The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

From a queer point of view, one of the defining features of straight culture is complaint. Straight women complain about men they date or marry with such gusto that queer people are left shaking our heads and thinking, “My god, why, why, why does this woman stay with someone she finds this pathetic?” In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant demonstrates that complaint was cultivated in women through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to create a singular and normative “women’s culture” organized around the premise that heteroromantic love is what women want most and what they will seek at all costs, even when it fails them and causes them great pain.23 Products marketed to women—cosmetics, romantic films and literature, self-help programs—manufactured sentimental belonging in “shared womanness” by celebrating women’s ability to survive their disappointing and failed relationships, and this survival became a defining feature of women’s empowerment. For Berlant, the female complaint also keeps individual women tethered to their own somewhat-unique expressions of normative heterofemininity: “[Women’s culture] flourishes by circulating as an already felt need, a sense of emotional continuity among women who identify with the expectation that, as women, they will manage personal life and lubricate emotional worlds. This commodity world, and the ideology of normative, generic-but-unique femininity trains women to expect to be recognizable by other members of this int...