This article examines accounts of heterosexuality in media for children. The authors analyze all the G-rated films grossing $100 million dollars or more between 1990 and 2005 and find two main accounts of heterosexuality. First, heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative. Second, heterosexuality outside of rela...

According to Steven Seidman, analysts of institutionalized heterosexuality have ‘focused exclusively on its role in regulating homosexuality’ and, while queer approaches theorize how ‘homosexuality gains its coherence in relation to heterosexuality, the impact of regimes of normative heterosexuality on heterosexuality has largely been ignored’ (2005: 40). Over the last decade and more, however,...

This study used a qualitative research design to explore hospital policies and practices and the assumption of female heterosexuality. The assumption of heterosexuality is a product of discursive practices that normalize heterosexuality and individualize lesbian sexual identities. Literature indicates that the assumption of female heterosexuality is implicated in both the invisibility and marke...

Heterosexual people with more positive attitudes to lesbians and gay men generally believe that homosexuality is immutable, is not a discrete social category, and that homosexuality exists in all cultures and time periods. Equivalent beliefs about heterosexuality and beliefs about components of sexuality have been less often researched. 136 people with diverse sexualities described heterosexual...

Abstract. Previous research demonstrates that membership of majority groups is often perceived as more fragile than minority groups. Four studies ( N 1 = 90, 2 247, 3 500, 4 1,176) investigated whether this was the case for heterosexual identity, relative to gay identity. Support heterosexuality found using various methods: sexual orientation perceptions a target who engaged in incongruent beha...

As we learn more about the causes of sexual orientation, the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children. This possibility (at least that of selecting for heterosexuality) has generated a great deal of concern among supporters of homosexual rights, with such selection being widely condemned as harmful and morally repugnant. Notwithstanding ...

We examined reports of sexual orientation identity stability and change over a 10-year period drawing on data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS I and II) and tested for three patterns: (1) heterosexual stability, (2) female sexual fluidity, and (3) bisexual fluidity. Fifty-four percent of the 2,560 participants were female and the average age was approx...

Gender and sexuality are not so much individual properties as social arrangements, and the relation between either of them and sociolinguistic variation lies in the dynamics that unfold in those social arrangements, and in their role in the political economy. Gender and sexuality can also not be considered separately, for the gender of one’s sexual partners is salient only because in this parti...