i am a sociology student in France and we have a “gender and socialization” course. first of all, thank you for your comment, i learned something thanks to you and i will look into the subject more! what you say is very interesting and it is very close to the theory of some “radical Marxist feminists” like Monique Witting in her book “the straight mind” who says that lesbians are not women because they do not fit into “women’s category” of the society. i don’t know if you know all of this but if the subject interests you i recommend it because it explains a lot and it puts an incalculable number of heteronormative thoughts into perspective!
It’s crazy how gender socialisation in sociology is both mind boggling yet it can mostly come out to a drawn conclusion especially with micro theories and interactionalists putting subtle interactions throughout history and daily life! I love sociology :)
Thank you so much for sharing! I was not familiar with that, and i liked reading it. Lot of interesting perspectives. From what I gathered by reading, it’s about rejecting the concept of “woman”, since “womanhood” exists as component of heterosexuality and is essential in its existence. Of course, lesbians do not fit within heterosexuality. So based on that, yes “lesbians are not women”.
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Adrienne Rich is a pretty well known work (especially because of “comphet”), so chances are you’ve heard of it. Some of those concepts reminded me of it. As Rich pm says, all women are pressured into heterosexuality and are assumed to be attracted to men. This erases lesbian relationships and contributes to the oppression of queer women.
Anyways thank you for sharing! I’ll definitely have to look into Marxist feminists more. There’s rlly so much to talk about w gender and sexuality, especially if you use an intersectional perspective
Wow.
Thank you for your comment and this information
yes!! in france we saw that a lot because of the politics here and we can analyse that forever! i hate to say that « history repete themself » but it’s the case with the increase of extrem ideas in europe :/
yes i heard of those concepts and i agree with you, they are similars. i think they are based of each other but im not sure so i don’t want to say something untrue. but marxist feminism is so interesting for this and you can see a lot of theories that are almost « true » on modern society!
Oh wow, I'm learning a lot. Happy Pride month! Thank you for sharing this!
The interesting thing is in the around the early 1900s, sex acts were (for the most part) still seen as separate from identity. (This is all USA centric idk as much about queer history in the rest of the world sorry :( )
Back then sexuality and gender were more tied up, so “homosexual” would refer to men that presented more feminine, not necessarily men attracted to men (same thing with women and lesbians). It was seen as gender “inversion”. So men that had sex with men were still seen, essentially, as straight as long as they topped and were masculine. Those men were still able to return to their wives and jobs, and were still seen as “normal”. It was the feminine men that were more likely the bottoms than were seen as outside of “the norm”.
I have to mention, in Harlem (1920s ish) there were massive drag balls (and other smaller parties), where ppl would cross dress. Some of these parties had thousands of attendees, and some were middle/upper class white ppl. There were also smaller scale, queer-centric parties. Performing, like at jazz clubs, also gave ppl freedom to experiment with their gender presentation (Gladys Bentley is the best we all stan).
Things of course progressively changed. The Great Depression ended the larger scale parties, but of course there was still a queer community within Harlem. the lavender scare (1940-70s) caused queer people to be be fired from their jobs, and queer ppl were excluded from the GI bill plus dishonorably discharged from the military. The state actively punishing queer ppl helped cement heterosexuality as the norm and homosexuality as “deviant”.
Anyways it makes sense why a straight man won’t see topping someone as gay LMAO