performances are recurring and accomplished
processes of daily life but are also deeply
constructed by the effects of male domination
and heteronormativity.
• Butler’s performative theory argues for seeing
identities as the “stylized repetition of acts . . . .
[that constitute] sustained social performances”
and that come into being through the very acts of
the performance (1990, 140-1).
Criticisms of Butler’s Theory
• Some scholars contend that Butler’s performative theory
underemphasizes the contextual and relational dimensions
of identity performances.
• In her book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex
Trafficking in Tokyo, Rhacel Parreñas (2011) analyzes the
gender performances of Filipina transgender women
hostesses to show that their performances as women
require recognition by their Japanese male customers or
other transgender men.
• Similarly sociologist Jane Ward (2010) argues that queer
femmes do the gender labor of being “the girl” in their
relationships with female to male (FtM) transmale partners
and establish his masculine performance as legible through
“forgetting” his girlhood past
Straight Identity and Queer Theory
• This book examines how straight men and women talk
about acts of gender and sexuality to establish their
own identity performances as well as those of lesbians
and gay men.
• Queer theorists have brought into analytical view the
importance of shifting the study of sexuality “from
explaining the modern homosexual to questions of the
operation of the hetero/homosexual binary, from an
exclusive preoccupation with homosexuality to a focus
on heterosexuality as a social and political organizing
principle, and from a politics of minority interest to a
politics of knowledge and difference” (Seidman 1996,
9).
Queer Theory and Heterosexualities
• Queer theory makes clear the importance of focusing
on the social construction of heterosexualities as not
simply behaviors but as a set of identity practices in
relation to nonheterosexualities.
• Heterosexual identities are multiple and variable, and
irreducible to the social system that enforces
heterosexuality across society.
• Through solidarity and alliance with LGBTQ persons
and issues, heterosexuals can challenge homophobia,
refuse heterosexual privilege, and promote respect,
recognition, and rights for LGBTQ identities and lives
The New Sociology of
Heterosexualities
• In White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in
Popular Culture, Chrys Ingraham (1999) argues that
weddings and marriages show that heterosexuality is a
ritualized cultural practice that creates rules for
behavior, privileging heterosexuals economically and
culturally
• Similarly, Amy Best (2000), in Prom Night, shows how
the prom is a high-status event encouraging youth to
practice a ritual that fashions masculine and feminine
selves through scripts of romance, dating, and public
recognition of the heterosexual couple as the idealized
form
Psychoanalytic Sociology on
Heterosexualities
• Psychoanalytic sociologists maintain that
masculinity often acts as the bridge between
gender practices defined as active and aggressive,
and a heterosexuality that is by definition maledominant and active (Chodorow 1998).
• The sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy
Chodorow argues that heterosexual men’s
homophobia partly centers on “men not being
men and women not being with men” (1998, 4).
Psychoanalytic Sociology on
Heterosexualities
• Psychoanalytic theories of the formation of girls’ identities
in childhood also help to explain some of the persisting
patterns sociologists document among straight women.
• Feminine selves, they argue, are generally less defensive,
are more porous in their establishment of ego boundaries,
and use merging with others to connect and create
relationships (Chodorow 1978, 1999; Corbett 2009; Gilligan
[1982] 1993).
• For example, these social-psychological patterns can be
seen in straight women’s more emotionally elaborate and
physically tactile displays of affection with female friends
(Felmlee 1999).
Straight Identities in Post-Closeted
Culture
• Examining the changing status of heterosexuality in post-closeted
contexts, sociologist Steven Seidman (2002) explores how young
heterosexuals, born between 1970 and 1980, are contending with
the increased visibility of gays in the 1990s.
• He argues that gay visibility is making young heterosexuals more
self-conscious of their own heterosexualities. Social interaction with
gay individuals, he finds, erodes the presumption of heterosexuality
for them. The entrenchment of the heterosexual/homosexual
definition as a central cultural binary in America implants
homosexual suspicion and some straights now purposefully flag
their straight identity.
• Seidman’s work suggests important themes, it does not examine
how race and gender shape the meanings and enactments of
straight identities. By focusing on young adults, he also does not
capture a range of straight identities across age groups and life
course situations.
Gay and Lesbian Identities and the Rise
of a Post-Closeted Culture
• Over the last third of the twentieth century and beginning
decades of the twenty-first century, Americans have seen
the decline of virulent stereotypes of lesbian and gay
images and the rise of their visibility and more positive
depictions in popular media forms.
• In All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America, the
sociologist Suzanna Walters (2001) argues that the new gay
visibility of the 1990s must be understood as situated
within the context of capitalist commercialism and
mainstream straight culture’s new interest in gay life. For
her, TV programming represents the most illustrative case
in the shift from invisibility to unprecedented visibility in
1990s popular culture.
