adrienne rich h1 essay

Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.

Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo

I recently reread the essay titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” by late poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, with my students this semester. Published in the summer of 1980, on the heels of the Women’s Liberation Movement, I found that the essay still maintains its relevance and challenges us to remember that feminism is a political movement that itself must be continually interrogated.

The essay (which you can read here , with a foreword from Rich published 23 years after the original) has four sections which are titled only with the roman numbers I-IV. I labeled these sections for my students to try and capture the focus of each: I. Compulsory Heterosexuality – The Groundwork; II. Male Power and the Inequality of the Sexes; III. Lesbian Existence as Political Identity; and IV. Woman-Identification as Source of Power and Energy.

Part I lays the groundwork for her piece, which involves two central points: the first is the fact that there is a bias of compulsory heterosexuality which pervades not only literature at large but also specifically feminist literature and scholarship, and, the second, that this bias not only erases the continuum of lesbian experience among women, but “forces into hiding and disguise” the ways in which women may choose one another as comrades, partners, lovers, and primary community (31). Through examples from literature and psychology, she demonstrates the multiple ways heterosexuality is not only assumed, but set up and presented as if it is the only viable option – the assumed norm. Thus, Rich makes the case that heterosexuality should be properly seen as a political institution that disempowers women (17).

Part II is heavy with many examples of male power as “societal forces” that “wrench women’s emotional erotic energies away from themselves and other women” – the forces ranging from physical force, like rape and enslavement, to control of consciousness, through forms of compulsion emanating from “art, literature, film” and the “idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage” (17-19). In this section she also raises the question of whether consent is possible within a context of such deeply rooted inequality among the sexes; and makes the point that compulsory heterosexuality is fundamentally about male-identification (22, 24).

In part III Rich turns her attention to the vast range and diversity of woman-identified experience, and argues that in as much as the lesbian existence breaks a taboo and rejects a (heterosexual) compulsory way of life, it is a political identity. This in part explains why the history of lesbian experience is intentionally destroyed, erased, for it is a “direct and indirect attack on the male right of access to women” (22). Finally, in part IV Rich outlines how the denial of “the reality and visibility” of woman-identification represents a loss of power and source of energy for women. Compulsory heterosexuality creates an absence of choice, and can therefore be seen as a crime against women in as much as it robs them of the possibilities of the wide range of lesbian experience, along with the energy, power, and sensuality it provides.

As I reread the essay, I was again struck by the boldness of this piece, written in 1980, as well as its continuing relevance for our society today. Adrienne Rich outlined and named the compulsory nature of heteronormativity in society at large and demonstrated how feminist scholars are also complicit in the erasure and distortion of women-identified women, and of all who fall within the continuum of the lesbian experience. My students pointed out that a parallel essay could be written today in terms of the distortion and denial of trans women’s experience. How the narrow and restrictive understanding of “woman” based on a very specific idea of sex erases the reality of the expanse and continuum of women’s experience.

While in some ways the piece is quite heavy, delineating the very familiar characteristics of the “power of men,” pointing out how these effectively preserve sexual inequality, “strip[ing] women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential…(specifically) the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity,” it is also clear that Rich’s underlying commitment is the movement for liberation (20). The liberation she seeks is the possibility to live otherwise – in a vast multitude of ways, free from coercive power and with the potential for mutuality, dignity, autonomy, and integrity. She writes with the aim of contributing to “new social relations between the sexes” and writes for those who see themselves as part of that movement.

There were two specific points from Rich’s essay that we raised for discussion and analysis in class when we read the piece: 1) her very poignant question about why “the means of impregnation (for procreation)” must be so rigidly identified with “emotional/erotic relationships” (17); and 2) if sexual inequality and male-identification is built right into the very fabric of society, what are the conditions needed to make sexual consent between heterosexual people possible—is it possible (24)? What are the actual possibilities for undoing this power that is “everywhere wielded over women”? (37).

It was not a light read for my students last week, many who are entering the field of critical theory for the first time. But it was very fulfilling to get to discuss with them this classic feminist writing from over 50 years ago and to see how both the essay and my students continue to contribute to the ongoing conversation that is part of the feminist, and now queer, movement for liberation. Which is by definition necessary to any living movement. Which is precisely the point Rich made in the Afterword of the 2003 republication of “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” stating, “my essay should be read as one contribution to a long exploration in progress, not as my own “last word” on sexual politics” (37).

What word would you like to add to the discussion?

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Author: Xochitl Alvizo

Feminist theologian, Christian identified. Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the area of Women and Religion and the Philosophy of Sex Gender and Sexuality at California State University, Northridge. Her research is focused in Congregational Studies, Feminist and Quuer Theologies, and Ecclesiology specifically. Often finding herself on the boundary of different social and cultural contexts, she works hard to develop her voice and to hear and encourage the voice of others. Her work is inspired by the conviction that all people are inextricably connected and the good one can do in any one area inevitably and positively impacts all others. View all posts by Xochitl Alvizo

13 thoughts on “Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo ”

Thank you for this Xochitl. I hope to read Rich’s essay when I have some time to sit down and absorb it. In the meantime, I am grateful for your overview. As I read your post, I think of Carol Christ and how she taught us all about patriarchy and ownership. Ownership of women’s bodies (see the abortion issue in the US), ownership of children (see groups like Moms for Liberty), ownership of the earth (see the Supreme Court advantaging business interests over ecological ones). It is harder to patriarchal interests to own the LQBTQ+ community who threaten entrenched interests because they are in a foundational position to challenge it. But it’s painful to see how hard the patriarchal systems are doing their best to own even that corner of freedom.

