The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Winner, 2021 PROSE Award in the Cultural Anthropology & Sociology Category

Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies

A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness.

In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships.

Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”

Jane Ward is Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations.Jane Ward is Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations.

Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, the Seventies in San Francisco:
Sharp, witty, provocative, informed, and feeling, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality flips the scripts of queer suffering and heterosexual happiness. Jane Ward details the harms and disappointments of heterosexual culture for straight women, analyzes the "misogyny paradox" at its heart, and points toward a deeper love.

Hanne Blank, author of Fat:
The intelligent generosity of spirit of Jane Ward’s bullseye critique of heterosexual culture is the icing on the cake of its timeliness, necessity, and page-turning readability. I lost track of the number of times I wrote 'fuck YES!' in the margins as I read this book.

A great read for LGBTQ+ and straight readers, Jane Ward's non-fiction book tackles compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and how they impact us all.

This book is a loving lesbian intervention, a defamiliarized look at what we’ve come to expect from heterosexuality.

A gender and sexuality professor has written a book explaining the secret to straight people having happier relationships — be more like queer couples. Jane Ward, a gender and sexuality studies professor at University of California, Riverside, studied tips from marriage manuals, self-help books, dating coaches and marriage therapists while writing The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality wastes absolutely no time getting to the point...it is at heart a somber, urgent academic examination of the many ways in which opposite-sex coupling can hurt the very individuals who cling to it most....[The book] might be just the thing to rescue heterosexuality from its unearned hegemony in our shared cultural imagination.