The elephant in the room: Heterosexuality in critical gender/sexuality studies

Abstract

Taking Turns is an open forum for brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite Nordic as well as non-Nordic scholars to present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research. In this issue, we are handing the relay over to Chris Beasley, an Australian feminist scholar and Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Adelaide, whose main areas of research interest are ethics, culture, and gender/sexuality theory. She is currently in the process of working on two books, one concerned with the cultural politics of popular contemporary film, and the other a co-authored book on heterosexuality. In her position paper for NORA, she argues forcefully for the pressing need for alternative feminist approaches to heterosexuality.