Adrienne Rich's Essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

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Adrienne Rich attacks heterosexuality as “a political institution which disempowers women” in her 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (Rich 23). What most see as a traditional way of life, Rich views as a societal mandate that serves as “a beachhead of male dominance,” (Rich 28). For a woman in Virginia Woolf’s time, “the one profession that was open to her [was] marriage,” and though females entered the public sphere as the 20th century progressed, “single women…are still viewed as deviant” and somewhat ostracized (Woolf 25 and Rich 30). Compulsory heterosexuality, Rich argues, is one of many institutions that historically and currently have allowed men to maintain a dominant societal position, and this institution, although seemingly unrelated, is fundamentally parallel to American slavery, which was even more compulsory for Africans than heterosexuality is to women. These institutions are strongly linked when considered with Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, which examines colonialism as “relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production,” (Césaire 42). His primary concern with colonization, the method by which a relationship of colonialism is established, is not the physical presence of colonists trespassing on land that doesn’t belong to them. Rather, he deplores colonialism because the relationship between oppressor and oppressed has negative consequences for both parties. “Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer,” who is acting towards a self-serving, profit-driven goal and “not [as] a philanthropic enterprise,...

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