HETERONORMATIVITY

The term critically defines all discourses, practices and policies that make heterosexuality look natural, internally coherent, and morally superior to any other sexual identity, orientation, and behaviour. Although the debate on the normativity of heterosexuality already took place in the 1980s through the involvement of the feminist philosophers Monique Wittig in France and Adrienne Rich in the United States, Michael Warner first coined the term in the early 90s within the field of gender, queer and feminist studies. Then Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler re-articulated it. The term is now applied across many hard and social sciences.  

The term assumes gender and sexual binary as seemingly natural, as much as natural are considered traditional gender roles. Heteronormativity and (hetero)sexism are mostly equivalent, the first referring to a universalised ideal to which everyone must adhere, the second to the discrimination that this imperative engenders. Heteronormativity is usually invoked by critical scholars, activists and progressive politicians when political action based on the sex/gender binary is taken against lesbian and gay rights, let alone the rights of intersex, transvestites, transexual, and transgender people – meaning people who do not fall within the sex binary, people whose appearance (clothes, make up, hair) is considered as not respecting the sex assigned to them at birth, people whose sex (assigned at birth) was changed through surgery, and finally people whose gender does not coincide with the sex assigned at birth.  

Nevertheless, a new shift is occurring within populist far-right and extreme-right movements and parties, which now claim to recognise sexual minorities—provided that they confine their sexualities and identities to the private sphere and do not challenge the notion of the nation as inherently heterosexual. As a result, heteronormativity persists, either when LGBTQ+ individuals are compelled to lead a “double life” or when they conform to heteronormative gender roles in their private lives, regardless of how openly they assert their LGBTQ+ identities. In fact, heteronormativity being as pervasive as any other social norm that regulates social reproduction and societal structures, it is interiorized and reproduced in the public and in the private sphere alike. More recently, heteronormativity has been rethought within critical thinking (postcolonial, decolonial, critical race studies, Black feminisms) in order to map its intersections with other systems of oppression – namely those inherited from colonialism and slavery – including current border regimes. 

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