The Invention of Heterosexual Culture

Heterosexuality is celebrated--in film and television, in pop songs and opera, inliterature and on greeting cards--and at the same time taken for granted. It is the cultural andsexual norm by default. And yet, as Louis-Georges Tin shows in The Invention ofHeterosexual Culture, in premodern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternativeculture. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of theheterosexual couple was not. Tin maps the emergence of heterosexual culture in Western Europe andthe significant resistance to it from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Tinwrites that before the phenomenon of "courtly love" in the early twelfth century, the man-womanpairing had not been deemed a subject worthy of more than passing interest. As heterosexualitybecame a recurrent theme in art and literature, the nobility came to view it as a disruption of thefeudal chivalric ethos of virility and male bonding. If feudal lords objected to the "hetero" inheterosexuality and what they saw as the associated dangers of weakness and effeminacy, the churchtook issue with the "sexuality," which threatened the Christian ethos of renunciation anddivine love. Finally, the medical profession cast heterosexuality as pathology, warning of anepidemic of "lovesickness."

Noting that the discourse of heterosexualitydoes not belong to heterosexuals alone, Tin offers a groundbreaking history that reasserts thecultural identity of heterosexuality.

Louis-Georges Tin, born in Martinique and now living in Paris, lectures in the arts faculty at the University of Orleans. He is the editor of The Dictionary of Homophobia, the founder of the Paris-based IDAHO Committee, which coordinates International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, and cofounder and spokesman for the Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN).