Keith

“When I started this research, I believed, like most of us, that heterosexual feelings, acts, and relationships exist completely apart from the word and the concept. I perceived the word and concept to be reflections of a heterosexual thing-in-itself. That thing, I assumed, has long preceded the words and idea.

I've ended up thinking that this, our usual, commonsense assumption, significantly distorts and substantially simplifies the historical relationship of the word heterosexual and the concept, the feeling, activity, and system. I now believe that those relationships are much more active and complicated.

To be as clear as I can about this complexity: I don't think that the invention of the word heterosexual, and the concept, created a different-sex erotic.

I do think that the doctors' appropriation of the word and idea of heterosexuality newly and publicly legitimated the previously existing but officially condemned different-sex eroticism of the middle class. The word heterosexual, and the concept, then helped to re-create this sexed eroticism as, specifically, "heterosexual" within a new, specifically "heterosexual" society.

This radical social-constructionist analysis contradicts our hard-held contrary hypothesis, that heterosexuality just is, un-mediated by language and ideas, or only superficially mediated. According to that just-is hypothesis, heterosexuality is a thing apart from the word and concept, and objectively existing fact of male and female flesh.

The idea that a heterosexual thing exists apart from discourse is itself a powerful conceptual ploy that keeps the historical discourse about heterosexuality from being examined closely. For the just-is idea makes a history of the word heterosexual, and the concept, a paltry trifle. If heterosex just is, the history of the word and the concept is superstructural, and overlay on top of the real, essential, authentic heterosexual thing. It's not, as I've written this book to show.

Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as that which is outside discourse. It's manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal. It's constructed in a historically specific discourse as that which is outside time. It was constructed quite recently as that which is very old: Heterosexuality is an invented tradition.”
― Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality