heteronormative love

heteronormative

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to the practices and institutions that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality, heterosexual relationships, and traditional gender roles as fundamental and "natural" within society.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

hetero- +‎ normative

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Examples

  • We know that the word 'heteronormative' is bad because people who are good said so.

    Archive 2007-04-01 2007

  • So the bad thing, heteronormative, is now re-nurtured as a good thing, self-actualization.

    Archive 2007-04-01 2007

  • The first condition is that the current crop of malcontents facing the Human Rights Commissions, namely the heteronormative meanies Kate from SDA, Kathy from Five Feet of Fury *, and the pushy Ezra Levant *, all get convicted by the HRC.

    Practical Actuarial Mathematics for the Common Man 2008

  • I'm sure they just forgot to add the word heteronormative on the Grants page, because the way it stands right now, it seems awfully discriminatory.

    Archive 2007-07-01 2007

  • When women give up their souls to the ultimate colonization known as heteronormative existence, they lose their shot at greatness.

    Women's Space 2008

  • And here's where modernity raises its ugly, intrusive head: the opposite of "heteronormative" history is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender history, since all of these categories reference the normal in some way.

    Archive 2009-03-01 Tenured Radical 2009

  • And here's where modernity raises its ugly, intrusive head: the opposite of "heteronormative" history is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender history, since all of these categories reference the normal in some way.

    Teach This Book! Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Part 3 Of A Blogfest) Tenured Radical 2009

  • May I, once again, register my extreme irritation at the term "heteronormative"?

    Archive 2006-11-01 Ann Althouse 2006

  • To the ACLU's secular Jewish policy-makers, Christianity is a tool of majority opression of "victimized minorities" which has to be warred on along with other high agenda bugaboos like firearms ownership, bigots who won't let courts impose gay marriage, and "heteronormative" institutions like the Boy Scouts.

    Protesting minarets. Ann Althouse 2006

  • May I, once again, register my extreme irritation at the term "heteronormative"?

    Swarthmore, conquering heteronormativity with pornographic chalkings. Ann Althouse 2006

Comments

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  • This word was thrown out semi-accusatorily at me in a late night conversation. I had to ask what it meant.

    Apparantly, in heteronormative thinking there is an assumption of a dichotomy that does not exist.

    March 12, 2009

  • one of the despicable words in the English language

    April 11, 2009

  • The word? Or the concept that it designates?

    April 12, 2009

  • I don't even know what it designates; it's so fumbled up in its self-referential, decadent academic righteousness. I hate the tone and atmosphere of it.

    May 2, 2009

  • Nice job unpacking that, MM :-)

    Seriously though, I agree. It's a loathsome word and my new least favorite.

    May 2, 2009

  • I can see how the academic righteousness can be annoying -- it's like any buzzword, like saying "weltaunschauung" instead of "worldview" just to be pretentious. But the concept of "please don't assume everyone is straight, and please don't assume everyone believes in a binary system of gender, and please don't ignore my identity/relationships just 'cause they're not like yours" seems a useful one.

    May 3, 2009

  • This is a useful term for theoreticians, and there is no reason to disdain it, any more than one would disdain specialized nautical terminology. It's curious the way people seem to admire the specialist jargon from certain fields (military, medical, astrophysical), but get upset when they hear words that convey nuanced notions from the humanities and social sciences (social theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, anthropology, etc.), perhaps from a kind of anti-intellectual populism. The scholars in these fields study ordinary things, like family structure, social prejudices, the workings of the imagination, and while it is true that everyone deals with such things, and hence in a way are also experts on them from a practical perspective, very few people think about these things with any depth or rigor. Those who make it their business to understand the workings of such phenomena do need to develop special terms. I would be the first to agree that these special terms can get out of hand, turning into abstractions that seem to lose all connection with the reality they seek to describe, but in many cases they are useful. I prefer simple, understandable words, but as K&P points out, words like heteronormative are a succinct way to express a fairly complex concept.

    I am not a big fan of this word, particularly because here the prefix hetero- means "heterosexual" not "differing" (just as homo- in "homophobia" means "homosexual" not "same"). But within the discipline of cultural theory, this has become an acceptable use. I would, at least in some contexts, prefer the word heterosexualist, but heteronormative has the advantage of sounding neutral, whereas heterosexualist is a more loaded term.

