Queer Theory 101: Compulsory Heterosexuality

Before There Was The ‘Am I A Lesbian’ Masterdoc, There Was Adrienne Rich

This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Upgrade your subscription for more.

If you can, will you please fill out this survey about subscriber benefits? I would love to hear from you all about what you’re looking for in a newsletter subscription.

If you’re queer and on the internet, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ often shortened to ‘comphet.’ While academic and scholarly theories have often made their way into popular culture, this is especially true on the internet, particularly in spaces like Tumblr and now Tik Tok. 

Today’s popular usage of the term compulsory heterosexuality has stemmed from several different sources, but there’s one source that stands out as being the most influential. The so-called “Am I a Lesbian?” masterdoc was first posted on Tumblr in early 2018, and since then has gone viral on that site and others, with copies frequently being posted and discussed on Twitter, Reddit, and Tik Tok. The 30-page document was created by a Tumblr user who was 19 at the time, and is essentially a checklist of sorts, or as the creator puts it, “a tool of self-reflection.”

The document relies heavily on the theory of compulsory heterosexuality, reassuring readers that compulsory heterosexuality can cause women to feel like they are or should be attracted to men, but that uncovering who you really desire is the key to unlocking your identity. The document lays out the difference between actual attraction to men and the experience of compulsory heterosexuality, as well as listing many common signs that you may have been attracted to women in the past without realizing it. 

Since the masterdoc was first posted, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding it, with many sharing how much it helped them figure out their identity (even Kehlani said it helped her realize she was a lesbian), and others critiquing it for ignoring bisexuality. I’m not interested in unpacking that controversy right now, in part because it would take all day and also because I don’t feel it’s necessary to pick apart the impromptu work of a teenager. Instead, I want to dig into the lexicon used in the document and explore the origin of this terminology. 

Oftentimes, when terms like ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ get popularized, they are used without an understanding of the context in which they emerged. This is not to say that one can’t use scholarly terms without having read the source material, because that’s just not how the evolution of language works. It is true that popularized terms like these are often used inaccurately – I’m thinking especially of the term ‘intersectionality’ here – but that’s not what I’m going after either. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that it can be useful to all of us to gain a better understanding of the origins of popular ideas, understanding both their contextual usage and original intention.¹ 

Contemporary culture, especially contemporary western queer culture, is very inward-focused and centered on the idea of personal identity and individuality. This is not the culture in which the term compulsory heterosexuality emerged. The idea of compulsory heterosexuality was first put forth by poet and lesbian feminist writer Adrienne Rich in her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which was first written in 1978 and published in 1980. Feminists in the 1970s were in fact very interested in the idea of looking within, but there was also a second component to this directive: looking outward. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “the personal is political,” a slogan used by second-wave feminists to describe the ways in which one’s personal experiences are connected to larger structural issues. This is the context in which Rich created her now-famous framework. 

In a forward for the essay, Rich writes that she composed the piece as both a challenge to lesbian erasure and a challenge to heterosexual women to examine their own position within the social order. Rich writes that lesbian existence is “a source of knowledge and power available to women” while heterosexuality is “something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force.” The important distinction here is that Rich’s framework defines heterosexuality as an institution – much like patriarchy – rather than a natural state of being. 

Some critics of the lesbian masterdoc have argued that it is a problematic document because it excludes bisexual and pansexual people. These readers take issue with the fact that the document alleges that their attraction to men could be defined as compulsory heterosexuality, ie. that they have been duped in some way by cultural systems. But that impression is a misreading of the concept (which, to be fair, isn’t extensively defined in the document). The point is that everyone is compelled in some way by compulsory heterosexuality, whether heterosexual or bisexual attraction is something you feel like you “naturally” experience or not. As a very wise professor of mine once said, just because something is socially constructed doesn’t mean it’s not real. 

In the essay, Rich defines two terms that help explain how compulsory heterosexuality functions, and, even more importantly, how it can be resisted. Interestingly enough, neither of these terms have become a part of the cultural lexicon in the way that compulsory heterosexuality has. The first term is lesbian existence, which Rich says “suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence.” As Rich explains in the afterward, this historical presence has also constituted a lineage of knowledge that can be drawn upon. The second term is lesbian continuum. Rich writes that she means for this term “to include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of women-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.” 

Again, thinking about the context in which Rich was writing will help us better understand these ideas. This was a period of time when the idea of “political lesbianism” was being put forth, ie. the idea that someone could identify or align themselves – for political reasons – with lesbians regardless of whether or not they were actually attracted to women. This was also a time when lesbian separatism became popular because some lesbians maintained the only way to live ethically was to live completely outside of the patriarchy. (Rich, it should be noted, was not arguing for separatism here, and in fact, was urging lesbian and straight feminists to work together in solidarity.) The lesbian continuum stands in contrast to a contemporary understanding of lesbianism which sees the category as inherently limiting. 

Rich writes that “if we consider the possibility that all women [...] exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbians or not.” What this framework does is de-center the institution of heterosexuality, with lesbianism instead becoming the organizing force of women’s relationships. From a historical perspective, “it allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance,” Rich writes, which can include figures like Emily Dickinson and Zora Neale Huston. If we dismantle the notion that the institution of heterosexuality is simply a natural force, it allows us to recognize “that women have always resisted male tyranny,” though the methods through which this resistance took place have not always been legible to us as such. 

As the points brought up in the essay are somewhat controversial, Rich is sure to point the reader in what she sees as the productive direction. She argues that historians need to be looking at how the institution of heterosexuality has been “organized and maintained” over time. For those of us who are not historians, Rich argues that the question of whether all heterosexual relationships are inherently “bad” is the wrong one to be asking. “Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives,” Rich writes. 

The notion of choice in regard to sexuality is contentious today, especially because the so-called “born this way” schema has become the most widely-accepted framework of sexual orientation. But Rich maintains that choices – or the lack thereof – are always a part of the equation when it comes to social organizing. Indeed, in the essay’s afterward, Rich broadly defines lesbians as those who “have made their primary erotic and emotional choices for women.” Thus, the point being made here is not that lesbianism is innate and heterosexuality is conscripted, but that women need to be allowed to make their own choices about sexuality and define for themselves what these choices mean to them. It’s not about deciding who to be attracted to, but rather deciding how and when to act and what those actions mean on a personal and a collective level. The notion of the collective is essential here, as institutions cannot be upended by individuals alone. 

What’s significant about Rich’s configuration is that it asks one to look inward and outward, as well as into the past. The idea of the lesbian continuum – which isn’t often brought up in conversations about compulsory heterosexuality – allows for a more expansive and less rigid understanding of solidarity among women, a connection that resists the conditions of compulsory heterosexuality. Rich asks us to look back into history to find examples of such resistance, while also staking a claim to lesbian existence today. Resisting compulsory heterosexuality can expand the possibilities of living for everyone. It’s a project of collective empowerment, which is far more extensive than individual thinking. 

1. Let me know if you are into this kind of thing and want me to write more queer theory explainers – I can think of a number of other topics I could tackle in this way.