Thinking Straight

What is heterosexuality? In recent years, scholars in all fields have spent so much time defining homosexuality, that the nature of heterosexuality goes unexplored. In White Wedding , Chrys Ingraham began to ask the important questions about the nature of the institution—how was heterosexuality invented, naturalized, normalized, and institutionalized? These questions begin to define the field that Ingraham has dubbed ‘Critical Heterosexual Studies’. In Thinking Straight , a collection of original essays will unravel the current heterosexual scene. The collection will be broken into three parts: one on power, one on paradox, and one on promise. Topics will include: cartoons and heterosexuality; weddings; proms; citizenship; marriage penalties; mermaids and myth.

Author Biography

Chrys Ingraham is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Women’s Studies at Russell Sage College. She is author of White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality inPopular Culture, and co-editor (with Rosemary Hennessy) of Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Race,Difference and Women’s Lives, both published by Routledge).