The Political Heterosexual Matrix: Gender and Political Office as Co-Constituting Sites of Performative Subjectivity

Abstract

This thesis explores gender and political office as co-constituted performative sites. Gender and political office are both performances that are socially perceived and regulated, as mediated by indexical relationships that fire between the acts that constitute them and their objects: “man,” “woman,” and “officeholder.” Because political office is strongly associated with masculinity, there is a unique relationship between gender and office that is worth exploring. This project makes the claim that people who are not able to perform normative masculinity will always be disadvantaged when they attempt to hold political office under today’s heterosexual matrix. However, there are ways that such people can avoid punitive action for attempting to hold political office, including, but not limited to, running for office “as women.” By centering "women’s and family issues" in their policy platforms, people who are unable to perform normative masculinity index their femininity within a position that (for them) indexes counternormative gender. They can negotiate a performance of subversive gender while holding political office. Congresswomen Patricia Schroeder and Shirley Chisholm performed such negotiations; an analysis of their performances within the “political heterosexual matrix” can point us towards how society’s demands for heteronormativity might be broken down.