Heterosexuality. It is a sexual orientation characterized by desire and attraction towards people of the opposite sex. A heterosexual man is attracted to women, while a heterosexual woman is attracted to men.
Concept
It is designated with the term of heterosexual to everything that belongs to or related to heterosexuality. Meanwhile, heterosexuality refers to sexual orientation that is characterized by sexual attraction or love desire towards those individuals who belong to and have a sex opposite to ours and which is certainly opposed to homosexuality (sexual attraction between individuals of the same sex). and bisexuality (an individual is attracted to people of the same sex and to those of different sex).
Sexual orientation
About sexual orientation there are two fundamental aspects: if it responds to a genetic or social condition. There are those who believe that individuals are born heterosexual or homosexual and that their desire follows a genetic pattern. Other people argue that sexual inclination is the product of the individual’s free choice. In the case of humans, reproduction is only possible through heterosexual relationships (unlike other species whose individuals are hermaphrodites). Human subsistence, therefore, requires heterosexuality. According to these criteria, many dare to affirm that any relationship between people of the same sex is not natural.
Mandatory heterosexuality and feminism
In the 1980s, thanks to lesbian feminists like Monique Wittig or lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich, they affirm that feminism contains a presumption of heterosexuality in its political theories and practices. But Wittig, goes even further, in a congress in the United States affirms that “the lesbians are not women ”while the concept of womanit is always defined in relation to men: “It would be improper to say that lesbians live, associate, or make love with women because women have no meaning except in heterosexual systems of thought and in heterosexual economic systems.” Lesbians, with their practices, displacements, and re significations present other ways of being in the world and cannot be defined as women.
Wittig’s main objective is to problematize the identities that supposedly emerge from the body and sexuality, that is, to question the continuity that is believed to exist between sex and gender as well as the man-woman binomial. Finally, Monique Witting, will conceive both, lesbians and homosexual men, together with women and “all” as “the others”, the otherness that heteronormativity has placed in oppression. In this way, Wittig establishes an important identity alliance, based on shared oppression, between the gay and lesbian movement and the feminist movement and opens a deep gap, from which feminist theory has not yet recovered, in the subject of political and ontological representation of feminism.