Heteronormativity

D. Bell, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Cruising The practice of giving and receiving often
fleeting indications of sexual attraction between
passers-by, using nonverbal communication, such as
eye contact or posing. Cruising has a long history in gay
male culture, and is widely practiced in public space as
well as in commercial venues. There have been debates
about whether similar practices between lesbians, and
between heterosexual people, can also be regarded as
cruising.
Quest Romance A common narrative form utilized in
literary texts and other popular culture forms, such as
films and pop songs, the quest romance has a story arc
focused on the (usually ultimately successful) search for
(heterosexual) love, often using fantasy themes,
emphasizing the centrality of romantic (and sexual)
fulfillment as a powerful cultural norm.

Introduction
Heteronormativity is a portmanteau word which borrows
the hetero- from heterosexuality and bolts this onto
normativity, derived from normative, meaning the establishment of a norm, that is, a standard or type. The
term is used in discussions of sexuality, in gender studies
and queer studies, where it describes the ways in which
social institutions and forms of behavior reinforce or
indeed produce belief that certain things are normal; in
this case, obviously, that heterosexuality is the norm. This
normalizing of heterosexuality implies, of course, that
anything different from this is not normal, even abnormal. Heteronormativity, then, is a powerful but often
unmarked set of assumptions, practices, and beliefs that
constantly reinforce the normalness and naturalness of
heterosexuality as the only normal, natural form of
sexuality. So, to understand heteronormativity, we need
first to understand heterosexuality.
Heterosexuality or, perhaps more appropriately, heterosexualities combine a multitude of behaviors, beliefs,
rituals, and institutions. At one level, of course, heterosexuality is about sex: about sex between two bodies (or
two people) defined as opposite on the grounds of certain characteristics, such as their genital anatomy, their
chromosomes, or their genders. But heterosexuality is not
just sexual practice between two opposite-sexed subjects.
It invokes what is sometimes referred to as the heterosexual matrix and in contemporary Western societies

this matrix equates gender, sex, and desire, and binds

these together through rituals, assumptions, and sociospatial practices. So the male sex maps onto masculine
gender, and maps onto desire for female sex and feminine
gender. The condensation of this matrix is the heterosexual couple perhaps most notably the married couple.
This is a romantic, sexual, (potentially) reproductive,
monogamous, lifelong union of two oppositely-sexed
subjects, ritualized through religious or civil ceremony
and supported by countless institutions (government,
religion, family, etc.) and practices (displaying affection,
having children, commemorating anniversaries, etc.). So
heterosexuality is at once a sexual orientation or identity
embedded socially as the only legitimate, normal,
natural form and also much more than this. Such is the
weight of normativizing that surrounds heterosexuality,
that some feminist and queer scholars talk of compulsory
heterosexuality; it is the sexuality which you cannot be.
Rather than seeking to expose irrational prejudices,
such as homophobia, work on heteronormativity focuses
instead on the prescription of certain identities, practices,
and institutions, and the concomitant prohibition of
others. The term as it is currently utilized was allegedly
first coined by US queer critic Michael Warner in 1991,
and since then it has come to be increasingly common in
discussions about the politics of sexuality though the
term is not uncontested. Part of the task of the term is to
remind readers of the sheer weight of this normativizing, and therefore the difficulty of living a life outside of
heterosexual norms. Its association with queer theory
means it is often discussed in terms that draw on psychoanalysis, but it is also deployed in more sociological
discussions, such as those which seek to expose the embedding and reproduction of heteronormativity in social
structures and social relations. Relatedly, geographers
have also explored how space and place are implicated in
heteronormativity.
Spaces of Heteronormativity
Work on geographies of sexuality has developed significantly in human geography, mainly since the late 1980s
and 1990s, yet the overwhelming focus of research has
been on nonheterosexual identities and spaces, from
early work on gay bars and gay gentrification, to work on
lesbian home-making or transgender activism. As we
shall see further, the trajectory of this work is revealing of
the heteronormativity of geography as a site of knowledge production. This key point aside, much work on
geographies of sexuality has implicitly (and sometimes

