Heteronormativity in Action

Even some of my most theory-minded students roll their eyes a little at that word, heteronormativity . It isn’t an elegant term, I’d agree. But the concept is an important and legitimately useful one, I think. It is essentially a specific form of what Antonio Gramsci thought of as ideologically-interested “common sense”, a perspectival unconscious that influences everything we think and say but that we’re scarcely aware of. I would depart from Gramsci in that I think much of this common sense is made or manipulated not so much to consciously serve the interests of any social group but is instead like the accumulation of geological layers at the bottom of an ocean bed. It’s what history becomes as it decomposes. It’s the way the past resides in our minds, as a hodgepodge and contradictory set of assumptions about what is normal.

Scholars who study race have made note of the way that whiteness gradually became the unreferenced, invisible norm from which blackness or Asianness or any other racialized identity was imagined as different. A similar history applies with sexuality and gender—and it is that to which the term heternormativity refers.

It’s hard to deny that something like that exists in the United States in the wake of New Jersey governor’s James McGreevy’s resignation yesterday. It’s a phenomenon that stands outside of whether one approves of homosexuality or not: it has to do with how we instantly frame and understand particular events.

The story as it played out last night was that the governor had come out of the closet, and was resigning because of it. Even his opponents were shocked, stunned, confused, and in some cases, respecting his “courage”. This has a bit to do with how McGreevy himself framed his resignation in his speech, but I think it’s the reaction most people probably had in some measure on hearing the news, a kind of shocked double-take mixed with some sympathy for him.

Now imagine this instead: a governor already under fire for dubious political practices and hints of corruption resigning because it was revealed that he had an extramarital affair with a woman and had placed that woman—without qualifications—in a high-paying job within his administration. We’d all yawn, more or less. Sure, there would be coverage, and sure, there would be political fallout. But as a story, it would also have something of a dog bites man character to it. We expect it, we’ve seen it before in American politics.

And yet, that’s McGreevy’s story, too. His sexual orientation is beside the point: it’s not why he had to resign. He had to resign because he was already skirting the edge of unethical patronage practices and with the placement of his lover in a job in his administration had gone right off the edge. But it takes effort, even for those who follow New Jersey politics closely, to move their minds onto that track, to recognize the actual banality of the story in its details. That’s the subtle difference that accumulated histories of identity make: they lead us to misrecognize something that’s as plain as day.

Would it be progress if we got to the point where a gay man doing something unethical was just another humdrum case of corruption in politics? Yeah, at least from where I’m sitting, it would be.