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In an article playfully titled “Queer Theory for Everyone,” the literary scholar Sharon Marcus argued for a more expansive interpretation of the insights of queer theory, particularly its emphasis on the instability of gender norms and sexual identities. Marcus urged other scholars not to limit queer theory’s relevance to those individuals who have identified as, or who have been identified as, LGBTQ and instead to deploy queer theory as a tool to understand sexuality more broadly. Such an approach, she suggested, would help the field move beyond an analytically flat contrast between all things “straight” and all things “queer,” and it would enrich our understanding of how the very idea of “straight” and “normal” shifted through historical time and cultural context.53 Laura Doan, a historian of sexuality in Britain, similarly urges scholars to employ “queerness as method” in unpacking the creation and implications of the sexual binary, rather than conflating heterosexuality with “normal” and thus the opposite of “queer.” “Queerness-as-method,” Doan explains, “invites scrutiny about what is queer in all sexual practices but also invites history’s intervention as a corrective to the queer faith in heteronormativity as a universal or transhistorical value.”54 Doan, Marcus, and other scholars prompt us to examine the tacit assumptions that often presuppose heterosexuality’s historical ubiquity. Our effort to curate a collection of essays in the history of heterosexuality reflects our indebtedness to the insights of queer theory, yet we find such an approach compelling but incomplete without a commensurate appreciation for the feminist critique of heterosexuality.

Prior to the creation of queer theory as a field or the coinage of the term “heteronormativity,” the feminist, gay liberation, and women of color movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a great deal to say about heterosexuality as a system of patriarchy (the systemic oppression of women) and about heterosexual sex. For many feminists, heterosexuality might be normal, but that very norm was the target of their activism. A fair amount of radical and lesbian feminist political writing in the late 1960s and 1970s focused on critiques of heterosexual relationships, describing them as inherently oppressive (even as necessarily violent) given the power of heteronormative patriarchy. One radical group, The Feminists, argued in their manifesto that women could not have noncoercive sex under a system of patriarchy: “Heterosexual love is a delusion in yet another sense: it is a means of escape from the role system by way of approval from and identification with the man, who has defined himself as humanity (beyond role)—she desires to be him. . . . We must destroy the institution of heterosexual sex which is a manifestation of the male-female role.”55 These feminists argued that it was the presumption of normality that made heterosexuality so deeply toxic to the cause of women’s liberation.

Gay liberationists also critiqued the institution of heterosexuality. Radical gay men, such as those in The Red Butterfly, a Marxist-leaning cell of the Gay Liberation Front, theorized gay liberation as a critique of heteronormativity, militarism, racism, and capitalism in a series of pamphlets printed in 1970. Their first pamphlet, Gay Liberation, challenged the idea of normal sexuality and insisted that gay sex was “natural.”56 In a subsequent pamphlet by Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto, he wrote more urgently, “Exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up. It reflects a fear of people of the same sex, it’s anti-homosexual, and it is frought [sic] with frustration. Heterosexual sex is fucked up, too; ask women’s liberation about what straight guys are like in bed.”57 A third pamphlet, Gay Oppression: A Radical Analysis, argued that gay liberation affected heterosexuals both by illuminating that homosexuals were far more numerous than straight society had previously acknowledged and by challenging the idea of heterosexuality as natural or inevitable.58

Radical feminists produced a rich body of academic and vernacular discussions of the hetero/homo binary as a source of women’s oppression. A major contribution to these conversations came in 1975 with the publication of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women.” Rubin was then a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Michigan and a member of feminist groups in Ann Arbor. The essay, which has been reprinted in multiple anthologies, explored the assumptions about women’s subordination within theories of Marx and Engels, Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but it also suggested that these theories offered a powerful resource for a feminist critique. Rubin interpreted these canonical works to reveal a “sex/gender system” that each generation learned and relearned. Rubin argued that cultures “produced” gender inequality and that the sex/gender system was not embedded within, or prior to, the development of human societies.59 Her essay described “obligatory heterosexuality” as a historically created effect of the sex/gender system that subordinated women. Her reading of this process was daringly optimistic: “Sex/gender systems are not ahistorical emanations of the human mind; they are products of historical human activity.”60 The poet and activist Adrienne Rich’s widely circulated and anthologized argument about “compulsory heterosexuality,” first published in 1980, extended this lesbian feminist critique of heterosexuality as a species of patriarchy. In an article in the feminist journal Signs, Rich described heterosexuality as a political institution that bound women into sexual servitude and economic dependency.61 The critique of heterosexuality that Rich and other feminists advanced was of the sex/gender system of patriarchy that oppressed women and queer people, something more akin to what we today name as heteronormativity.62