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Heteronormativity

explicitly) discussed heteronormativity, through its focus

on the spatial practices on non-normative sexual cultures
(most usually those lumped together using the acronym
LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender though
we should note non-normative heterosexualities, too).
This work explores how space and place are part of the
heterosexual matrix in all kinds of ways, and how they are
deeply implicated in heteronormativizing processes.
Here the focus is on five spaces of heteronormativity:
home space, work space, social space, public space, and
nation space.
Home Space
Home as a geographical concept has been a relative
newcomer, though the infrastructures and institutions of
home such as housing have long been a core interest
of geographers. More recently, home has been researched
not just as bricks-and-mortar, but also as ideology and
discourse, as metaphor and as experience: what does it
mean to be at home, to feel at home? Where is home?
Even if we do take home and house as synonymous, we
can see ways in which home is a powerful space of heteronormativity, for example, through the emphasis in
housing design and building on the family home.
Home is a key site where the idea of family is produced,
then home space is family space. But the idea (or ideal) of
family here is very particular: in many white, Western
cultures it means the nuclear family, the family made up
of two opposite-sexed adults, who have a romantic and
sexual relationship (and are also bonded through institutions such as marriage, taxation, legal rights, etc.) and
who, through sexual reproduction, have had children,
themselves assumed to be heterosexual, who are in turn
nurtured into heterosexual adulthood in the space of the
home (and related spaces such as school).
Anyone who lives outside of this norm can be viewed
with suspicion, or pity or at least as having not yet
settled down. So being at home is implicated in a distinct
set of intimate behaviors, too settling down, or living
together and these are markers of maturity, of adulthood. The ubiquitous sociosexual story of our culture,
the quest romance, is a parable of this process, emphasizing the compulsory nature of making home the
space of the romantic heterosexual couple or family unit.
Children growing up with nonheterosexual identities or
desires may therefore experience home as a site of oppression and even exclusion, as countless coming out
narratives attest. (At the same time, one of the ways in
which homosexuality is rendered abnormal is due to its
decoupling of sex from reproduction.)
The idea of home also contains within it particular
notions of privacy the space of the home is private,
intimate space, in distinction to public spaces such as
streets (see ahead). Home is therefore coded as the

proper space for certain kinds of private, intimate behavior, including sex acts (often tellingly euphemized as
making love). In the legislation of sexual practice, for
example, sex which takes place in the home is often afforded greater protection than sex which takes place
elsewhere, whether in a commercial sex venue or in
public space. But this idea of what counts as private and
what counts as sex is also overwritten by heteronormativity, for example, in the legal definition of privacy meaning that there can be no more than two people
present when a private sex act is being engaged in, even
in the home. None of this is to say that other ways of
living are not accommodated under the idea of home, nor
that other life courses are impossible. It is rather to remember the many ways that the idea of home is
powerfully coded, closely bound to the idea of family,
and to reiterate that home and family are arguably the
most concentrated spaces of heteronormativity.
Work Space
Geographies of work have explored how issues of identity
whether individual or collective relate to experiences
of and paths to and through paid employment. Work is
seen as an important site of identity formation, but also as
a key institution through which norms are produced and
reinforced, for example, in relation to gender identities
and ideas about mens work and womens work, or in
terms of class identities and occupational hierarchies.
Workplaces are also sites of heteronormativity, whether
through practices of discrimination, hostile workplace
cultures, or sexualized assumptions about appropriately
gendered work roles (which presume that, for instance,
any man entering what is coded as a female occupation
must be homosexual, given the matrixial equating of male
effeminacy and male homosexuality).
One key and often reported response to the heteronormativity of workplaces is nondisclosure of nonnormative sexual identities, sometimes referred to as
closeting. Work functions as a closet space, to use
Michael Browns term, for those workers unwilling or
unable to disclose non-normative identities, practices, or
desires, who choose (or are forced) to maintain a silence
around their sexuality. Given the implicit and explicit
heterosexualizing of many workplaces heterosexualizing endlessly produced and reinforced through formal
and informal practices, ranging from sexualized banter
between co-workers to the display of photos of partners
and children at work stations closeting is for many
workers an unavoidable strategy, in spite of antihomophobic legislation in many countries. Stereotypical
and commonly held views about male and female
occupational sectors also reproduce work as a space of
heteronormativity, such that male florists are coded as gay
while women plumbers are coded as lesbian codings

Heteronormativity

which affect individual career choices, among other

things. (Debates in recent years about gays in the military provided a particularly vivid example of this.) The
relationship between the gendering of work and heteronormativity also plays out through workplace policies
around maternity and paternity leave, through dress
codes, and through work-based socializing, all reminding
us of the bleeding between home-family space and work
space.