Gay and Lesbian Identities and the Rise
of a Post-Closeted Culture
• In Beyond the Closet: The Social Transformation of Gay and Lesbian
Life, Seidman argues that by the mid-1990s, many of the gays and
lesbians he interviewed were no longer “making life-shaping
decisions to avoid exposure or suspicion. They may still conceal
their sexuality from some people or in some situations and they
may still struggle with shame and fear,” (2002, 63) but this struggle
does not define their lives, force them to go back into the closet, or
create the need for a double life.
• Others find a visible rise in LGBTQ representations by late 70s and
into the 80s and 90s. Sociologist Joshua Gamson (1998), in his book
Freaks Talk Back, explains that TV talk shows allowed and continue
to allow LGBTQ individuals to exercise a voice and degree of agency
absent from other TV genres.
• He shows that talk shows exhibit, exploit, but nonetheless portray
the rarely seen racial (nonwhite) and class (non–middle-class)
diversities of the LGBTQ community.
Gay and Lesbian Identities and the Rise
of a Post-Closeted Culture
• Wayne Brekhus (2003), in Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay
Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity, finds that many
suburban gay men reject a core, primary gay identity, and instead
view being gay as one of many identities. The phenomenon of gay
suburbanites speaks to the larger trends of gays’ integration and
normalization.
• In Straights, Dean asks: how do straight individuals respond to and
negotiate these new post-closeted cultural dynamics and contexts?
• He documents a continuum to map a range of social identity
practices through which straights enact their straight masculine and
feminine identities.
• The continuum captures the multiplicity of practices and stances
that straights use, from homophobic defensive ones to
nonhomophobic and antihomophobic ones and documents the role
race plays in one’s establishment of sexual-gender identity.
Bring in Gender: Straight Masculinities
• Scholars argue that heterosexuality is central to the construction of
dominant masculinities and the ability to claim power, status, and
authority over others (Connell 1987; Kimmel 2005; Pascoe 2007). Raewyn
Connell developed the concept of hegemonic masculinity to theorize the
superordinate form of masculinity that all men must negotiate in enacting
their gender practices (1987, 1995). In theorizing hegemonic masculinity,
masculinity scholars (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 2002; Whitehead and
Barrett 2001) conceptualize masculinity as multiple and hierarchical.
• For instance, the masculine practices of straight men of color as well as
straight working-class men are marginalized for their less valued racial and
class statuses, respectively, but valued for their performances of gender
and sexual normativity.
• Further, the subordination of women and the repudiation of practices
associated with femininity continue to be central to conceptions of
hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Schippers
2007). Straight men similarly invoke homophobic practices to subordinate
gay masculinities as effeminate (Hennen 2008).
Bringing in Gender: Straight
Masculinities
• The concept of hegemonic masculinity captures the
structural relationship between heterosexuality as
dominant and the accompanying homophobic practices
that subordinate homosexuality.
• Debate persists on the relational links between practices of
heterosexual masculinities and homophobia. The
sociologist Michael Kimmel (2005, 2008) argues that the
projection of masculine identity in general is based on
homophobia: “homophobia, men’s fear of other men, is the
animating condition of the dominant definition of
[heterosexual] masculinity in America, [and] the reigning
definition of masculinity is a defensive effort to prevent
being emasculated” (2005, 39).
Straight Masculinities, Homophobias,
and Hegemonic Masculinity
• A problem with this conception of homophobia is that it connects
masculinity to the social construction of heterosexuality so tightly that the
two concepts collapse into one another, with masculinity serving as a
proxy for heterosexuality. This theoretical conflation is understandable: in
practice, many heterosexual men invoke this exact strategy in performing
heterosexual masculinities. That is, straight men often aim to be
conventionally, even exaggeratedly, masculine in their identity
performances as a way to project a straight status.
• In their reformulation of hegemonic masculinity, Connell and
Messerschmidt (2005) state that “the conceptualization of hegemonic
masculinity should explicitly acknowledge the possibility of democratizing
gender relations, of abolishing power differentials, not just of reproducing
hierarchy.”14 Nonetheless, the concept has been used to study the
structural relations of dominant and subordinate masculinities, not
democratizing or inclusive ones (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009).
Bringing in (Anti)homophobias
• Recent scholarship has started to explore the antihomophobic practices of
high school boys (McCormack 2011; McCormack and Anderson 2010) and
college men. For example, Eric Anderson (2005) finds that white college
heterosexual male cheerleaders often become less homophobic when
they befriend gay men on their teams.
• Straight masculinities, then, do not necessarily rely on homophobia for
their establishment.
• That is, one can identify as straight without being homophobic. In
following Arlene Stein’s (2005) argument for understanding homophobias
as plural, where she documents that homophobias are culturally
malleable and may target gender-normative gays, as opposed to gendernonconforming ones, Dean suggests that we approach understanding
antihomophobic practices as plural and constitutive in the establishment
of some straight masculinities (and femininities).
