The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Unlike previous chapters, Chapter 7’s introduction begins with the discussion of a quote not from a popular public text but from an academic source: R T Goodman’s Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies. Ahmed uses this text as a reminder of her previous point that biological reproduction is often conflated with perpetuation of the social ideal. The traditional family is portrayed as vulnerable and in need of defense. Heterosexuality between white men and women becomes a prescribed means of defending both the status quo and its future. Immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and mixed-race couples are stuck together into a threatening object. These narratives shape the identities and bodies of both those who obey their prescriptions and those who contradict them. Ahmed compares the workings of these regulatory norms to physical labor that, in repeatedly impressing on and orienting bodies in a prescribed manner, creates a kind of “repetitive strain injury” and contorts bodies “into shapes that enable some action only insofar as they restrict capacity for other kinds of action” (Location 3362 of 6419). Heteronormativity is one such regulatory norm.

Heterosexuality, Ahmed argues, is not simply a matter of one’s chosen sexual partners. It is an investment in the perpetuation of heterosexuality as a norm permeating and structuring the collective.