Posts Tagged ‘heterosexuality’

How do we write about love of cock?

There’s something embarrassing, shameful, about enormous desire: cuntstruck, dick-drunk, dickmatized, down bad. So much work goes into pretending to be more upright, less addicted, than we really are. When I…

Compulsory Heterosexuality, Past and Present: Adrienne Rich and the Lesbian Masterdoc

I started using TikTok in late 2020. Not long after joining, the app began feeding me videos by queer women who enthusiastically praised something called the “Lesbian Masterdoc,” describing it…

Hetero Ever After? Romance Novels, Race, and the Limits of Social Dreaming

Heteropessimism is everywhere, it seems, from our newsfeeds to our brunch conversations — and now, also, in our book clubs. This gender malaise plays out in contemporary literary fiction with…

Sally Rooney’s Love Plot as Gimmick

The novel is, by definition, formally heteropessimist: gesturing towards queerness at the levels of narrative, style, and perspective while resolving upon heterosexual coupledom in the end. This, at least, is…

The Performativity of Heteropessimism as Feminist Complaint

“Females, however, and effeminate men enjoy having people to wail with them” — Aristotle1 Around the time I turned thirty, I was dating the most magnetic man I’d ever met….