Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance

I am deeply honored to participate in this retrospective on Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Approximately fifteen years ago, I enrolled in an undergraduate course entitled "Women and Difference: Marginality, Art, and Politics." Co-taught by Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff, the class transformed me intellectually, politically, and personally. The education that I received in this setting differed dramatically from the curriculum of my first year in college. Instead of the universalizing humanistic discourse of western civilization, a canon dominated by the great white and male thinkers of western culture, my feminist studies course focused on women "perceived as 'different' (spinsters, lesbians, women of color, Jewish women, women with disabilities, women without children)." ¹ Specifically, the class examined how these women used their marginality as inspiration for political critique as well as artistic and intellectual creativity. Through the readings and lectures, I learned about the lives and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Agnes Smedley, and Virginia Woolf, almost all of them previously unknown to me. The class laid two crucial foundations for my subsequent intellectual development: 1) It opened my eyes to the ways in which university curricula, that is, the construction and presentation of knowledge, can mask the diversity of human experience, and 2) I realized the importance of intersectionality for understanding the social dynamics of power and the multi-faceted nature of identities. These insights provide the basis of my reflections on the impact and relevance of Rich's 1980 groundbreaking essay on my present field of expertise, Asian American history.

In "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Rich makes two broad claims to expose heterosexuality as a normative ideology. First, she critiques feminist scholarship of the late 1970s for its largely unquestioned acceptance of heterosexuality as the "presumed . . . 'sexual preference' of 'most women.'" ² Instead, Rich posits that heterosexuality, far from being "natural," has been rendered compulsory. Social and political institutions, material conditions, and physical violence serve to discipline women to accept heterosexuality. In essence, feminist scholars who ignore heterosexuality as a constructed social norm reinforce the compulsory nature of this institution. Second, Rich proposes the concepts of "lesbian existence" and "lesbian continuum" to shed light on the ways in which women engage in a variety of sexual, erotic, emotional, social, and political relationships with one another. While the term "lesbian existence" refers to women who reject heterosexuality, the phrase "lesbian continuum" encompasses a "range . . . of woman-identified experience . . . to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support." ³ By identifying both concepts, Rich moves lesbianism from a marginal to a central position in feminist projects that seek to understand women's lives.

Although Rich was addressing primarily a community of women's studies scholars, her arguments regarding compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence/continuum are useful for understanding the ways in which Asian American history has been constructed and the emerging scholarship on Asian American sexuality. However, Rich's concepts need to be historically contextualized in order to acknowledge how racialized groups experience both compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory sexual "deviance." ⁴ Her choice of terms in describing lesbian existence and lesbian continuum also suggests the need for historically nuanced language that captures how individuals identify themselves and are in turn identified by their communities.

In Asian American history, the tendency to accept heterosexuality unquestioningly as the norm is linked to the field's critique of racially motivated intrusions on the construction of family. To highlight the discrimination experienced by people of Asian ancestry, scholars emphasize the passage of exclusion laws during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These policies not only limited the total number of Asian immigrants in the United States but also created gender imbalanced populations, especially among the laboring classes. ⁵ The characterization of these Asian...