The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Fat Lesbians vs. the ‘Heteronormative Gaze’
31st May 2015
The Other McCain continues peering under the rock.
It should be noted that, according to federal research, 2.3% of the U.S. population (about 1-in-40 American adults) is either gay or bisexual. Yet lesbianism is vastly overrepresented in the faculty and curricula of Women’s Studies programs to such an extent that Carmen Rios, communications director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, jocularly described these departments as “Lesbo Recruitment 101.” This anti-heterosexual bias is reflected in the contents of Feminist Frontiers, which includes selections with titles like “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (p. 153), “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality” (p. 309) and “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (p. 536). Among the lesbian feminist authors cited as references by the contributors are Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin, Celia Kitzinger, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Marilyn Frye, Gayle Rubin, Audre Lorde and Arlene Stein.