This paper explores how sexual trauma and heterosexual normative power dynamics frame relationship between therapist and a female-identifying teenager. She reportedly experienced fear of men, sexual attraction to women, and panic in public. She grappled with issues of sexual identity and emotional vulnerability, underneath which lay the attempt to integrate past sexual traumas. Despite identifying as a “homosexual,” the patient perceived sexual encounters within the confines of heteronormative power dynamics: she indicated that the man was the dominator and the woman the dominated. She believed as the dominator, the man is powerful and in control of his emotions, while the woman is at the mercy of her feelings. Fear of emotional and sexual vulnerability was further clarified when the patient recounted several dreams with themes of sexual violence. Inevitably, these challenges played out in the therapeutic relationship and a power struggle ensued. The therapist who prioritized emotional expressiveness was viewed as the weak member in the dyad and frequently felt dominated by the patient in the countertransference. However, by working within the power dynamic rather than against it, therapist managed to gain the patient’s trust and facilitate a therapeutic relationship that existed beyond the roles of doer and done to.

In recent years, there has been an acute rise in both the rates of LGBT identification as well as mainstream discourse on Queer gender and sexual expression. A CDC report found 20% of Gen-Z Americans identify as non-heterosexual, with the rate of Trans-identified individuals having doubled in the past five years. This trend is no doubt largely a result of the peeling back of heteronormative mores and increasing acceptance of Queerness in popular consciousness. But, I suggest, there is some distress that can be read in this turn. That is, there is perhaps something symptomatic in the fervor with which younger generations are gravitating to these identities.

Drawing from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Walter Benjamin, this paper identifies the insidious decline of symbolic power as a potent framework for making sense of this phenomenon. The authority of Law in the west today is arguably in crisis: the individual’s fundamental relationship to the foundations of social authority are in flux, and so tension and antagonisms abound. The political subject more and more frequently struggles and fails to invest belief in a seen-as-legitimate social architecture that allows them to make sense of their world. As the symbolic mandates, processes, and objects which confer authority onto some institution or organizer of Law begin to decompose, this decay reveals the “rottenness” in the unconscious obverse of social authority - it begins to “secrete” a kind of sexuality. This decomposition leads to a collapsing of the symbolic into the subject, the violence immanent to its construction exploding outward and finding expression most immediately in another register similarly awash with rottenness and violence: sexuality. That is, symbolic decline finds its discrete manifestation in part through aberrations in gender and sexuality, and as such in the queering of the political subject.

“Engaging in heterosexual love as a feminist woman can be experienced as extremely conflict-ridden: it is difficult to combine a critical stance towards male power, based on the revelatory practice of identifying injustices that are not apparent at first sight because of their normalized and naturalized status, with the openness, vulnerability, and trust that love requires” Lena Gunnarson (2018)

As a young Indian feminist, I feel that though feminism has created a space for us to talk about the ingrained oppressive gender norms, and pushed us to challenge them, a certain shame and silence continues to hover around the gendered norms we feel ambiguous about, or rather, might even derive pleasure from. The desire to not feel so alone with my confusions is what prompted me to take on this journey.

My paper is a phenomenological inquiry, which attempts at understanding the lived experiences of four Indian heterosexual feminist women from different walks of life. It seeks to put forth their messy journeys of navigating through the paradoxical structures of heterosexual desire and feminism, one marked inherently by subordination and dominance, and another that stands for questioning the given power structures, and disorganizing and disordering the seemingly settled fields of the heteronormative society. My own subjectivity as a cisgendered, heterosexual married woman and a shy feminist has shaped how I have been able to make sense of the different experiences shared with me.

In the current socio-political culture that pushes us into polarized absolutes, amplifying certain voices and narratives while silencing others, I wish to create and occupy a small space under the theme of evolving politics of gender for non-linear, ruptured learnings that emerge as we humans navigate through the blurred boundaries of the “in-betweens” of right-wrong, conscious-unconscious and desire-fantasy-politics.