Secondly, to answer your question on how language my experience or expression… I find that my experiences and my capacity to speak about them with words(since I am much more comfortable with intellectual and rational discourse than more creative, word-less expressive modes) are completely inter-related. If I have no words, I seem to erase and render invisible the experience and to others. And it becomes a struggle to even reclaim the memory.

Let me explain.

I grew up in India, and although I learnt and developed my politics and values through many avenues, after a certain age, I primarily engaged with ideas through English. That too, a narrow, coloniser’s euro-centric English as well as a method of understanding things. This has resulted in me unable to articulate even to myself parts of the my experiences growing up and how they have shaped my identity and politics.

Again, moving to the North American continent as a young adult, and slowly becoming racialized here has been an experience which I do not yet fully comprehend, largely because I cannot find the words to describe it. In fact, if I hadn’t discovered Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks and other black writers, I would not have even the minimal understanding and vocabulary to make sense of my life here.

To use the terms heteronormative or phallocentric with regards to sex is most widely understood to mean, the defining of sexual relations from a male and/or heterosexual standpoint. Your, rather idiosyncratic, take on the matter is to focus on the mechanics of the deed and not the narrative through which that deed is understood.

To put it plainly, a heteronormative take on sex would be to define it exclusively in terms of sexual relations between a man and a woman. This, unfairly, excludes the gays, the lesbians, sex with beasts, and other abnormal forms of sex.

Now, if I understand you correctly, and I think I do, a heteronormative take on sexual acts would be to accord primacy to, say, the act of a penis penetrating the vagina.

What about other sexual acts?, the anti-heteronormative under your definition, asks. What about folks who get off, admittedly absurd, penetrating newspapers with their penises or inserting noses into their vaginas.

The issue is surely about the narrative and not mechanics.

Btw. Lacan would love this discussion.

@Desi Girl – Thank you also for trying to clear it up for me.

@Penelope — Thank you so much! I am glad you enjoyed the post, and just as glad you found it — you should know how much support you have!

@Desi Girl — No, I have explained above concisely what I mean.

The problem with such narrow definitions is that it excludes the points of view of the lesbians, the gays, the people who like sex with beasts, and other such anomalies.

So even your question “What other ways are there to define it?” reveals that you can only imagine sex in one possible configuration. When in truth there are millions of configurations.

Thus, instead of saying “I would like to masturbate my penis” one should use more universal less-loaded language – such as “I would like to masturbate my genital region/or I would like to masturbate my vagina”.

Or to combat the bias towards heterosexuality in language: instead of saying “I would like to sleep with her” one could say, “I would like to sleep with it.” The second statement is less contentious and more gender neutral.

I hope I’ve helped clear this up for you Pickles! Language usage is very much an indicator of power-relations in a society. One can help in little ways to change unequal power relations by adopting speech like I have suggested above.

Penelope

otherwise, very interesting article