Social Space
As noted, some contexts for socializing, such as those
revolving around work relationships, or indeed family
relationships, may import work-based or home-based
heteronormativity into social space: a drink after work
with colleagues is ambivalently at once work and not
work, and so may not afford de-closeting possibilities.
Yet the possibility of separating work life and family life
from social life might also mean that social spaces offer
opportunities to act differently. Certainly, in the more
recent history of gay cultures in the West, social spaces
have been seen to provide certain kinds of opportunity to
escape from prevailing heteronorms the development
of bars, discos, clubs, commercial sex venues, and so on
provides plentiful evidence of the potential for commercial social spaces as spaces apart from heteronormativity. Of course, there are costs to producing this
space apart: not just the entry costs of commercial spaces,
but the cost of bracketing off such spaces from all other
spaces. The production of gay space, to use the most
accessible example, does little to challenge the status of
everywhere else as straight space. Yet using spending
power to assert the right to claim space has been a very
significant strategy though not an uncontested one
used by non-normative sexual cultures excluded from
other kinds of space. In capitalist societies, this possibility
of buying space to be different has been manifest in the
development of gay villages, notably in larger metropolitan centers.
But, as already noted, bounding one part of the city
as gay space has ambivalent effects. No city feels the
need to designate a straight village, since everywhere
outside the bounded gay space is unreflexively coded as
heterosexualized. Social space is therefore heavily heteronormative, perhaps especially since social space acknowledges and accommodates sexual difference. Selling
social space to non-normative sexual cultures represents a
strategy of containment, too the remaining space can be
safely assumed to be straight, since all the gays are in their
village together. And it also commodifies gayness as a
spectacle of multiculturalism, something to be displayed
as a sign of the tolerant climate of a place. Tolerance is
of course a key tactic of heteronormativity, because

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tolerance reinstates a hierarchy of difference: we (the

normal) tolerate you (the abnormal).
Social space extends beyond bars and clubs, of course,
to encompass a whole range of sites of leisure and
recreation. The list is potentially endless: sports venues,
holiday destinations, performance venues (cinemas,
theatres, concert halls), consumption spaces of all kinds.
Most of these involve a monetary transaction, and here
is a key issue: consumer capitalism is also heteronormative, based on (even exploiting) the heterosexual
matrix. While much has been made about the pink
economy about how the spending power of gay men
has made them a key target market for lifestyle commodities the volume of discussion around this phenomenon reminds us of a much louder silence: that
myriad routine consumption practices reinforce the
heterosexual couple/family as the norm. The weekly
family shop to the supermarket, piling the trolley with
family packs of goods, is a good illustration of this.
Public Space
Of course, a social space like a gay village is not made up
of just bars and clubs; it also includes the public spaces
around those venues the streets, alleyways, car parks,
taxi ranks, etc. Public space has come under increasing
scrutiny from geographers concerned with its perceived
privatization by commercial interests. At the same time,
there has been considerable interest in exploring what
goes on in public spaces how members of the public
interact there. In histories and geographies of non-normative sexual cultures, this focus on public space has
been echoed, for example, in discussions of the use of
streets, parks, and other public spaces as sites of interpersonal intimacy, as in the (mainly) gay practice known
as cruising. Accounts of the generative role of cruising
in the formation of gay culture emphasize that, in the
telling words of historian George Chauncey, privacy
could only be had in public, given the heteronormativity
of nominally private spaces such as the home.
Of course, public space is heavily regulated, and also
subject to the informal social policing that permits some
acts while prohibiting others. A key concern in this regard
is the possibility of displaying affection or attraction in
public. Taken-for-granted actions like holding hands or
kissing have therefore taken on political meanings for
non-normative sexual cultures excluded from their routine practice in public space. Queer activist groups in the
1990s, for example, staged kiss-ins to bring attention to
the iniquities around a seemingly mundane act. Not
feeling able to engage in public displays of affection due
to the pressures of heteronormativity, therefore, marks
public space as another potential closet space.
But public space is also political space, the site for
protest, hence the kiss-ins. Since the birth of the modern

