Archives from the FAR founders: Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo 

This was originally posted on Feb 10, 2024

I recently reread the essay titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” by late poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, with my students this semester. Published in the summer of 1980, on the heels of the Women’s Liberation Movement, I found that the essay still maintains its relevance and challenges us to remember that feminism is a political movement that itself must be continually interrogated.  

The essay (which you can read here, with a foreword from Rich published 23 years after the original) has four sections which are titled only with the roman numbers I-IV. I labeled these sections for my students to try and capture the focus of each: I. Compulsory Heterosexuality – The Groundwork; II. Male Power and the Inequality of the Sexes; III. Lesbian Existence as Political Identity; and IV. Woman-Identification as Source of Power and Energy.  

Part I lays the groundwork for her piece, which involves two central points: the first is the fact that there is a bias of compulsory heterosexuality which pervades not only literature at large but also specifically feminist literature and scholarship, and, the second, that this bias not only erases the continuum of lesbian experience among women, but “forces into hiding and disguise” the ways in which women may choose one another as comrades, partners, lovers, and primary community (31). Through examples from literature and psychology, she demonstrates the multiple ways heterosexuality is not only assumed, but set up and presented as if it is the only viable option – the assumed norm. Thus, Rich makes the case that heterosexuality should be properly seen as a political institution that disempowers women (17).  

Part II is heavy with many examples of male power as “societal forces” that “wrench women’s emotional erotic energies away from themselves and other women” – the forces ranging from physical force, like rape and enslavement, to control of consciousness, through forms of compulsion emanating from “art, literature, film” and the “idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage” (17-19). In this section she also raises the question of whether consent is possible within a context of such deeply rooted inequality among the sexes; and makes the point that compulsory heterosexuality is fundamentally about male-identification (22, 24).  

In part III Rich turns her attention to the vast range and diversity of woman-identified experience, and argues that in as much as the lesbian existence breaks a taboo and rejects a (heterosexual) compulsory way of life, it is a political identity. This in part explains why the history of lesbian experience is intentionally destroyed, erased, for it is a “direct and indirect attack on the male right of access to women” (22). Finally, in part IV Rich outlines how the denial of “the reality and visibility” of woman-identification represents a loss of power and source of energy for women. Compulsory heterosexuality creates an absence of choice, and can therefore be seen as a crime against women in as much as it robs them of the possibilities of the wide range of lesbian experience, along with the energy, power, and sensuality it provides.  

As I reread the essay, I was again struck by the boldness of this piece, written in 1980, as well as its continuing relevance for our society today. Adrienne Rich outlined and named the compulsory nature of heteronormativity in society at large and demonstrated how feminist scholars are also complicit in the erasure and distortion of women-identified women, and of all who fall within the continuum of the lesbian experience. My students pointed out that a parallel essay could be written today in terms of the distortion and denial of trans women’s experience. How the narrow and restrictive understanding of “woman” based on a very specific idea of sex erases the reality of the expanse and continuum of women’s experience.   

While in some ways the piece is quite heavy, delineating the very familiar characteristics of the “power of men,” pointing out how these effectively preserve sexual inequality, “strip[ing] women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential…(specifically) the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity,” it is also clear that Rich’s underlying commitment is the movement for liberation (20). The liberation she seeks is the possibility to live otherwise – in a vast multitude of ways, free from coercive power and with the potential for mutuality, dignity, autonomy, and integrity. She writes with the aim of contributing to “new social relations between the sexes” and writes for those who see themselves as part of that movement.  

There were two specific points from Rich’s essay that we raised for discussion and analysis in class when we read the piece: 1) her very poignant question about why “the means of impregnation (for procreation)” must be so rigidly identified with “emotional/erotic relationships” (17); and 2) if sexual inequality and male-identification is built right into the very fabric of society, what are the conditions needed to make sexual consent between heterosexual people possible—is it possible (24)? What are the actual possibilities for undoing this power that is “everywhere wielded over women”? (37). 

It was not a light read for my students last week, many who are entering the field of critical theory for the first time. But it was very fulfilling to get to discuss with them this classic feminist writing from over 50 years ago and to see how both the essay and my students continue to contribute to the ongoing conversation that is part of the feminist, and now queer, movement for liberation. Which is by definition necessary to any living movement. Which is precisely the point Rich made in the Afterword of the 2003 republication of “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” stating, “my essay should be read as one contribution to a long exploration in progress, not as my own “last word” on sexual politics” (37).  

What word would you like to add to the discussion?