• By antihomophobia, he means practices that aim to counter prejudice and
discrimination against gays and lesbians as well as practices that may
expose, and sometimes renounce, straight status and privilege.
Bringing in Gender: Straight
Femininities
• The concept of straight femininities has not been explicitly
theorized, but in mapping the multiplicity of femininities, gender
theorists have developed concepts to understand the sexual-gender
practices of (straight) women.
• Emphasized femininity is Connell’s concept for practices of
normative femininity that are compliant with hegemonic
masculinity (1987). According to Connell, emphasized femininity
entails “the display of sociability rather than technical competence,
fragility in mating scenes, compliance with men’s desire for
titillation and ego-stroking in office relationships, acceptance of
marriage and childcare as a response to labor-market
discrimination against women” (1987, 187).
• Emphasized feminine practices, however, do not exercise
dominance over other femininities as much as they try to
marginalize them (Schippers 2007).
Bringing in Race: Theorizing Blackness
and Whiteness
• Straight identity practices are always already constructed
through race and a society’s historical racial formations
(Omi and Winant 1994; Ferguson 2004; Moore 2011).
Scholars who focus on black sexualities (Clatterburgh 1997;
Collins [1990] 2000, 2004; hooks 2004; West 1993) argue
that racial and racist discourses tend to construct blackness
as exaggeratedly sexual while leaving whiteness unmarked
and associated with sexual normativity (Ward 2008c).
• In other words, these discourses construct black
heterosexualities as hypersexual, whereas white
heterosexualities are marked as neither hypersexual nor
abnormally asexual but rather as normal, ideal, and neutral.
Bringing in Gender: Straight
Femininities
• At the other end of the spectrum of non-normative
femininity is what the cultural studies scholar Judith
Halberstam (1998) calls female masculinity. Female
masculinity is her term for the masculine practices of
female bodies, sometimes lesbian, sometimes
heterosexual, but always a masculinity practice without
men and male bodies.
• Women often draw on masculine practices such as
masculine body aesthetics, particularly in sports, or
educational capital in school and work to gain social
status, respect and recognition, illustrating the
complicated relationship women have to the variety of
masculinity practices in society.
Bringing in Religion
• Regarding the link between homophobic practices and black
identities, blacks have been documented to be on average more
disapproving of homosexuality than whites (Braumbaugh, Nock,
and White 2008; Lewis 2003; Moore 2010a). Religion plays a role in
this, as 85 percent of blacks define religion as very important in
their lives, compared to 58 percent of whites (Pew 2008).
• However, blacks are more supportive than whites of civil rights for
gays, (Lewis 2003; Yang 1999 ). This book’s findings simultaneously
build upon and challenge these accounts; it analyzes the way race
subtly and complexly shapes straight men’s and women’s reported
homophobic and antihomophobic practices.
• Sociologist Bernadette Barton shows that white evangelical
heterosexuals in Bible Belt states enact strong homophobic
practices; here, whiteness, religion, and region become the key
categories for understanding the salience of a closeted pattern of
existence.
Discussion Questions
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Explain in your own words how modern forms of power work through groups or persons of authority. How do
these groups or persons impose their will over you, whether at work, in school or in encounters with state
agents such as police officers, DMV personnel, or IRS staff?
Similarly, explain in your own words how normalizing postmodern power works through identity categories
such as straight, lesbian, and gay. Do identities come packaged with a set of norms that an individual is
supposed to meet? Who polices these norms on individuals?
Judith Butler thinks of identities as the “stylized repetition of acts . . . . [that constitute] sustained social
performances” and that come into being through the very acts of the performance (1990, 140-141). That is,
she views identity as performative or produced through a series of effects on human bodies, not as roles we
perform. How does society (parents, peers, etc.) impose gender and sexual identities on us in daily life?
Still, sexual-gender identities are situated in social contexts and social relations. How do other individuals
confirm or not confirm one’s enactment of a straight masculinity or femininity? How do gay men and lesbian
women as well as transmen and transwomen enact sexual-gender identities that are confirmed or not
confirmed by other individuals and groups? What is the role of sexual and gender norms of power in the social
construction of sexual-gender identities across the straight/LGBTQ social order?
Define the role of hegemonic masculinity and its key aspects in your own words.
Define the role of emphasized femininity and female masculinity and their key aspects in your own words.
Explain the role of race (blackness and whiteness) in shaping and changing the meaning of straight masculinities
and femininities, according to Dean. How do you agree, disagree or both agree and disagree with his
assessment of racial categories as affecting straight identity performances?
Finally, religion is often thought to be a barrier to tolerating and accepting homosexuality and gay and lesbian
identities and rights. Explain the role of religion in attitudes of those who are anti-gay as well as those who are
gay-friendly and supportive.