Gender power structure is still on everyone’s lips. But politicians in the Swedish Parliament who work with gender equality issues have also noted another oppressive structure that must be combated: heteronormativity. “In our society, heterosexuality is still the norm. A heterosexual identity is seen as normal and desirable,” the Left Party has complained in a number of parliamentary motions. LGBTs, that is, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual, have been rendered invisible and discriminated against as a result of  the “privileges that heterosexuals today are automatically guaranteed”, the Green Party has also  explained. 

Heteronormativity permeates society on every level; it is apparent in Swedish legislation and reproduced in the application of laws. At the same time, it is invisible, because heterosexuality is viewed as something neutral and natural, according to these critics. In order to change this, Maria Wetterstrand and her fellow Green Party members want to investigate “how these norms are based on heterosexuality being what is normal and everything else deviant, and thereby highlight the need for change.”

The Left Party has also demanded “a general overview of legislation from a perspective that challenges heteronormativity.” Queer theory is put forward as the solution to combat this heteronormative oppression. Anyone who knows anything about either queer theory or Swedish sexual politics finds this surprising. In the past, the Swedish Parliament’s gender equality policy has been based on radical feminist interpretive frames, which have been criticised by precisely these queer thinkers. Does the attention being paid to heteronormativity entail a reformulation of Swedish sexual and gender equality policy? Should Sweden become queer?

The simple answer is no. Parliament’s version of the queer perspective still has one foot in radical feminism and the other in the heteronormativity it pretends to be fighting against.

The queer movement has its origins in the US, where it developed out of the activism of homosexuals against a heterosexual society. Gays wanted to show that people could organise their sexual lives and identities in many different ways. Today, however, queer theory is not purely a homosexual concern; it also highlights how people who keep to heterosexual relations are limited by what is considered normal. The social anthropologist Don Kulick, who was one of the people to introduce queer theory in Sweden, argues, for instance, that patriarchal norms and middle-class views of sexuality restrain and set norms for every person’s sexual desires and pleasures. Some “natural” and “pure” forms of sexuality are allowed according to this norm while others are stigmatised as unnatural, perverted or dangerous.

”The norm determines what kind of relations are allowed and in what way even heterosexuals can have sex,” Kulick explains. It is primarily women who are restricted, he believes. “For instance, she can’t be too ‘fast’ or demanding in sexual relations. The expression ‘a loose woman’ is a result of heteronormativity.” A sexually active man is part of the hetero norm that prevails in our society, Kulick argues. That is why no one talks about loose men. Queer activists reject legal restrictions that standardise sexuality because they argue that these approaches limit people’s development and freedom.

One of the laws that have drawn attention and been criticised most heavily by queer researchers throughout the world is the Swedish decision to make it a crime for a person to buy sex. The Swedish law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services, which has now been in effect for ten years, was legislated with the aim of showing that it is not acceptable in Sweden to pay for sex. Men buying sex are considered by advocates of the law to exhibit a perverted and patriarchal form of sexuality. The long-term objective of this law is to abolish prostitution and limit sexual intercourse to equal, and preferably loving, partners. In other words, the objective of the law is clearly normative. Given the preparatory work for the law, which characterises prostitution as an enterprise in which men buy sex from women, the law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services can also be described as heteronormative. Homosexual forms of prostitution have been rendered invisible in the document, according to queer theorists.

Feminist advocates of this law have been inspired by radical feminism. This current of thought embraces theories that challenge the gender power structure in society. Radical feminists often work from a structural analysis of the patriarchy, where men by definition are considered to dominate over women and sexuality is identified as the source of women’s subordination. According to the renowned American radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, who was appointed Special Gender Adviser to the International Criminal Court in The Hague last autumn, sexuality is a construct created by men to suppress women. According to one of her sources of inspiration, Andrea Dworkin, heterosexual intercourse is always characterised by male dominance and makes sexual violence possible.  

In her book Intercourse, Dworkin writes that heterosexual, vaginal intercourse makes a woman vulnerable in every context and irrespective of culture, race or class, because intercourse entails the man pressing into, penetrating and occupying the female body with his penis. “Penetration was never meant to be kind,” Dworkin emphasises. What is depicted as natural and normal sex, in her view, has been constructed on a continuum of rape, murder and other sexual oppression and abuse.

Not every radical feminist is as radical as Dworkin and MacKinnon. There are also those who share the view that sex is the origin of patriarchy, but think that heterosexuality can be transformed into a powerful force. Among these are theorists like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond, who were invited to Stockholm in the early 2000s by the Swedish Government Offices and the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communication to lecture on the advantages of the law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services. For these radical feminists, sexual freedom consists of sexual relations between equal partners, where the focus is on emotions and greater trust is the goal. So not all heterosexual intercourse, just sexual expression that involves objectification – sadomasochism and role playing, for instance, but also the sexualisation of public space, pornography and prostitution – is considered to uphold patriarchal structures.

Queer theorists challenge the radical feminist thesis that phenomena like prostitution and pornography are always indicators of heteropatriarchy. They believe that sex that is purchased can also be interpreted as a threat to the kind of heteronormativity that characterises our society. From this perspective, people who are active in the sex industry show that the official ideal (sex for love’s sake) is not the only way to organise one’s sexual life and in this way makes it possible to question the prevailing norm. Don Kulick summarises this point of view:

“People who buy sex, for instance, are disturbing in part because buying sex exposes the economic dimension of heterosexual relations that has to stay repressed in order for heterosexual marriage to come across solely as a natural result of love and not as a result of economic calculations or economic inequality.”