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gay rights movements in the 1960s, heavy stress has been

placed on claiming the right to occupy public space and
to resist heteronormativity there. The development of
Pride marches or Mardi Gras parades in many countries
is the most visible and longstanding manifestation of the
politicized use of public space, with the idea of pride
itself serving to challenge the supposed shame of
non-normative sexuality. Again, of course, there are
tensions here, as public space is routinely, mundanely
heterosexualized, a fact arguably reinforced rather than
undermined by any challenges. Nevertheless, this politicized use of public space remains a central tactic in
antiheteronormative struggles.
Nation Space
The nation is embedded in and productive of heteronormativity in many ways, not least since family and
nation are ideologically wedded, with the family the
bedrock of the nation and the nation imagined as one big
(happy) family. So, for example, defense of so-called
family values is a key project of governments of all
political orientations, since they could hardly stand as
antifamily; while the state maintains a regulative role in
issues around reproduction, such as assisted conception
or parenting roles and responsibilities. At the national
scale, too, the footloose cosmopolite can be labeled as
potentially traitorous, or morally suspect, for their failure
to express fidelity to nationhood such promiscuity has,
in times of geopolitical tension, been ideologically connected to sexual impropriety, for example, during the
Cold War. National citizenship with its bundle of
rights and responsibilities is also a key site of
heteronormativity, as debates over the right of nonheterosexuals to join the armed forces illustrate. Homosexuality is here coded as a threat to national defense,
just as the cosmopolites lack of national(ist) allegiance
equaled a threat to national security. Lastly, the relationship between the national and the international scale
can also bring to light the heteronormativity of nation
space, as seen in the contest between European states and
the European Union over the legal recognition of LGBT
rights.

Challenging Heteronormativity
The discussion of public space earlier raises a bigger
issue, therefore: the issue of how to challenge heteronormativity. Once the reality of heteronorms is acknowledged and made visible, how best can those who
dis-identify with those norms effect social and political
change? One key strategy is to make claims for equal
rights this has been, in fact, a popular and effective

platform for challenging the inequalities that heteronormativity promotes. Arguably the most notable rights
claim at the present moment surrounds the contentious
issue of marriage. In a number of countries around the
world, mostly those where marriage has long been
constructed as the romantic, reproductive union of two
opposite-sexed adult subjects and also as the only legitimate mode of adult living, the issue of gay marriage
has become a hot political topic, and in some countries
variations of civil partnership (a marriage-like contract) have been legalized. While there have been vociferous protests to this, from groups representing some
organized religions for instance, civil partnerships are
becoming recognized, bringing state-defined benefits
and also, in some cases at least, a degree of recognition
for same-sex relationships.
However, critics argue that civil partnerships reinforce
heteronormativity by granting same-sex couples some of
the same rights as opposite-sex couples, on condition that
they live in the same couple formats. This leaves no room
for alternative forms of intimate relationship, effectively
reinstating marriage as the only legitimate bonding (even
while actually denying marriage per se, granting only
something that is marriage-like). The discourse of
families of choice, used by some LGBT groups, similarly maintains the centrality of the idea of family, even
as it attempts to rewrite kinship away from biological
and affinal lines. The harmonizing of normative and
non-normative relationship forms in this way has
been discussed by critics in terms of promoting a
new homonormativity that replicates and therefore
reproduces heteronormativity. (Of course, this leaves
unquestioned any other non-normative sexualities and
relationship forms, such as nondyadic relationships,
bisexuality, etc.)
Pitched against this new homonormativity are various
forms of queer sexual cultures, where queer is used to
signal opposition to norms and normalizing. Rejection of
heteronormativity is performed by queer subjects and
groups through, among other things, political tactics
which disrupt the naturalness of heterosexuality, for
example, by parodying it (as in forms of cross-dressing).
Critics of queer theory and politics argue that its supposed transgressive quality is often little more than
empty posing or postmodern posturing, yet there is a rich
vein of work exploring how tactics like parody can be
utilized in heteronormative spaces as a political provocation, and this provocation has been widely used by
activists to bring to visibility the many ways that heteronormativity does violence to non-normative subjects.
Whether such performances represent better progress in
sexual politics than achieving civil partnership rights is
certainly a contentious question. To end, one more key
site of heteronormativity is considered: the discipline of
geography itself.

