Heterosexual Matrix
이성애 매트릭스
A concept Judith Butler used in Gender Trouble (1990) for the grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desires are naturalised. Within it, for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. Butler said the term drew on Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality”.
In depth
The heterosexual matrix is the term Butler used, within the theory of gender performativity, to explain how gender and sexuality are inextricably linked. Butler characterised it as a hegemonic discursive and epistemic model of gender intelligibility. Within that model sex, gender and desire must cohere, and bodies that fall outside the coherence become unintelligible or unnatural.
Butler’s first source was the radical lesbian theorist Monique Wittig. In “The Category of Sex” Wittig argued that the categories “male” and “female” mask the economic, political and ideological power imbalances between men and women; oppression precedes and creates the idea of a biological sex, not the other way round, and heterosexuality enforces women’s subjugation through mechanisms such as marriage, domestic labour and forced reproduction. In “The Straight Mind”, first delivered to the Modern Language Association in 1978, she wrote that “lesbians are not women”. The second source, Adrienne Rich, argued in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) that heterosexuality is not natural or intrinsic to humans but a political institution that supports men’s domination of women.
Chapter 2 of Gender Trouble, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix”, revisits three accounts of how the incest taboo turns sex into gender: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, with its kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere’s “womanliness as a masquerade” that hides a masculine identification; and Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, in which the ego incorporates the lost loved one. With Freud, Butler argued that “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition”. For heterosexuality to remain stable it needs a notion of homosexuality within culture, and the incest taboo generates and regulates both approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists beforehand.
The concept fed into the discussion of heteronormativity: the stability of heterosexual and cisgender identities depends in part on rejecting homosexual and transgender subjects, which connects to what Butler called the cultural requirement for cohesion between biological sex, gender identity and sexual desire. In queer theory, “queering” heterosexuality came to mean disrupting the rules under which, according to the heterosexual matrix, bodies, genders and desires are considered “natural” and “normal”. Butler’s own example of such a practice was drag, which unsettles the notion of an original gender.