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>> 133 4 Straight Women Doing and Undoing Compulsory Heterosexuality Are straight women less homophobic than straight men? Like other researchers (LaMar and Kite 1998; Loftus 2001), I find that the homophobic stances of the straight women in my sample are less defensive than the straight men’s. Nonetheless, I do find homophobic prejudices among straight women. In particular, their antigay prejudice comes to the surface regarding the issue of same-sex marriage and granting social and legal recognition to lesbian and gay couples. For example, Beth Moore, a twenty-six-year-old white married woman, disagrees with the idea that gays should be entitled to the civil right to marry. As a Christian, Beth views marriage as a religious institution and does not think lesbian and gay relationships are morally equal to straight ones. While she supports civil unions for same-sex couples, she maintains a Christian worldview that does not respect a secular society in which the granting of lesbians’ and gay men’s legal rights is a question for the country’s courts, legislatures, and ballot boxes. Straight women, also unlike straight men, did not report a preoccupation with how their styles of dress would be interpreted by others. In fact, many of the most pro-gay women told me stories of trying to persuade homophobic straight male friends to lighten up and be less worried about a gay man flirting with them. Erica Harris, a twentytwo -year-old black woman, recounts taking straight male friends to gay bars in Orangetown to show them that their perceptions of gays 134 > 135 and discrimination but do not blur normative boundaries of heterosexuality . The blurred boundaries category is discussed in the last section. Here, I focus on a more “activist” set of straight women whose identity practices blur identity boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality . These straight women begin a discussion of women who selfdefine their identities as straight but enact queered identifications in their willingness to engage in sexual relations with other women and promote sexual equality. As in chapter 3, I show how race shapes and frames straight women’s homophobic and antihomophobic stances. On the homophobic end, black straight women generally draw on their racial status and Christian faiths to justify their homophobic beliefs, while their white counterparts use notions of lesbian and gay sexualities as deviant in their rejection of lesbian women’s and gay men’s claims to recognition and rights. However, I also document exceptions to this pattern, illustrating how one of the white straight women invokes her Christianity in disapproving of same-sex marriage and one of the black women cites her Caribbean culture and family’s views of homosexuality as socially abnormal in legitimizing her prejudicial attitudes. On the antihomophobic end of the continuum, and similar to my findings regarding black straight men’s antihomophobic stances drawing on their experiences with racism in affirming gay life, I show that black straight women reference a shared understanding of oppression based on their racial status in articulating their reasons for supporting lesbian and gay equality. Theorizing Straight Femininities: The Continuing Relevance of Compulsory Heterosexuality The sociologist Raewyn Connell (1987) argues that women enact normative femininity, or what she calls “emphasized femininity,” by generally being supplicants to men, particularly in the workplace, as well as by establishing their roles as wives and mothers as central to their sense of selves. Emphasized femininity, she states, is “the display of sociability rather than technical competence, fragility in mating scenes, compliance with men’s desire for titillation and ego-stroking in office relationships , acceptance of marriage and childcare as a response to labor-market discrimination against women” (187). 136 > 137 but not reducible to each other, relations and orders of male domination and normative heterosexuality straight women face in doing their sexual-gender identities.5 In other words, Rich maintains that the norms, relations, and institutions that organize the lives of women as wives and mothers, as well their historical economic dependence on fathers and husbands, enforce the norm of heterosexuality on women in qualitatively distinct ways than they do on men. In the straight construction of women as subordinates who face unwanted sexual advances from men at work, on the street, or even in their own homes as wives, compulsory heterosexuality makes salient the connections between systems of male and heterosexual domination and the oppressive processes through which women are forced into, subordinated through, and circumscribed by heterosexuality . “Women have married,” Rich explains, “because it was necessary, in...

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