Black women who broke off from a second-wave feminist group, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), to establish the Combahee River Collective challenged what subsequent scholars would call heteronormativity, and they did so while attuned to the intersectional operations of power.63 The black feminist authors of the “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977, including Demita Frazer, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith, provided a sustained analysis of the intersectional operation of heterosexism within systems of racial and class discrimination: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”64 Members of the collective did not stop there. These black feminists additionally maintained that “the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”65 At once socialist and anti-imperialist, the collective’s pathbreaking analysis shaped generations of feminist scholarship that centered the intersections of sex, race, and class systems of privilege and oppression. What was clear to them, and what historians would be foolish to ignore, is that we should be as skeptical of the idea that heterosexism ever operates in isolation as we are to claims that heterosexuality itself is transhistorical.

Moreover, the poet Audre Lorde’s 1985 pamphlet I Am Your Sister set forth a theory of heterosexual privilege as an operation of power and a means of oppression. Lorde offered a blunt definition: “HETEROSEXISM: A belief in the inherent superiority of one form of loving over all others and thereby the right to dominance.”66 Lorde distinguished that privileging belief from homophobia, a reflection of “terror” at the knowledge of same-sex love. Lorde additionally explained that her identity as a black lesbian was omnipresent in her activism and creative output, a source of power and an inspiration to act. If lesbianism was considered “abnormal,” so too was blackness: both claims ultimately meant that Lorde was systematically oppressed by heterosexist presumptions about women’s and lesbians’ “place” within movements for civil rights, just as racism sought to limit her and other people of color. It was, for Lorde, nothing less than incumbent on progressive activists and thinkers to ask, “what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped?”67

Indeed, pointed interrogation of sexuality and the “normal” vitally animated work by theorists who followed Lorde. In other words, the queer theory that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which took as its starting point the existence of heteronormativity and the necessity of its undoing, built on the critique of heterosexuality’s toxicity that feminist, gay liberationist, and black lesbian activists and scholars had created. Michael Warner published the first academic article to use the term “heteronormativity” in a now-canonical 1991 article in Social Text. In that article, Warner called on other scholars “to challenge the pervasive and often invisible heteronormativity of modern societies.”68 Warner did not explain whether heteronormativity is transhistorical or whether its contemporary power derives from the presumption that it has always existed among those who receive its benefits. His study nevertheless provides a marvelously illuminating framework for understanding how heterosexual privilege operates: “Heterosexual culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of inter-gender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist.”69 Theorists of heteronormativity point to its simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility; in this volume, we argue that the emergence of that powerful norm has a history.

We have challenged each author to define “heterosexuality” as they employ the term in their work. In this way, each author provides a history of heterosexuality as well as a historiographical case for “how to do the history of heterosexuality.” Richard Godbeer even finds heterosexuality inapplicable to the people he studies. In every case, however, this approach moves the history of heterosexuality beyond the presumption that it constitutes a transhistorical yet inchoate norm against which queerness reacts or that queerness attempts to subvert. Our goals for this book are therefore to illuminate heterosexuality’s antecedents, the circumstances of its creation, and its consequent effects—not to vaunt “heterosexual” as concept, practice, or identity.

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Rather than organize the essays in chronological fashion, we have instead grouped them according to four rubrics: difference and desire; bodies and difference in popular culture; conceptions of marriage, family, and the domestic; and discourses about desire. Arranging essays in loose chronological order would indeed emphasize critical changes over time. Still, we have juxtaposed essays in ways that should create both productive tension and dialogue within each section and that should generate revealing analytical connections across sections regarding the historicity of heterosexuality. In each section, we have collated essays in ways that amplify “difference” across various registers. If the literary scholar Marlon Ross was explicitly interrogating “the closet as a raceless paradigm” when he observed that “racialized minorities may operate under divergent social protocols concerning what it means to be visible and invisible within normative sites like the family, . . . the workplace, . . . the street, and the community more generally,” we hope that these essays will, in concert, profitably highlight a similar dynamic when it comes to a range of intimate, different-sex interactions and practices across four centuries of North American history.70

“Race” is not a primary concern for every author in Heterosexual Histories. Analyses of race constitute a through line in this anthology all the same. Several of the authors locate histories of heterosexuality within racial, gendered, and class-marked systems of power relations in ways that echo pathbreaking work on colonial sexualities by scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler.71 Moreover, scholars in this volume benefit from and build on a raft of significant Americanist gender scholarship about race and sexuality—and on sexuality and religion, for that matter—that has been produced over the past four decades. We do not seek to delve into such scholarship here.72 We do, however, wish to highlight a few salient points as a means of introducing the essays.

