Heteronormativity in Action: Reproducing the Heterosexual Nuclear Family in After-hours Medical Calls

Abstract

Heterosexism has become a recognized social problem since the rise of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activism in the 1970s. One of its manifestations is heteronormativity: the mundane production of heterosexuality as the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality. My research uses conversation analysis to explore heteronormativity as an ongoing, situated, practical accomplishment by people oriented to other actions entirely. I show that family reference terms-across a dataset of 59 after-hours calls to the doctor-are deployed so as to construct a normative version of the heterosexual nuclear family: a married couple, co-resident with their biological, dependent children. I examine the inferences normatively attached to family reference terms, consider how these inferences are used interactionally, and document how this everyday talk-in-interaction both reflects and reconstitutes the culturally normative definition of the family. This research advances our understanding of normativity by showing how a social problem can exist even when there is no orientation to "trouble" in interaction. Here, the persistent and untroubled reproduction of a taken-for-granted heteronormative world both reflects heterosexual privilege and (by extrapolation) perpetuates the oppression of non-heterosexual people, denied access to key social institutions such as marriage and unable to take for granted access to their culture's family reference terms. The article shows how the heteronormative social order is reproduced at the level of mundane social interaction, through the everyday conversational practices of ordinary folk.

“Have You Been Married, or …?”: Eliciting and Accounting for Relationship Histories in Speed-Dating Interaction

“…For these participants, then, the categories 'married-children' were treated as 'going together'. It is in such pairings that the moral, normative meanings of a culture's categories are constructed and maintained: here, the constitutive categories of a heteronormative 'family' (see Kitzinger, 2005). In addition to these categorial components, questions were built with features to handle the delicacy of asking about personal matters.…”

Heteronormativity and practitioner–patient interaction

“…Evidence suggests that the subtle ways in which doctors communicate disapproval may negatively affect the interaction with and health outcomes of LGB patients. One way in which doctors communicate disapproval is through heteronormativity, or the assumption that everything is normally and naturally heterosexual (Kitzinger, 2005). Common examples include assuming that one's partner is always of the opposite sex, asserting that identifying one's orientation as gay or lesbian is immoral, and disregarding bisexuality as a sexual orientation (Habarth, 2011).…”

Beliefs about Children’s Adjustment in Same-Sex Families: Spanish and Chilean University Students

“…As Kitzinger (2005) points out, the problem of homosexuality has now become a problem of heterosexism. In the words of Herek (1995), heterosexism is "the ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any non heterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationships, or community" (Herek, 1995, p. 321).…”