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Xochitl – it is so reassuring that our Foremothers are still in the picture – Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly. Susan Griffin to mention just a few were first introduced to me by my close friend of 35 years and former professor who happened to be lesbian helping me to enter a different perspective with ease. Immediately I was stunned to experience the ways we marginalize some groups of women, woman who make CHANGES like you do, having been freed from restraints… I would have loved to be your student and I would love to figure out how to encourage young feminists to read these extraordinary books. They are as germane today as they were when written. I taught women’s studies for 15 years and by the end of that teaching experience was having difficulty getting my students to read what our foremothers had to say. No doubt the se young women would have embraced the new feminism – barbie and ken –

Thank you for reviving this powerful, perceptive piece by Rich. Your post reminded me of similar wonderful discussions of this piece with students. That’s the part of teaching I miss most. Enjoy!

Adrienne Rich is an exemplary feminist for our times.

Your students sound very sharp & engaged and I wonder if you can explain to me how it is that a man-who-wishes-he-were-a-female is actually construed as female? This as a serious questions although I know that such questions are routinely shut-down on the principle of “no debate”, but I have to ask it because in countries that have gender self-ID, such as Spain, a man can simply assert a female identity and that is then legally defensible. I don’t understand this. What would you say? What would your students say? To me it seems like Rich would be concerned, once again, with the erasure of the reality of the female body and female experiences.

In my own life the reality of my own female body has been incredibly important — in ways good and bad. I don’t understand how someone with male genes and male traits can “be” a woman. He can want to be a woman and emulate what he thinks a woman is, but that’s not the same thing. “Feels like a woman” is odd to me because I never so much “felt like a woman” as I simply was a woman but virtue of my mature female body.

Hi AliB, You bring up an important, interesting and sensitive topic. This is one that FAR often finds itself in the middle of and can be quite contentious. Her at FAR we find it important to support the most vulnerable of our communities and those who are not cis-gendered are at great risk in many communities. The murder rate of our trans population is astronomical and terrifying.

I will let others speak to what Rich might have said but here is what I know, there are people who live a reality that may be different than others in their identifications. Just because I don’t have those identifications myself does not mean they don’t exist for others. For this reason, I think it important for all of us to seek to educate ourselves. You bring up a question for the ages – what is a woman? Is it only because of our physical bodies that we are women? I would say no. And I say no because I don’t think that if someone identifies as a woman with “male genes” as you write is erasing anything from my own experience or that of feminism in general. In fact, I think that various identities only work to enlarge our community and present us with new and liberating ways to exist in this world.

What does it harm anyone to honor and respect the identities of those who don’t fit into the boxes that society has proclaimed? In fact, I think the tenets of feminism would agree. Afterall haven’t we as women sought to break out of the constraints that society has tried to place on us. Why not take it even further and rid ourselves of all gender constraints? How liberating is that?

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such a good analysis!! I love that piece and met Adrienne Rich…and submitted poetry to her when she was editor of SINISTER WISDOM- I cherish my very complimentary but ultimately rejection notice from her- she championed lesbian existence and worked in so many ways to make it possible. A true foremother

“How the narrow and restrictive understanding of “woman” based on a very specific idea of sex erases the reality of the expanse and continuum of women’s experience.”

I think Rich herself would take issue with this statement, as it is being applied in this instance to transwomen. She did not make the mistake of conflating sex and gender, or gender identity. She was specifically describing the cultural dynamics of *female oppression on the basis of sex*. This subjugation enforces (and depends on) a narrow and restrictive definition of women that is applied, regardless of who a woman might feel herself to be, but above all to keep her from transgressing the “feminine” behaviors demanded of her, or challenges male supremacy in whatever ways.

She must comply with these codes of femininity, in which compliance and submission loom so large, or be punished for her resistance to them. These codes include restrictive dress of varying kinds, and substantial constraints on mobility, speech, gaze; limits to access to opportunies in the public sphere, which is, even now, controlled by men. She may be denied access entirely (as women were from universities, government, and the professions not so long ago), or her access may be conditional on her obedience to the rules of male domination. Even when she does comply, she remains at risk for rape and harassment on the basis of sex. She will be paid less (or not at all, in the case of the double shift), get less opportunities and recognition, and undergo countless not-so-micro-aggressions on a daily basis. In the USA four women a day will be killed by men; eleven a day in Mexico.

Rich spent most of her life contemplating all the sexed restrictions inflicted on women, including in her examination of motherhood (voluntary or not), and the devaluing of women’s reproductive labor, and the economics of exploited female labor. (See her book Of Women Born). She was one of our feminist scholars who examined the stark differential of male and female socialization, and its impact on women’s behavior, fear, hesitancy vis a vis male entitlement, choices, and all the foreclosures of choices that systemic patriarchy imposes on women purely on the basis of our female embodiment.

