The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

Queer conversations about the boredom of straight life take place with different languages and at multiple registers. In the academic realm of queer studies, the fact that straight culture feels tedious and repetitive is sometimes traced back to the way gender itself is a repetition, a never-ending process of attempting to achieve normative, or at least legible, femininity or masculinity.15 Everyone more or less follows the same predictable scripts that signal gender success in a given time and place. Sometimes queer scholars understand the mechanical and unoriginal quality of straight culture to be reflected in its obsession with reproduction, or the ways that straight adults so often pin their own value and happiness on their children’s future accomplishments—a literal reproduction of themselves.16 Numerous queer scholars have also argued, in different ways, that heterosexuality is intended to be boring, its very design aimed at control and predictability. Straight culture keeps people having babies, buying products, working hard in the paid labor force to support children, and fearing many of the potentially less boring sexual desires and/or subcultural practices that are inconvenient for capitalism, white supremacy, and the state.17