Libidinous politics: heterosex, 'transgression' and social change

Abstract

Heterosexuality is simply rarely examined nowadays in Gender/Sexuality scholarship. It is largely taken to be of little critical interest, as simply to be equated with heteronormativity. The present conflation of heterosexuality with heteronormativity presents dominant practices as monolithic, as all of a piece, and unchanging. In other words, the conflation over-determines this sexual mode as a source of domination and under-theorises it as a site for social dissonance or even a potential source of subversion. This paper, by contrast, considers the term transgression in relation to heterosexuality and in particular to heterosex. It is asserted that transgression might be intrinsic within dominant practices like heterosexuality (rather than necessarily always external to them). In the process the potential of the term transgression is compared with other terms like subversion/dissent/protest. The term is explored in the context of heterosexuality by drawing upon a range of resources such as analyses arising from environmental politics, Deleuze's conception of ‘becoming’, accounts which foreground ethical considerations (Carmody; Jenkins; White) and the notion of ‘social flesh’. This discussion leads to the question of what might transgression in the realm of the dominant look like; how might a transgressive heterosexuality be conceptualised? Such an account complicates our understandings of self and social change and thus opens up hopeful possibilities.