The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
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Winner, 2021 PROSE Award in the Cultural Anthropology and Sociology Category

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.
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Reviews
“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.”—Hanne Blank, author of Fat and Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality
 
“This book needed to be written and who better to plunge into the murky mysteries and sad dramas of heterosexuality than Jane Ward? The Tragedy of Heterosexuality offers a map of the complex and shifting landscape of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo, sexual harassment, and Title IX….An immensely readable, fairly controversial and surely relevant book.”—Jack Halberstam, author of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
 
“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 towards a deeper love.” — Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The 70’s in San Francisco
 
“In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward challenges and entertains readers with a serious joke. She reverses the usual story of queer suffering to elaborate instead the miseries of heterosexual life, especially for women, and the ecstatic joys of queer alternatives. She provides us with a sharply hilarious account of ‘the heterosexual repair industry,’ including an ethnography of commercial seduction coaching, and follows up with pointed queer observations of straight life. Offering herself as an ‘ally’ and calling for a transformation of ‘deep heterosexuality,’ Ward’s joke builds on 1970s lesbian feminism as she constructs a wickedly smart and illuminating takedown of heteropatriarchy.” —Lisa Duggan, author of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

                                           Reviews 

“Clear-eyed and unsqueamish, Not Gay defiantly insists that sex between contemporary American straight white men is in fact meaningful sex that can't—and shouldn't—just be hand-waved away. Jane Ward provides a timely and convincing corrective.”--Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History

"[Ward] has arrived at an interesting conclusion: straight men - specifically white men - are having sex with other men to affirm just how straight they are, because to be straight and still be able to perform 'gay sex' - while always remaining uninterested - is the height of white masculinity." - The Guardian

"Ward’s book is confident and theoretically well-informed, and offers a rich, often counterintuitive and thought-provoking tour through straight white men’s homosexual activities and their shifting meanings – in history, in the military, in fan fiction, in French kissing among Hell’s Angel members, as well as in the accounts of pop psychological experts who assure straight men having sex with other men that they are not gay. In short, this is cultural studies at its best."-Times Higher Education

"[Ward] shows that homosexual contact has been a regular feature of heterosexual life ever since the concepts of homo- and heterosexuality were first created -- not just in prisons and frat houses and the military, but in biker gangs and even conservative suburban neighborhoods." - New York Magazine

"Jane Ward...[has] penetrated the internet with one of those ideas that people were maybe thinking but just weren't saying: Male sexuality is as fluid as female sexuality... Ward's idea that our cultural understanding of men's sexuality has been way too simplistic for way too long is fundamentally sound and refreshing. Ward's reach suggests she's well on her way to enacting the change she intended with her writing." - Gawker 


​​NOT GAY: Sex Between Straight White Men


​Although the U.S. media has recently been abuzz with commentary about sexual fluidity, most accounts have focused on “girls who kiss girls” for the pleasure of male spectators, or men of color “on the down low” who are presumed to be gay and in the closet.  But where do white men—the dominant culture’s most normalized and idealized figures—fit in to these narratives?

​In this provocative book, Jane Ward follows straight white men’s homosexual encounters across numerous sites—from biker gangs and public bathrooms to college fraternities and the United States military—illustrating the unique ways that whiteness and masculinity converge to circumvent the cultural surveillance applied to men of color.  Ward shows that the homosexual contact of straight white men is hardly an accident; instead, it does a good deal of productive work for white heteromasculinity.  When white men approach homosexual sex in the “right” way—when they make a show of imposing it and enduring it—it functions to bolster not only their heterosexuality, but also their masculinity and whiteness. By taking sex between straight white men as its point of departure, Not Gay offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification and racialized heteronormative investments.

In German translation with Männerschwarm Verlag 
“Not Gay is nothing less than a breath of fresh air. This book is certain to change the way that we think about heterosexuality’s relations with the homoerotic.” --Roderick Ferguson, author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique

"So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are." – Vice

“[…] Not Gay, an insightful treatise on the nature of heterosexual male interaction with other men, addresses many of the stereotypes and assumptions associated with straight and gay men.  The book also skillfully analyzes the often fluid nature of sexuality, race, privilege, and the taboo crossover behavior between sexually active men of opposing preferences.”-The Bay Area Reporter


"This fascinating book explores the worlds of white men who have sex with other white men and yet identify as straight.”-Pacific Standard

"Rather than focusing so much on sexual orientation, or trying to unmask the feelings of these men, who position themselves as heterosexual yet engage in same-sex sexual behavior, Ward turns her attention to the ways in which certain organizations use homosexual acts to further men's investment in heterosexuality, hypermasculinity and homosociality in order to build lasting, strong bonds and friendships and to reassert white manhood."-Metapsychology


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Respectably Queer

Respectably Queer chronicles the diversity work of three nationally prominent queer organizations in Los Angeles: Christopher Street West, which produces L.A.'s queer pride festival; the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, a 37-year-old multi-site organization; and Bienestar, an HIV services organization for gay Latinos. Based on three years of in-depth ethnographic research, Ward documents the evolution of these organizations, including class and race conflicts within them. Respectably Queer reveals how neoliberal ideas about difference are becoming embedded in the daily life of a progressive movement and producing frequent conflicts over the meaning of "diversity." The author shows how queer activists are learning from the corporate model to leverage their differences to compete with other non-profit groups, enhance their public reputation or moral standing, and establish their diversity-related expertise. Ward argues that this instrumentalization of diversity has increased the demand for predictable and easily measurable forms of difference, a trend at odds with queer resistance.

Ward traces the standoff between the respectable world of "diversity awareness" and the often vulgar, sexualized, and historically unprofessional world of queer pride festivals. She spotlights dissenting voices in a queer organization where diversity has become synonymous with tedious and superficial workplace training. And she shows how activists fight back when prevailing diversity discourses-the ones that "diverse" people are compelled to use in order to receive funding-simply don't fit.

Reviews for RESPECTABLY QUEER

This study will be immensely helpful to both scholars and activists who want to learn about the shaping of LGBT issues by the nonprofit industrial complex.-Gender & Society
This is an important book. Ward shows how managing diversity in the LGBT non-profit sector mirrors the corporate sector's management of diversity: representing identity differences has become instrumental, not an ethic or end in itself. Her nuanced and complex case studies demonstrate how difference is contained and domesticated, and provide empirical grounding for the larger theoretical claims about the effects of neo-liberal apolitical discourses of diversity, the current funder-directed state of the LGBT social movement, and the importance of documenting ways to resist corporate diversity-speak.-Paisley Currah, Director, Transgender Law and Policy Institute, and Associate Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, CUNY
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Other places Jane's writing appears