    May 4, 2009

  • I like the word, and I do use it. Hallo too, rolig!

    May 4, 2009

  • Thanks for saying what I'd been thinking, rolig :)

    Maybe the word does get too much traffic in contexts where it's not appropriate--say, in casual speech by people who wanna look smart using fancy-shmancy words--but I've only ever seen it used in sociology papers. I may have felt like the word sums up my general frustration with the implicit norms in mainstream cinema and TV or in political discourse or whatever, but I wouldn't use it except in some specific academic discourse.

    May 4, 2009

  • Like I said, I'm not crazy about this word, because at first glance it seems to mean "different from what is normative" (compare heterodox v. orthodox), but I wouldn't out-and-out attack it, since the social theoreticians who use it understand what it is supposed to mean. The idea it describes is not hard to grasp, since almost all of us encounter it everyday: the assumption that the heterosexual model of society is properly privileged (if not the only acceptable model).

    May 4, 2009

  • I've heard too many pseudo-intellectual poseurs use this word to not dislike it--I buy the Valse hypothesis. All apologies to Rick Moody, but it has been ruined by semiotics majors from Brown, wearing clunky glasses and knit scarves and babbling about Derrida and reeking of smug.

    So maybe it's not the word I dislike, but everyone I've ever met who has used it, up until now :-) Rolig, I very much appreciate your measured tone. You are Obama-like (Obamaesque? Obamian?) in your ability to speak dispassionately about topics that are sometimes combative or incendiary.

    And knitandpurl, I agree it's useful to differentiate some of the trappings this word has acquired (pretention, smugness), from its original meaning, which certainly describes a real phenomenon.

    May 4, 2009

  • Usually, when I hear this class of jargon, it's a sure sign that the discussion will turn to more-oppressed-than-thou nitpicking and veer away from meaningful understanding of marginal communities and their issues. Then again, I went to a university with a wretched English department with a serious bone for more-oppressed-than-thou nitpicking, and the academics therein may simply have been fond of abusing such terminology.

    May 4, 2009

  • I'd never seen the word until 3 minutes ago and can't quite see what all the hate-mail is about. Dare I say moist? Still, I thank our commentators for putting their thoughts down at such length.

    May 5, 2009

  • I'm with bilby. This one's new to me.

    May 5, 2009

  • Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean to get my kickers in a twist--I hate to be a hater.

    There's nothing wrong with the word per se. It's just that there was a period in the nineties when it was in heavy rotation with a certain type of person, pseudo intellectual kids from the Northeast U.S. who went to a certain set of schools, read (or pretended to have read) a certain set of books, who dressed disturbingly alike, and who repeated certain words and phrases with a knowing glance, like they were occult signifiers to be shared only between initiates. "Heteronormative" was one of those words, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

    May 5, 2009

  • This is a very interesting and informative conversation. Thanks everyone, for your thoughts. :)

    P.S. I didn't know John wore knickers. *ponders*

    May 5, 2009

  • Unless I'm riding, in which case I tend to sport jodhpurs.

    May 5, 2009

  • Heteronormativity refers to the state of expectations regarding social performance that anticipates that individuals will behave in ways that cleanly corresponds to contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity. Heteronormativity supports the notion that heterosexual orientations are the most appropriate and that men and women will relate in ways that reflect this and also reflect a binary understanding of gender. Wikipedia is currently the only reference source I have found that contains an adequate definition of this term, and I'd love for you -- or us -- to be on the same bandwagon!

    June 6, 2009

  • Heteronormative. This pertains to heterosexuality as in -- males who like females and females who like males. It relates to sexuality in the same way as above. It relates to the genre of fiction I write as Valentine Bonnaire. I follow a line of writers in this genre -- Literary Erotica -- which is not smut and not pornography. xxoo! <3

    February 16, 2013

  • "For me, queerness encompasses my sexual identity as someone uncomfortable with binary presentation. It also encompasses my rebuke of cisgender and heteronormative privilege and the intersection of these privileges with white privilege. LGBT+ labels tend to presume a binary origination, and their usage coincides with a social movement that seeks assimilation and erases the existence of non-binary identities. Using “queer” as a catch-all umbrella term, whether intentionally or not, silences that important fringe voice."--https://www.them.us/story/what-does-queer-mean

    July 2, 2021