We first draw readers’ attention to an observation that the cinema scholar Richard Dyer made in 1997: “All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality. Race is a means of categorising different types of human body which reproduce themselves. It seeks to systematise differences and to relate them to differences of character and worth. Heterosexuality is the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction of these differences.”73 To be sure, Dyer’s project was not to historicize heterosexuality. Authors featured within this collection, though, do rigorously consider how race has suffused what we now think of as “heterosexuality,” not to mention how different-sex sexuality has undergirded notions about “race.” Taken together, their essays reveal the persistence of these interlocking dynamics over time, how arguments regarding “race” and different-sex sexuality have changed, and how “race” can result in certain different-sex intimacies being deemed as deviant. We nonetheless join a long line of scholars who roundly reject arguments that race is a biological reality.

It seems especially pertinent and productive to turn to Karen Fields and Barbara Fields at this juncture. They rightly assert that the term “race” is actually a “shorthand,” one that “stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups . . . of unequal rank.”74 Emphasizing that race is a conception, a doctrine, or a construction hardly means that race had—and has—no actual impact on the quotidian realities and lived experience of people. Quite critically, concepts of racial difference have profoundly informed notions about human worth and labor value, as have conceptions about sexed or gendered difference.75 If the essays herein are not necessarily in conversation with scholarship on labor, the authors are attentive to matters of class. And many of the authors also speak to work that theorizes racialized gender, including studies of unfree as well as paid labor.76

As much as the essays in Heterosexual Histories are disciplinarily bound, they have interdisciplinary reach. That said, it is our aim and hope that these essays clearly establish what Jennifer Spear and Kevin Murphy have argued in another anthology of historical work on sexuality, that “careful and contextualised analysis of the shifting relationship of gender and sexuality across space and time illuminates broader historical processes.”77

The essays in part 1, “Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century,” offer sweeping discussions of the creation and effects of different-sex desires. They show how gender, race, religion, and nation coconstituted ideas about “normal” or “moral” sexuality at various moments in the American past. Richard Godbeer finds that “heterosexuality” is a form of sexuality unknown to his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects, whose sex/gender system operated according to a distinct “poetics of desire.” This poetics could, as Godbeer compellingly demonstrates, include desire for connection with the divine and be more expansive than modern understandings of erotic, different-sex interaction. In an essay that covers several centuries, Renee Romano asserts that when we consider histories of heterosexuality, we must reckon with the fact that it is bound up with interraciality, that racial difference is intrinsic to the construction of different-sex desires and to associations with sexual deviance. Nicholas L. Syrett’s essay places age difference at the center of heterosexuality’s history. As Syrett contends that age asymmetry has been a critical means of instantiating heterosexuality, he demonstrates how gendered ideals of age shaped desires for different-sex partners. His chapter additionally shows how the historical shift in Americans’ awareness of their numerical ages led to a diminishment in age disparity in marriage, even as most American women—across ethnicity, race, religion, and region—continue to marry somewhat-older men. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu examines the history of Asian Americans through the lens of heterosexuality, finding that it served both as a negative stereotype used to justify Asian exclusion and discrimination and as a positive model for Asian Americans’ self-understanding. In addition, Wu persuasively demonstrates that, by embodying heteronormativity, Asian Americans have not only claimed cultural citizenship in the United States but have shaped both racial and sexual liberalism as well. All four of these essays suggest ways of rereading American history by centering sexual differences and gendered desires.

