Un‐believing the matrix: queering consensual heteronormativity

Abstract

Two key concepts arising from Butler’s work are the heterosexual matrix – the conflation of sex‐gender‐sexuality which leads to the normalisation of heterosexuality – and performative reinscription – the discursive process by which the marginalised Other brings new meanings to normative identity constructions. While we have found both concepts useful, we consider the extent to which the very act of naming – or in Althusser’s words, hailing – the heterosexual matrix reifies it. Drawing on our own research on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in primary schools, we consider disruptions (breaking what Butler describes as echo‐chains) and reinscriptions (forging new ones) as approaches to queering consent. This vision requires disorganisation rather than resistance and replaces the metaphor of the matrix as a system of externally imposed rules with an understanding of how the matrix – to the extent that it exists at all – relies on hegemony as organised consent.

Keywords:

• heterosexual matrix
• hegemony
• consent
• performative reinscription

Notes

1. Butler more fully defines the heterosexual matrix as ‘a hegemonic discursive/epistemological model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality’ (1990, 151).

2. The slogan from the film’s advertisement became something of a popular mantra.

3. We call upon Valerie Walkerdine’s metaphor of ‘unpicking the knitting’ (as cited by Nixon and Givens 2006).

4. For more information, see DePalma and Atkinson (2007b), and visit our project website at www.nooutsiders.sunderland.ac.uk.

5. Since teachers mentioned here are conducting action research in their own classrooms, we are using their real (first) names, with their permission. All other participants have been assigned pseudonyms.

6. The Civil Partnership Act came into force in the UK in December 2005, allowing same‐sex partners the same rights and responsibilities as married couples.

7. This is a popular catchphrase of the only gay character in the comedy series Little Britain, aimed at an adult audience but widely watched by children.

8. An exquisitely simple example of a momentary decoupling of certainties occurred in one project school where a teacher, upon hearing one child call another ‘gay’, asked, ‘Did you mean that as an insult or a compliment?’

9. See Atkinson (2007) for a notable exception.