Heterosexism and the Study of Women's Romantic and Friend Relationships

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 2000 by Suzanna Rose

Suzanna Rose [*]

The study of women's relationships has been guided by cultural scripts that are deeply heterosexist. In this article, the impact of cultural scripts on the research agenda is explored concerning two aspects of romantic and friend relationships: sexuality and relationship development. Research on lesbians is used to demonstrate how the inclusion of sexual orientation in relationship research challenges heterosexist assumptions and provides new directions for research.

The study of women's romantic and friend relationships has been deeply affected by theories and research that are implicitly heterosexist (Kitzinger & Perkins, 1993; Wood & Duck, 1995). Heterosexism refers to an ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes nonheterosexual forms of behavior, identity, relationship, or community (Herek, 1993). Although current models of relationships do not explicitly demean homosexuals or homosexuality, they generally are derived from cultural scripts that hold heterosexual relationships to be the norm. This assumption has limited research on women's relationships in at least two ways. First, it has caused lesbian relationships to be understudied or studied primarily along dimensions deemed relevant to heterosexual relationships (Wood & Duck, 1995). For example, research has examined whether lesbians have or want enduring relationships or adopt "husband" and "wife" roles (e.g., see Peplau, 1991, for a review). Signs of abnormality among lesbians also have been assessed, such as how dysfunctional, unhappy, deviant, or impoverished they were compared to heterosexual women (Peplau, 1991). This research has been significant in depathologizing lesbian relationships but has not examined lesbians from the standpoint of their own experience (Huston & Schwartz, 1995). Second, heterosexist biases have defined what is studied or neglected in terms of heterosexual women's experience. For instance, research on sexuality often focuses exclusively on behaviors or outcomes that are mutually preferred or preferred by men (e.g., sexual intercourse) but excludes others that women considered to be important as well (e.g., touching, female orgasm).

The intent in this chapter is to explore how research on women's sexual orientation might be used to expand our understanding of women's relationships with partners and friends. First, cultural scripts for relationships and their impact on the research agenda will be explored. The second goal is to place lesbians at the center of the analysis of relationships in order to raise new questions as well as to reveal the embedded heterosexism of past research. A selective review of research will be used to illustrate what is known and what might yet be learned about women's relationships.

Cultural Scripts for Romance and Friendship

Social constructions of romance and friendship have profound implications for how behavior is organized through the process of cognitive scripting. Scripts are cognitive structures that shape how knowledge is categorized and used to understand and remember events (Bower, Black, & Turner, 1979; Shank & Abelson, 1977). Simon and Gagnon (1986) proposed that scripts operate on three distinct levels: cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic. Cultural scripts refer specifically to the instructional guides that exist at the level of collective life that instruct individuals in the requirements of specific roles within a relationship. Interpersonal scripts pertain to the application of cultural scenarios by the individual in a specific social context. Intrapsychic scripts represent an individual's private world of wishes and desires. Behavior operates under the combined guidance of these scripts, but in most instances, "doing" the relationship satisfactorily means broadly following a cultural script (Allan, 1993).

Cultural scripts not only serve as blueprints for individual behavior but also have inspired major lines of research concerning relationships. The ideology of heterosexism embedded in cultural scripts has had a particularly distinct influence on what has been studied. Several examples illustrate this point. First, heterosexual marriage has been ritualized in the cultural script for romance. The host of studies done on premarital sex and courtship reflect and reinforce this particular script. In the past, the romance script had a high degree of shared meaning and was seldom challenged. The script loses its predictability for lesbians, however, because there is less shared meaning. The notions of premarital sex and courtship make less sense from a lesbian perspective, given that marital sex as demarcated by a societally recognized legal or religious ritual does not exist for them.

Second, cultural scripts strongly endorse gender roles by prescribing that women and men express different motives and behaviors within relationships. These roles (e.g., passive female, active male) create dynamics and dependencies that contribute to the idea that heterosexual relations are a likely, natural, and normal outcome of cross-sex interactions. Research on friendship reflects these cultural assumptions. For instance, in studies of cross-sex friendship, it invariably is assumed that cross-sex interactions may have a sexual component (Werking, 1997). In contrast, questions about sexuality rarely are asked when studying same-sex friendships.