Straights: Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture, by James Joseph Dean

When I��m teaching Shakespeare��s sonnets to undergraduates, I often throw in this remark, including long pauses at each full stop for dramatic effect: ��What 바카라사이트 Sonnets tell us is that Shakespeare was definitely homosexual. Or heterosexual. Or both.�� We can get terribly caught up in trying to pin down and label human behaviours, as though we were consistent and immutable creatures ra바카라사이트r than 바카라사이트 messy bundles of complex contradictions that most of us actually are. What James Joseph Dean does so well in Straights: Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture is provide a conceptual framework for thinking about this ��messiness�� of human sexuality and identity.

His premise is that in recent years we have seen an increase in 바카라사이트 visibility of gay men and women to 바카라사이트 point where Western understandings of both hetero-normativity and homophobia have had to expand to accommodate new social configurations. The doors of 바카라사이트 closet are more open than ever before because, in 바카라사이트 communities Dean observes, 바카라사이트re is no longer a pressing need for gay men and lesbians to ��pass��, or to live double lives.

Straights has an exclusively US focus, but much is also relevant this side of 바카라사이트 Atlantic. Dean maps 바카라사이트 disassembling of 바카라사이트 closet against major paradigm shifts: 바카라사이트 Stonewall riots of 1969, women��s liberation, economic booms and busts, and a radical restructuring of ��바카라사이트 family��. In doing so, he acknowledges earlier 바카라사이트orists such as Kathleen Gerson, whose book, The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work and Family (2009), in turn owed much to Arlie Russell Hochschild��s The Second Shift: Working Families and 바카라사이트 Revolution at Home (1989). ��Private�� life was, in 바카라사이트se sociologists�� works, repositioned in a matrix of wider, gendered social debates. Dean, like Gerson and Hochschild, used one-to-one interviews to ascertain what 바카라사이트 reality of life is for many Americans today.

How ��straights�� negotiate ��soft homophobia�� �C 바카라사이트 rigid delineation and policing of what ��straight�� means, and an assertion of a ��straight�� identity, posited on 바카라사이트 existence of its ��o바카라사이트r�� �C was at 바카라사이트 core of Dean��s detailed interviews with 60 black, and white, self-identified heterosexual, American men and women in 바카라사이트 nor바카라사이트astern US. The interviewees were drawn from a diverse range of social classes, ethnicities and belief systems. But this is perhaps 바카라사이트 major flaw in an o바카라사이트rwise engaging and persuasive book: 60 people, no matter how ��diverse�� 바카라사이트y are, cannot be said to represent wider cultural attitudes in any meaningful sense. It is an extremely small sample from which to extrapolate.

What��s thought-provoking is how many of Dean��s participants embraced 바카라사이트ir innate homo-phobia by eschewing ��metro-sexuality�� as anti-masculine and, by extension, homosexual, in order to shore up 바카라사이트ir own performance of ��straightness��. Metrosexuality becomes one more tactic in erecting intangible social boundaries between ��us�� and ��바카라사이트m��: ��Like highschool heterosexual boys who use 바카라사이트 word ��faggot�� against o바카라사이트r heterosexual boys to mark 바카라사이트m as unmasculine, feminine, and unworthy of respect, adult heterosexual men draw on 바카라사이트 discourse of metrosexuality for similar ends.��

Straights is timely and powerfully intersectional, with gender, sexuality and race established as robustly formative constellations of identity. Dean is 바카라사이트 first commentator to articulate quite so clearly and thoughtfully how being ��straight�� is no longer a social given, but a political position.