On refusing to become, or to remain, heterosexual

This essay pushes back against mainstream queer and feminist discourses that assume an ontological distinction between lesbians and straight women. This distinction is a commonplace feature of a spate of recent books and films produced and marketed to mainstream feminist audiences. This idea of sexuality as ontology is key to the resurgence of biological determinism that has defined LGBT political advocacy in the twenty-first century. This biological determinism, or what we might call, following Lady Gaga, the "born this way" discourse, has pushed feminist discourse into a fatalistic heteropessimism, or the idea that heterosexuality is irredeemable but that straight women are simply stuck with it. This, despite the reality that many women can and do refuse to become or to remain heterosexual. Such discourses, I argue, are profoundly anti-feminist because they obscure how heterosexuality works as a political system. Thus, under the guise of admiring lesbians' freedom from men, heteropessimist feminism paradoxically reinscribes heteropatriarchy's status as natural. Instead of accepting the limited gains that the "born this way" discourse has achieved, we must advocate for sexual freedom and autonomy built around the fundamental premise that our desires are contextual, not static, innate, and unchangeable.