On Heteropessimism

Highlighted quotes: "In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, an “anesthetic feeling”: “a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.” Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy delivers “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain." "Stay single, stay wanting, and let the data of your desire accumulate like so many layers of gold." "Heteropessimism has helped stimulate this individualizing turn, not just by draining the hetero couple form of its appeal but because dissatisfaction with heterosexuality, despite being sold as universal, always seems to operate on the level of the individual. Collectively changing the conditions of straight culture is not the purview of heteropessimism. In this sense, heteropessimism actually reinforces the privatizing function of heterosexuality, even as it is mass distributed through culture as a viral meme. Under a heteropessimistic rubric, women might not view themselves as competing with one another within the cutthroat dating “market,” but in metabolizing the problem of heterosexuality as a personal issue the possibility of solidarity remains foreclosed."