The HIV/AIDS panic propelled the study of sexuality into the sociological mainstream, framing young people’s sexual relationships as an important strategy for discovering information that might minimise risk of the disease. For feminist analyses, this research simultaneously drew attention to social constructions of heterosexuality (Jackson, 1999; Allen, 2003), underlining sexual attitudes and behaviours centrally concerned around issues of desire, pleasure and power, and the degree to which women can subvert or challenge it within heterosexual relations. This essay examines recent debate regarding the nature and extent of power in terms of its ‘immutability’ and ‘instability’ in heterosexual relationships (Allen, 2003). It will examine research that suggests power is inescapably patriarchal and that heterosex represents the embodiment of men's domination and women's subordination (Holland et al, 1998; Chung, 2005), as well as claims that heterosexual relations are being contested; asserting agency to women and suggesting that male power is at some level vulnerable to subversion (Stewart, 1999; Allen, 2005).
Heterosexual feminist theories configure masculinity and femininity around gendered, normative standards of what it means to be masculine, and by default, feminine (Goldstein, 1994). Wilton (1997) notes the structural ‘heteropolarity’ maintained within the context of hegemonic heterosexuality, which asserts conventional femininity as ‘passivity, helplessness, and victimisation’ (Vance, 1984), in opposition to a super-ordinated masculinity; predicted upon independence, activity and the possession of sexual desire and power (Goldstein, 1994; Connell, 1987). Consequently, heterosexuality has often been theorised by feminists as a repressive, patriarchal institution that serves the interest of men, who exert power over women (Rich, 1980; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1994; Jackson, 1999). According to such gendered power relations, heterosexuality is thus predicted upon a man’s sexual pleasure and desires (Stewart, 1999), whilst female desire has been argued to be ‘not permissible, not imaginable, not there’ (Wilton, 1997), inhibiting the social acceptance of young women’s sexual needs and desires (West, 1999). It is the resistance to this subordination, which is the foundation of feminist political activism (Jackson, 1999).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an explicitly feminist group of researchers carried out the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) and the smaller-scale Men, Risk and AIDS Project (MRAP) by conducting interviews with young people in the UK, which problematizes the sexual practices of the heterosexual youth (Holland et al. 1998). Whilst the authors had expected to find that heterosexuality was regulated by ‘two separate worlds of masculinity and femininity brought into collision in sexual encounters,’ through young people’s accounts of experiencing everyday heterosexuality it emerged that: ‘heterosexuality is not, as it appears to...
