Peterson & Parisi: Heterosexism, Gender, The Private Sphere, and Group Identity
In their essay, “Are women human? It’s not an academic question”, Peterson and Parisi examine how human rights protect, or rather fail to protect, women by looking at human rights through the lens of heterosexism rather than androcentrism. Before we can examine their argument, it is beneficial to define both androcentrism and heterosexism. Androcentrism quite simply refers to rights as being centered on men and masculine characterisitics. Hetersexism, meanwhile, refers to normalizing the notion that heterosexuality is the only acceptable form of relationships and basis for families. Now that we understand the terms, we can take a closer look at the authors’ argument.
Peterson and Parisi contend that human rights should be examined through the lens of heterosexism not only because heterosexism institutionalizes ideas of masculinity and femininity based on the socially constructed idea of gender, but it also renounces all but heterosexual couplings as the acceptable base for families and groups. The latter normalizes discrimination against non-heterosexual sexual identities and the former any gender outside of the two acceptable masculine and feminine gender identities. In addition to discrimination, analyzing human rights through heterosexism helps to explain how human rights fails to protect women while also hindering women from identifying with one another across groups based on culture, ethnicity, race, and class. Peterson and Parisi identify a number of ways in which this is done through the three generations of human rights, but we will examine the two overarching themes: the sepeartion of the public and private sphere and the role of group identity.
Peterson and Parisi assert that the socially constructed notion of binary gender identities is tied to heterosexualism which is in turn linked to the notion of the sovereign state and is then connected to human rights. At the same time, heterosexism enforces the separation of the public and private sphere. While the state is tasked with protecting against human rights violations, it focused almost solely on the public sphere. By keeping the public and private separated, the state fails to protect women where she is most vulnerable to violence and rights violations – in the private sphere. While there is minimal protection in the private sphere, there is plenty of regulation.
Heterosexism is connected to group reproduction, continuing the group, whether based on race, religion, ethnicity and so on. This subverts the personhood of women for two reasons – placing the identity of the group over the identity of the woman as an individual and by placing political control over women’s bodies. The former not only fails to recognize a woman as an individual but it also places the identity of the group in a higher place of importance than the identity as a women, which in turn hinders women identifying with women outside of their group. This then works to normalize inequality both within the groups (by gender) but also amongst the groups (by race, religion, etc). The latter removes agency away from women by taking away their ability to make their own decisions as it relates to their body and moving that decision making to either the state or their male partners.
Although written twenty years ago and while there have many gains in rights for the LGBTQ community, Peterson and Parisi make an incredibly compelling argument. The concepts they discuss surrounding gender identity, heterosexism, and group identity are so institutionalized it takes a dense twenty pages to just scratch the surface. We must understand how these ingrained cultural norms affect not only rights but our inability to organize across racial, ethnic, religious, and class lines.
