Heterosexism and the Study of Women's Romantic and Friend Relationships

The extent to which the development of lesbians' same-sex friendships mirror those of heterosexual women's remains to be determined. Little research has been done on lesbian friendship, and few comparisons are available. However, both qualitative and quantitative differences might be expected. Lesbians are not confined by heterosexual marriage and are not required by convention to subordinate their friendships to the marriage. In addition, although all women are subject to male dominance in ways that might inhibit their freedom of affiliation (e.g., fear of rape, male dominance of bars and other public spaces), lesbians may have more opportunities for friendship because of their economic independence and the availability of places to meet within the lesbian subculture. As a result, it might be that lesbians are likely to have more close women friends than heterosexual women and to engage in more interactions that include both intimacy and shared activities. However, these hypotheses have not been tested.

Desire and opportunities for cross-sex friendship also may be affected by sexual orientation. Heterosexual married women often form cross-sex friendships via their spouse (e.g., Booth & Hess, 1974) and also may inhabit social settings that would contribute to forming cross-sex friendships. Alternatively, lesbians may develop cross-sex friendships through their involvement with gay men in community activities.

Sexuality and Women's Friendship

Considerations of the role of sexuality in friendship have been strongly influenced by the cultural script defining friendship as a platonic relationship. Friendship generally is described as a close, loving relationship that has many of the same features of romantic relations; the one exception is that sexuality is absent. Its absence particularly from same-sex friendship arises from heterosexist norms that reserve sexuality exclusively for cross-sex relations. Thus, whereas sexuality is excised from same-sex friendships, the potential for it is believed to reside within any cross-sex friendship (e.g., Werking, 1997). These scripts affect what is known about friendship, because researchers tend to overlook questions that do not conform to them. Thus, same-sex friendships are "found" to be platonic because few or no questions are asked about sexuality. In turn, the available empirical evidence is taken to support the cultural construction of friendships as asexual.

A focus on women's sexual orientation raises issues that question this assumption. For lesbians, the dividing line between potential friends and lovers is often murky. Several factors play into this lack of clarity. First and perhaps most obviously, heterosexual women may use gender as a cue to identify who is a potential candidate for romance versus friendship by drawing romantic partners from their male acquaintances and friends from among female acquaintances. The fact that heterosexual women occasionally form close platonic cross-sex friendships does little to alter the social expectation that friendship between a woman and a man is highly likely to have romantic overtones (Werking, 1997). In contrast, lesbians typically draw both lovers and friends from their pool of same-sex acquaintances, requiring the relationship path for each to be determined on a case-by-case basis.