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Gender & Society
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Heteronormativity and Homonormativity as Practical and Moral Resources

The Case of Lesbian and Gay Elders

Dana Rosenfeld

The Center for Social Gerontology and the Research Institute for Life Course Research, Keele University

Studies of heteronormativity have emphasized its normative content and repressive functions, but few have considered the strategic use of heteronormative and homonormative precepts to shape sexual selves, public identities, and social relations. Adopting an interactionist approach, this article analyzes interviews with homosexual elders to uncover their use of heteronormative premises (specifically, the presumption of heterosexuality, and the gender binary) to pass as heterosexual. Informants also used homonormative precepts, grounded in a postwar, pre-gay liberation assimilationist homosexual politics they adopted in their early years and maintained in later life, to justify passing and to frame their understanding and evaluation of past and present homosexual practices. Viewed through a homonormative lens, heteronormativity provided the tools for personal survival in a hostile society and for the collective production of a respectable homosexual culture. Informants’ strategic use of heteronormativity can help explain heteronormativity’s survival despite the incoherence and fragility of its content.

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Gender & Society, Vol. 23, No. 5, 617-638 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0891243209341357
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