Hey y’all, for this week’s post, I read The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward. The book will be released in September of 2020. I was given a free ARC copy of the book thanks to NYU Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, queer feminist scholar Jane Ward reevaluates the question of whether heterosexuality is easier than queerness. With conversations of queer suffering and heteronormativity dominated by cis white men, the realities of other people, including queer womxn and women in heterosexual relationships are not given the same weight. Ward states that heterosexuality for women can be a state of violence, control, and disappointment, and that experiences of force, sexual assault, incest, economic dependence, and domestic violence common to heteronormativity and straight culture are often not taken into account in these comparisons between queerness and heterosexuality. Ward takes an intersectional approach to look at the situation for women created by misogyny and heterosexuality, and finds it easier to see how heterosexuality can benefit from many aspects of queerness.
In her book, Ward explores how straight men desire women’s services but not women themselves; want women, but do not truly like women. Hetero relationships too often reflect the patriarchal history of marriage as a contract and the identity of heterosexuality firmly anchored in opposite-sex desire, rather than empathizing with the desires of their partners. Ward hopes to show through her book that normalization of violence and hatred are core components of straight culture from its conception, projects to repackage feminist ideals to help men in their self-interest of not seeming like “creepy” or “undesirable” reflect a neoliberal project that does not get to the core of the heteropatriarchal dynamic that causes such problems, and that queer people are keen observers of the tragedy of heterosexuality. In conclusion, Ward states that heterosexual men can learn from queerness, becoming “women-identified” in the sense that straight men can learn to have a feminist, subjectifying desire for women, viewing them not as opposites, but someone to relate and identify with.
Overall I enjoyed reading the book, but at times found the content repetitive from earlier chapters. The sections about the “self-help” industry for men and the neoliberal project to monetize feminist ideals in the self-interest of men to seem more attractive to women illuminated a whole culture I didn’t even know existed before this. Although the book was interesting, I thought it lacked strong transitions between the topics and the information seemed like it wasn’t organized in the best way possible. Because of this, the book sometimes lacked flow and seemed choppy. Based on the description of the book which stated, “A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo”, I expected the book to discuss the #MeToo movement more directly and in more depth than it did. The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is a fascinating piece of queer feminist analysis, but it didn’t wow me as much as I had expected based on the description.
Danny's Bookstack 