Part 2, “Differences, Bodies, and Popular Culture,” includes essays that examine specific case studies of the American history of heterosexuality within print culture, theater, and discursive production. Their topics range among racialized British colonial discourses of beauty, in Sharon Block’s essay; health-reform literature that targeted interracial prostitution in antebellum New Orleans, in Rashauna Johnson’s essay; and Marc Stein’s study of gay satires of heterosexuality during the Cold War. Moreover, if Block analyzes the construction of sex-related beliefs that do not map onto notions about heterosexuality that gained currency after the advent of sexology, Johnson is concerned (in part) with emergent scientific norms. And while Johnson’s examination of print culture underscores that certain forms of different-sex sex could unsettle prevailing notions of heterosexuality, Stein’s examination of print culture produced a century later offers allied analysis of how heterosexuality could be troubled by queer commentary that offered trenchant assessments of ascendant heterosexuality. Each essay considers the words used—in eighteenth-century Atlantic-world print culture, in antebellum newspapers and health-reform literature, and in mid-twentieth-century gay camp and parody—to locate the emergence of different-sex desire as a site of gendered, raced, and embodied concern for a reading (and, in Stein’s essay, theatergoing) public.

Each essay in part 3, “Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy,” considers the project of defining and shoring up heteronormativity as a moral, legal, and cultural basis for American family life. Zurisaday Gutiérrez Avila and Pablo Mitchell show how, during a period of profound upheaval and dislocation, heterosexual family life factored in the experiences of Mexicans in the US Southwest between 1848 and 1900. Settler colonialism not only had profoundly negative impacts on both distinct and intermingled communities of indigenous and Mexican people but also imposed expectations of heterosexual morality on Mexicans who became Americans. Gutiérrez Avila and Mitchell find that heterosexual family life enabled Mexican women and men to counter negative Anglo assessments of their sexuality and thus became a resource for Mexican people during a traumatic period in their history. A far different picture of heterosexuality emerges from Carolyn Herbst Lewis’s chapter about white, middle-class suburban “swingers” during the 1960s and 1970s. Lewis locates these enthusiastic spouse swappers at the leading edge of the sexual revolution and considers what the movement’s gender conservatism might say about women’s desires within (hetero)sexual liberation.78 Indeed, Lewis reveals that swinging did not necessarily reflect egalitarian partnerships but could buttress male dominance among married couples. The third and final essay in this section turns to the legal history and rights claims of black mothers following the highly charged claims about female-headed households and “matriarchy” advanced in the 1965 publication The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which was authored by then–Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and is perhaps better known as “The Moynihan Report.” The legal historian Serena Mayeri looks at lawsuits brought by African-descended women between 1967 and 1978 that challenged “illegitimacy penalties” in US employment law and public welfare policy. Together, these essays provide illuminating assessments of how gender, race, class, and sexual norms infused understandings of heterosexuality during a critical period of US state consolidation.

Part 4, “Discourses of Desire,” includes three essays that reflect on how ways of naming and discussing heterosexuality—in medical literature, in religious language about “Judeo-Christian morality,” and in a political scandal—emerged and evolved over time. Sarah Rodriguez, a historian of medicine, explains how the episiotomy, a foundational practice in obstetrics, was developed in the 1920s by the physician Joseph DeLee, in part as a way to “restore virginal conditions” (tighten the opening of the vagina) following childbirth. This physical association between women’s anatomy and heterosexuality defined “normal” sexual function in terms of a male penetrative partner’s satisfaction while making the episiotomy a “normal” clinical practice in obstetrical care. Heather R. White, a scholar of religion, asks how the terms “Judeo-Christian” and “heterosexuality” came to be associated in American religious discourse. She finds that religious conservatives linked their definitions of “Judeo-Christian morality” to their vision of a sexually moral, religiously guided, and heteronormative past. Andrea Friedman’s essay on the politics of sexual humiliation and feminism in the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal concludes this section and rounds out our book. The scandal all at once revealed the reach, limitations, and contradictions of late second-wave feminist critiques of the sexual economy of heterosexuality. Friedman’s essay illuminates how much controversy remained about the contours and content of heterosexual desire even into the early twenty-first century. Lewinsky refuted the associations with sexual humiliation that many feminists assigned to her trysts with President Bill Clinton in 1998, yet more recently she has reconsidered the relationship between power and desire in light of the #MeToo movement, which originated in 2006 with the civil rights activist and women’s advocate Tarana Burke.

Together, these original essays offer myriad ways to reconsider what different-sex desire and erotic activity have meant in specific contexts and across time—not to mention what it means to write a history of heterosexuality itself. They call attention to the relationship between desire and differences of gender, race, and class. As histories of ideas and of experiences, these essays consider the relationship between differences, desires, politics, and cultures. Rather than unseen, fixed, or predetermined, heterosexuality has a complicated history. We hope this volume of essays will inspire others to continue to investigate its complex and even vexed past and present.