Page 44 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

28 Gender and Sexuality

and dominant. Within the heterosexual majority, those different iterations
or forms of sexuality tend to be obscured. The categorical norm of male -
female makes us think everyone in the majority practices the same hetero-
sexuality. But, of course, that is not the case. Some heterosexual women
have what the culture calls strong “ masculine ” traits, while others prefer
less assertive approaches to gender identity and to sexuality. And the same
range can be found in men, between active and passive, assertive and recep-
tive, and so on. We are many things sexually.
When one takes gay and lesbian experience into account, the simplicity
of gender and sexuality is also challenged. Add bisexuality, and things
become more complex. Moreover, around the world, people unhappy with
the physical gender nature assigned them dress the part of the gender they
prefer, and they can have surgery that transforms them into a manufac-
tured version of the natural gender they would have preferred. Some people
enjoy multiple forms of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual; they
make the socially normative injunction that one has to be choosy seem
overly restrictive. The gay - lesbian - bisexual - transsexual challenge to heter-
onormativity is not limited to noting that alternatives exist; it also strikes
at the way the norm operates to curtail and repress multiple possibilities
and multiple sexual desires within heterosexual identity itself. Scholars of
sexuality have found that most people ’ s desires are not limited to the privi-
leged heterosexual object assigned to his or her identity within the hetero-
sexual matrix. Many heterosexual men feel desire at some point in their
lives for other men, and the same is true of heterosexual women.
Nevertheless, a study of gender and sexuality in human culture reminds
us that culture is also nature. Humans may fabricate cultural lessons
regarding appropriate gender identity that conditions or determines how
future generations of young people are trained to behave (boys learn never
to wear dresses in most cultures), but each human being is a physical
machine programmed by genetics and propelled by chemicals. Some of the
interesting complexity of gender culture and some of the most compelling
problems of gender identity arise at those points where physical drives
confront cultural norms. Lesbian women, for example, who could not
imagine being heterosexual for perfectly natural reasons, found themselves
in the past stigmatized because they did not embrace the gender norms of
the cultures in which they lived. All human cultures are dominated by
heterosexual men and by the social imperatives that seem to be the cultural
legacy of their biological reality. Fear of homosexuality and especially of
female homosexuality has been a consistent feature of male heterosexual