“The Only Self-Defense I Have is My Wedding Band”: Doing Heterosexuality, Evading Gender Harassment, and Becoming Respectable in the Street
基于113位不同种族顺性别和跨性别女性的访谈，研究她们如何在街头通过佩戴婚戒、与男性朋友牵手等表演异性恋的方式，抵抗性别骚扰并维护日常尊严，同时揭示种族、性别认同和性取向如何影响这一过程的成本与收益。
The field of critical heterosexualities studies invites sociologists to untether heterosexuality from biology. In this article, I leverage the findings of 113 interviews with a racially diverse sample of cis and trans women to examine how women maintain everyday dignity in the street despite widespread gender harassment and systemic, racialized sexual inequalities. Drawing on social constructionist theory and applying an intersectional framework, I examine heterosexuality as a performance, uncovering how gender identity, race, and sexual orientation intersect to shape both the costs and benefits of “doing heterosexuality” in the street. Through practices such as wearing wedding rings, holding the hands of men friends, and displaying affection for men in public places, straight, queer, cis, and trans women creatively resist heteronormativity’s regulation of their social-sexual lives and strive to enunciate sexual unavailability; communicate the existence of a protector; and signal respectability by demonstrating conformity with racialized, cisnormative ideals of gender and sexual normativity. Findings demonstrate that racialized, queer, and trans participants tend to experience greater emotional costs and fewer symbolic rewards associated with “doing heterosexuality” than white, straight-identified, and cis participants. This intersectional analysis enriches extant research on gender and sexuality, illuminating the utility of the “doing heterosexuality” framework for uncovering intersections between heterosexual accountability and gender inequality across diverse organizational and interpersonal contexts.