The question of 'Transgression': (hetero)normativity, heterosexuality and heteromasculinity

Abstract

Heterosexuality is simply rarely examined nowadays in Gender/Sexuality scholarship. It is largely taken to be of little critical interest, as simply to be equated with heteronormativity. The present conflation of heterosexuality with heteronormativity presents dominant practices as monolithic & unchanging. In other words, the conflation over-determines this sexual mode as a source of domination & under-theorises it as a site for social dissonance. The over-determination of heterosexuality as singular, fixed and oppressive has implications for understandings of heteromasculinity. This paper, by contrast, considers the term transgression in relation to heterosexuality–in particular to heterosex–and heteromasculinity. It is asserted that transgression might be intrinsic within dominant practices like heterosexuality & hetero-masculinity (rather than necessarily always external to them). In the process the potential of the term transgression, is compared with other terms like subversion/dissent/protest. This discussion leads to the question of what might transgression in the realm of the dominant look like. How might a transgressive heterosexuality and, more specifically, a transgressive hetero-masculinity, be conceptualised? Attention to acts as well as identities suggests some productive directions. Such considerations complicate our understandings of self, gender, sexuality & social change & thus open up hopeful possibilities, with attendant implications for hetero-masculinity.