Heteronormativity

The Heteronormativity of Geography

Heteronormativity also frames knowledge, shaping the
questions that get asked and the ideas that are taken
seriously. As such, it is produced and reproduced by
academics who, in their role as experts, have (more or
less) unchallenged authority to think and talk intellectually about the world around them. But academics
are not insulated from that world, and their cultures are
also part of the broader cultures of which they find
themselves a part. The same assumptions and norms
shape the production of academic knowledge even as
academia is sometimes a key site from which challenges
to norms are mounted (the development of queer theory,
for instance). But such challenges are often marginal to
the mainstream operations of academic disciplines, operations performed in the classroom and the common
room, in the pages of text books and in conference presentations and let us not forget that academia is a
workplace, too, so the comments made earlier about
heternormativity at work apply here.
Geography as a discipline, a site of knowledge production and dissemination, has wittingly and unwittingly
perpetuated heteronormative knowledges, despite intellectual challenges from, among others, feminist and queer
geographers. Taken-for-granted assumptions about the
family, for example, or about gender roles and relations,
have been resoundingly critiqued in some circles, but
persist in more recalcitrant parts of the discipline. As
noted earlier, for example, the tag geographies of sexuality has, until comparatively recently, been seen to indicate studies of non-normative sexualities (mainly gay
and lesbian). Leaving heterosexuality unmarked, unresearched, is a clear representation of the weight of
heteronormativity in the discipline: heterosexuality
simply isnt legible as sexuality. Recent work with a
critical heterosexuality studies angle is beginning to
redress this a good example is work by Mary Thomas
on how teenage girls perform straight identities and
spaces but that work has yet to filter through to the
heartland of geography. Working harder to expose and

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counter the heteronormativity of geography is a challenge that still lies ahead.

See also: Feminism/Feminist Geography; Gay
Geographies; Gender, Historical Geographies of; Lesbian
Geographies; Patriarchy; Queer Theory/Queer
Geographies.

Further Reading
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Bell, D., Binnie, J., Cream, J. and Valentine, G. (1994). All hyped up and
no place to go. Gender, Place and Culture 1, 31--47.
Binnie, J. (1997). Coming out of geography: Notes towards a queer
epistemology. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15,
223--238.
Binnie, J. and Valentine, G. (1999). Geographies of sexuality A review
of progress. Progress in Human Geography 23, 175--187.
Brown, M. (2000). Closet space. London: Routledge.
Chauncey, G. (1996). Privacy could only be had in public: Gay uses of
the streets. In Sanders, J. (ed.) Stud: Architectures of masculinity,
pp 224--267. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Cowen, D. (2004). From the American lebensraum to the American
living room: Class, sexuality, and the scaled production of domestic
intimacy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22,
755--771.
Kitchin, R. and Lysaght, K. (2003). Heterosexism and the geographies
of everyday life in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Environment and
Planning A 35, 489--510.
Richardson, D. (1996). Heterosexuality and social theory.
In Richardson, D. (ed.) Theorising heterosexuality, pp 1--20.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Valentine, G. (1996). (Re)negotiating the heterosexual street: Lesbian
productions of space. In Duncan, N. (ed.) Body/space: Destabilizing
geographies of gender and sexuality, pp 146--155. London:
Routledge.
Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text 9,
3--17.
Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics
of queer life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Relevant Websites
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/gender-studies/index.htm
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies.
http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/QueerInfo/qstudy.htm
Resources and links for queer studies.
http://www.queertheory.com
Resources and links on queer theory.