When Rich died, I remember numerous posts on WMST-L, a women’s studies listserv, denouncing Rich for having been friends with Janice Raymond (author of the Transsexual Empire). Some scholars figuratively danced on her grave, women calling her names and saying things like, “I’m glad she’s dead.” You can look it up in the archives. All because she dared to address oppression of the female sex, front and center.

That is still very difficult to do. It is as prohibited as it was before, only under new rationales. In fact it has become taboo in many circles to even name <women> (or mothers), with some zealots arguing for using degrading terminology like “non-men,” or “vagina-havers.” You’ll have seen this kind of language policing. JK Rowling got demonized for objecting to calling women “menstruators.” So now the profoundly sexed experience of conception must be rendered in Newspeak by all right-thinking people as “pregnant people.” Rich wouldn’t be buying this for a second. Her work investigated the profound difference that sex makes in patriarchal societies.

The very values that Rich brought to the table are now under fire. Sex and gender are not the same thing, and attempts to conflate them actually hurt our ability to address the colossal wrongs systematically perpetrated on billions of women. Gender is first and foremost what culture makes of sex (and gender varies quite a lot by culture) and secondarily, gender identity is a personal response to cultural norms.

Many Indigenous cultures recognize/ed variant genders, had specific names for them (especially for transwomen, words with meanings like “women-men” or “like a woman”). These names did not conflate sex and gender, did not try to deny the reality of the sexed body. There are distinct words for woman and transwoman, for example winyan / winkte in Lakota, or fafine / fa’afafine in Samoan (“in the manner of a woman”).

The huge divide among women might be repaired if we took a similar approach. Rather than attempting to naturalize the patriarchal gender system (what we used to call sex stereotypes) as something inherent in “brain sex”, or even to deny the reality of sex itself, recognize variant genders as their own category. Gender until recently meant “a kind” of something. Woman is one kind, not the same experience as transwoman.

We cannot do without a word that describes the sexed experience, embodiment (and specific oppression) of women. The conflation of sex and gender does not serve women’s interests, as we are seeing with women’s sports, or the treatment of some of society’s most vulnerable women in shelters, refuges and prisons. It has been rough on lesbians, who face demands to change the defintion from same-sex orientation to same-gender (but where does that leave butches and femmes? those too are genders, within womanity.) Such demands are both misogynist and homophobic.

Thanks for this Max. I think the point is especially telling in relation to an essay on the erotic connections between women. I tried to imagine what it could mean to situate a male person identifying as a woman ie a transwoman in that context and all I can come up with is static that perpetuates patriarchy’s denial of women’s autonomous sexuality and the very erotic connections between us that Rich describes. Compulsory heterosexuality in another form.

Perhaps the students did not mean literally to imagine transwomen into those erotic connections but just wished to have a similarly liberatory essay for them. However that kind of project would not be a worthy emulation of Rich if it insisted on conflating gender with sex for the reasons you point out.

Thanks for this Max. The point is especially telling in relation to an essay on the erotic connections between women. I tried to imagine a male person identifying as a woman ie a transwoman in that scenario and all I get is static that replicates patriarchy’s denial of women’s autonomous sexuality, especially the erotic connections between us that Rich describes. Compulsory heterosexuality in another form.

Perhaps the students didn’t intend literally to imagine transwomen into Rich’s essay but instead to want a similarly liberatory essay for them. However such an essay would not be a fitting emulation of Rich if it conflates sex and gender, for the reasons you point out.

I appreciate your nuanced analysis.

Thank you so much Max Dashu for restating the basics that, incredibly are getting lost. I especially loved the very simple and indelible: “We cannot do without a word that describes the sexed experience, embodiment (and specific oppression) of women).” Amazing that it has to even be said–but it does; your clarity of language gives us a sentence to use over and over as needed.

Thank you for inviting this Rich conversation on this site and in your classroom

I feel Rich arguing for one of the most basic and liberating freedoms–the freedom to know your own thoughts. This freedom is never a given. It always something that must be sought. It almost always comes with a divesture, a winnowing. Rich’s analysis puts us in touch with the cultural, literary, media-induced obstacles for women to achieve the necessary winnowing. To feel and recognize how deep and persistent a clearing-house she must create in order to make it possible for her to achieve the freedom to know her own thoughts, and go beyond to the glory of expression, invention, creation of works that are her own.

At seventy-six, I am aware that maintaining a mindful clearing-house is a lifetime practice. Also it is one made perilous in these media-policed times where deviation from prescribed thinking on left and right creates a roar of disdain and a plague of shunning. It’s always useful and sometimes illuminating to ask: What am I not allowed to think? What am I not allowed to say? What am I not allowed to do? What or who am I not allowed to be?

PS. I am very late to this conversation. I ear-marked it “to read later” and then later got later and later. So glad to be pulled back onto this site and into this remarkable community. It’s been a while.

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Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo

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Author: Xochitl Alvizo

13 thoughts on “Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo ”

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