Understanding Heteronormativity and Heterosexism in the Workplace
The team at Red Bow Creative (RBC) have been tasked with creating a new digital and in-store advertising campaign representing modern families for a popular clothing brand, Ello Itty. The brief was to create a forward-thinking, innovative campaign that caters to a range of families from various diverse backgrounds: both the current clientele of Ello Itty and who they hope to appeal to in future. Ello Itty have recently launched their genderless range, to appeal to a more diverse range of shoppers.
After months of working on the campaign, incorporating many of the items from the genderless range, RBC present their ideas to Ello Itty. Despite a great deal of consultation, RBC completely missed the mark with their campaign. It features only what appears to be cisgender, straight couples – some of whom show mixed-race pairings wearing the genderless items. This was RBC’s interpretation of diversity. An executive at Ello Itty, upon seeing the images, stated that the campaign “reeks of heteronormativity and doesn’t at all feel inclusive.”
What went wrong here? How would an understanding of heteronormativity have helped RBC create a more truly inclusive campaign?
Certain buzzwords have come into vogue in recent years, making their way from research studies and university lecture halls into everyday parlance. It’s time that all of us start understanding certain words and the concepts attached to them.
It’s even more important to understand how these ideas filter into our everyday lives: how we consciously – or more frequently inadvertently and subconsciously – bring concepts such as heteronormativity to life without realizing their full, damaging extent. This impacts workplaces too: everything from who you choose to hire to your workplace policies, and your outputs – such as RBC’s marketing campaign.
So, what exactly is heteronormativity? How does it differ from something like homophobia?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as:
Of, relating to, or based on the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality.
However, this definition is rather limited and tends to focus specifically on the sexuality component of heteronormativity. This makes intuitive sense as the word seems to refer to a difference in heterosexuality vs. homosexuality, implying that heterosexuality is in some way superior or normal. In reality, heteronormativity’s reach goes far beyond sexuality alone. An expanded definition from scholarly literature gives us a more well-rounded understanding and starts to unpack the idea further:
“Ranging from organizational to interpersonal spheres, the presumptions that there are only two sexes; that it is ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ for people of different sexes to be attracted to one another; that these attractions may be publicly displayed and celebrated; that social institutions such as marriage and the family are appropriately organized around different-sex pairings; that same-sex couples are (if not ‘deviant’) a ‘variation on’ or an ‘alternative to’ the heterosexual couple. Heteronormativity refers, in sum, to the myriad ways in which heterosexuality is produced as a natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted, ordinary phenomenon.”
Using this expanded definition, we see that heteronormativity affects diverse facets of our everyday experience. Heterosexuality becomes not only a form of sexual expression but also the foundation upon which societies are built, thereby colouring all aspects of life. Heterosexism becomes the expression of heteronormative assumptions: the enacting of heteronormative beliefs.
Any deviation or challenge to this foundation is either seen as pathological and unnatural or at the very least, an acceptable variation that is not deemed exactly equal to heterosexuality.
This is precisely the dynamic that played out in RBC’s campaign. Even though they intended to create something inclusive, their unconscious adherence to heteronormative standards resulted in a representation that reinforced existing social structures rather than challenging them. The absence of LGBTQ individuals in their campaign was not necessarily intentional: it was a byproduct of the deeply ingrained norms that shape their thinking and creativity.
While extreme forms of heteronormativity may severely impact the rights of LGBTQ communities, the form of heteronormativity I’d like to focus on here is much subtler in nature: it’s the type of taken-for-granted assumptions many of us have rummaging around somewhere in our thoughts about what is acceptable and what is not; what we think of as normal. It is pervasive and may be more dangerous than overt heteronormativity in that it appears to be innocent and is not as easy to identify.
This type of heteronormativity is most often seen in contexts where homosexuality may be accepted, even protected under the law, and where LGBTQ individuals have rights and privileges similar to those of straight cisgender people – all the ingredients for equality. At least on the surface that is.
These heteronormative assumptions lurk deep within our subconscious and mean that true equality remains largely inaccessible.
And it affects all of us: gay and straight, liberal and conservative, religious or not. Only those who are aware of its effects and insidious nature are able to gain some freedom of thought. This everyday heteronormativity is more challenging to detect because we are desensitised to it; this is precisely why it poses such a great danger.
As queer scholar Celia Kitzinger states:
“While LGBT activists are campaigning against blatant oppression and overt discrimination, at the same time all around us a heteronormative social fabric is unobtrusively rewoven, thread by thread, persistently, without fuss or fanfare, without oppressive intent or conscious design.”
This type of heteronormativity is exactly what caused RBC to falter in their campaign. Their assumption that straight, cisgender couples represented modern families led to an incomplete version of inclusivity, one that lacked true representation. Without recognising these underlying biases, RBC was unable to meet the expectations of Ello Itty’s campaign brief.
Becoming more alert to the myriad ways in which heterosexism operates in daily life may not always be as easy as it seems.
There are the obvious heterosexist pitfalls:
Automatically assuming a child has a ‘mom’ and a ‘dad’
Asking a woman about her ‘husband’
Not questioning depictions of families or couples in advertising, as RBC failed to do
Showing slight shock when you learn that an individual you believed to be straight is gay, and so forth.
But there are also the much subtler forms of heterosexism that might be harder to distinguish. This is the exact challenge that the folks at Red Bow Creative ran into. Their underlying assumption related to diversity extended to multi-racial couples wearing genderless items of clothing. However, it did not stretch beyond this. Thus, their ‘template’ for a family was a heteronormative one to begin with. This template obscured their creative vision and resulted in a campaign that missed the mark. Thus, their modern families were racially diverse but lacked gender and sexuality diversity. A more inclusive campaign would have featured gay and lesbian couples, transgender and non-binary people, along with straight, cisgender pairings.
The tide has certainly begun to turn when it comes to greater general awareness of concepts such as heteronormativity. It is much more conceivable today to accept diverse sexualities and gender expressions, challenge preconceived notions, and entertain the immense diversity out there than it was even a few short years ago.
If we fail to challenge our own damaging heteronormative assumptions daily, we run the risk of perpetuating them in little and large ways indefinitely. RBC’s campaign is just one example of how heteronormativity operates subtly, but its lessons apply broadly to workplace diversity, hiring practices, and policy creation. By acknowledging and challenging these assumptions, we take a step closer to true inclusivity.
EquiDiverse Synergy offers specialised consulting aimed at better understanding how heteronormativity shows up in the workplace and how you can challenge it. View our service offering for more information.
