Week Eight Blog
Adrienne Rich’s piece both addresses and challenges the ideas about heterosexuality and patriarchy posed by Catharine Mackinnon. On the one hand, Mackinnon strongly believes that sexual objectification that women face “the way fish live in water�, which is a product of patriarchal oppression, is dealt with by their attempt to “meet the male standard, and measure their self-worth by the degree to which they succeed� (356). While Rich acknowledges the patriarchal pressures put on women in the form of assumed or “compulsory� heterosexuality, she argues that, in fact, women have formed bonds with other women throughout time and space. Those bonds have less to do with male supremacy or the need for women to cope with patriarchal oppression, than they do a special female experience, one that Rick calls the “Lesbian Existence� or the “Lesbian Continuum.�
She argues that this continuum has existed across cultures, and although heternormativity tries to erase the history of this, it is impossible to overlook. When Rich says that “woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power� I think she negates Mackinnon’s idea that women feel the need to succeed in relation to men in order to have self-worth (Rich, 323). Rich illuminates another system of relations that exists alongside patriarchy and in some ways has challenged it.
Furthermore, I think that Rich challenges Mackinnon to think about desire and the erotic outside of a heteronormative framework. While Rick notes that this framing has been imposed on us, she highlights the way that collective power as women can enable change and “determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives� (325).