The Rise and Rise of Heteronormativity

This word, of whose existence I was unaware until some weeks ago, now keeps appearing in the books I have to index. I remarked on this (not without some emotion) to my good friend Carol, who teaches history of English at the University of Toronto, and she sent me this graph, produced by the Google Books Ngram Viewer, of its frequency of occurrence over time in the corpus of books in English on that site:

As may be seen, heteronormativity charts a meteoric rise from about 1990 to the present. Indeed, it escaped inclusion in the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, but from forming precisely zero percent of the corpus of English in the 1980s, it has now zoomed upwards to form 0.0000041349 percent of printed words in English today.

Probably invisible in this screenshot of the graph is a very flat bump that occurs—like a blister—in the 1940s, when heteronormativity apparently made its first appearances in the English language. From 1944 to 1950, according to the Ngram Viewer, the word accounted for 0.0000000103 percent of the English words captured in the Google Books corpus.

Intrigued, I tracked down an occurrence to a 1947 book, the novel In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, which was adapted into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. However, and disappointingly, the only place where heteronormativity features in the online In a Lonely Place is in the 2003 afterword written by Lisa Maria Hogeland. The 1940s' flirtation with my word of the week turned out to be a mirage. I had pictured heteronormativity as some sort of unholy, post-atomic by-product of the war, lurking around like a virus in search of a suitable host until its grand, fin-de-siècle outbreak and worldwide spread.

What does it mean? According to Wikipedia (which has a whole page on the subject), heteronormativity refers to "the belief that people fall into distinct and complementary genders (man and woman) with natural roles in life." It was popularized by Michael Warner, who featured it in his article "Fear of a Queer Planet," which I guess we must call seminal.

Certainly, the complacent belief referred to is worthy of a name and worthy of struggle against. And I must admit I can't think of any more appealing, plain-English word that might stand in for it. But, element for element, it strikes me that heteronormativity might in fact mean the opposite: the belief that difference is natural.

As much as I depend on it for my livelihood, most academic writing will never strike me as elegant. But, for now, I'm happy to report that homonationalism (yes, it is out there! I have seen it!) returns no results at the Ngram Viewer.