From this perspective, the Swedish law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services, which fosters sex in putatively equal relations, appears to contribute to the heteronormative social order. 

However, queer theorists who describe prostitution as a liberating force do not always maintain that prostitution always benefits the liberation of women. Carol Queen, a queer activist in the US prostitution movement, stresses, for instance, that she does not include forced prostitution, minors or sex sellers who do not like to experiment with sex or are guided by the negative preconceptions of a sexist society, when she argues that prostitution can be liberating. However, once all of these destructive forms of prostitution are excluded, Queen argues, there is still a group who really want to sell sex and are not negatively affected by it.

These people suffer from a culture that either denies that there are happy hookers or condemns them. The queer perspective tries to help increase the self-esteem of these people, in Queen’s view, but is also the best way to break down the patriarchal structure in general. Women need to build their self-esteem, take control of their sexuality and set boundaries, and they can do this best when they learn to see through and challenge preconceptions in society, Queen believes.

The view that loving sex is the most desirable kind means, from a queer perspective, that other forms of intercourse are judged in relation to this norm. Having sex for reasons other than love appears to be a worse, maybe even a bad, alternative. But no heteronormative structures are changed when the Christian norm of marital intercourse for the sake of procreation is replaced by sexuality as an expression of love and consideration. That argument has been replaced in order to distinguish madonna from whore, but the norm of what is right and wrong is still upheld. 

The radical feminist notion that vaginal intercourse is an expression of the man’s sexuality rather than the woman’s, one that is not held by Dworkin or MacKinnon, can be criticised, from a queer perspective, as a view that preserves the order rather than an idea that challenges prevailing norms. Radical feminists attribute the leading role in heterosexual intercourse to the man and his penetrating penis while the woman and her vagina are seen as passive. In actuality, heterosexual intercourse, according to queer feminism, can just as easily be described as the vagina’s conquest, absorption or occupation of the penis, or less radically and less hegemonically as an encounter or a union where neither sex dominates the other.  

These examples show that even feminist ideas about sexuality are so strongly influenced by heteronormative interpretations that they have difficulty defining a sexuality that is free of stereotypes. That is why queer theorists believe that every attempt to define an ideal sexuality is doomed to fail. 

So what is it that the Green Party and the Left Party are doing with their parliamentary motions? The normative Swedish law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services is not mentioned in the demands for a queer theory overview of the legislation. Instead, the Left Party is concentrating on “creating a fair and equal society for all lesbians, homosexuals and bisexuals,” a society where it is “obvious that everyone’s love should be respected regardless of who a person wants to love.” The party wants to integrate LGBTs in the heteronormative way of life, where two equal partners are supposed to have children and be respected for their love. The Greens also have the slogan “All love is good love!” but that does not mean that all sex between consulting adults is acceptable. As with the heterosexual norm, radical feminist theories and the Christian tradition, sex is good only if it is an expression of love and consideration.

The two parties’ motions against heteronormative legislation cover gender-neutral marriage, the right to artificial insemination for women without partners and greater opportunities for homosexuals to adopt. The words “mother” and “father” in legislation are to be replaced with the gender-neutral “parents.” In addition, teachers, doctors and nurses, social service professionals and psychologists, police officers, pubic prosecutors and judges are to be given training in LGBT issues to fight discrimination. Homophobia in athletics is also to be combated.

The Left Party’s motions are no doubt welcomed by most LGBTs and should have been passed long ago. But they are not queer, and that is a shame. The hetero norm is not eliminated by treating people “who have the ability to love and feel sexual attraction to someone of the same sex” as heterosexual.

In the Left Party’s version, a queer society is “a society in which people have the right and the opportunity to be and develop into what they really are.” And according to the Green Party, “a society in which the norm is queer makes all genders equal and does not place emphasis on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” But in actuality, queer theory shows that it is impossible to determine what a person “really is”. Nor do queer theorists have any faith in a gender-equal society but instead continue to always make marginalised identities and ways of living salient.

People do not exist outside culture. Living with others always demands that we take norms and social rules into consideration. For every encounter between people, there is an order that could be described as a power structure. We are allowed to act in certain ways, but are excluded from the community if we behave differently. And that will continue to be the case. No society functions without power structures, and that is why we must be suspicious of a policy that defines a gender-equal way of living that everyone is supposed to follow.

There will always be power structures, but they constitute obstacles only as long as we cannot actively decide what rules we want to abide by. A queer policy enhances the opportunities of individuals to make conscious decisions by questioning normality. But it does not establish any ideals, because new ideals are new restrictions.

When the Christian Democrats have commented on the queer perspective, they have warned against a theory “that means there is nothing that is right or wrong.” Yet queer theory does not prohibit personal decisions but instead provides analyses that allow independent choices. The Christian Democrats have also warned against a “witch hunt against heteronormative society.” This fear, too, is unfounded. The aim of the queer movement is not a society where every present way of living has been abolished. In future as well, people will be able to marry and they will be able to choose a life where sex is practiced for love’s sake. As a queer theorist, one need not advocate sadomasochism, porn or prostitution, but one cannot operate under the assumption that one’s own convictions and preferences should also apply to others.