In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward critiques one of the basic premises of the mainstream LGBT rights movement—that heterosexuality is easier than queerness—by asking for whom, and under what conditions, is straightness easier. Drawing from ethnographic field work, archival research, and cultural studies methods, Ward examines the 20th century emergence of a “heterosexual repair industry”—a self-help empire designed to romanticize and ease heterosexual misery while eliding attention to heteropatriarchy and the queer, feminist interventions poised to undo it. In this talk, Ward takes her analysis in new directions, pointing to the global implications of heterosexual misery by analyzing the global “anti-gender” (or “gender critical”) movement and the collective anxiety about gender and sexuality that animates it. Ward conceptualizes “gender critical” projects as expressions of heteroparanoia and psychic dissonance aimed at reconciling the paradoxes of modern heterosexuality, and offers a feminist assessment of these projects' trajectories.
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. 
Published in 2020 by NYU Press, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is the winner of the 2021 PROSE Award in the Cultural Anthropology & Sociology Category and finalist of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies.This event is sponsored and organized by the Sociology Department's Ethnographic Methods Workshop and Gender & Sexuality Workshop.