This is a guest post by Rachel Hills. Rachel Hills is a London-based freelance writer on gender issues. She blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, and is currently writing a book on young people, sex and identity.
Recently I wrote an article for a ladymag on gay marriage. The article in question being Proper Journalism rather than a blog post in which I can opine at will, I was briefed to cover both sides of the argument accurately and fairly.
As a twentysomething leftie for whom same-sex marriage is a clear cut matter of equality and human rights, this at first left me feeling kind of stumped. I understood that a lot of people didn’t support gay marriage for religious reasons, but there were also plenty of religious people who did support it – or who at least didn’t feel the need to push their beliefs onto other, non-religious people.
Like many who share my views, my instinct was to automatically dismiss those who actively oppose gay marriage as fearful, bigoted and homophobia.
But even fear and bigotry exist for a reason, so I looked at their arguments a little more closely. And I amused to discover that, beneath the surface, the view that marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman-and-a-man-and-a-woman-only can probably be made sense of by the work of a famously gay, leftie French philosopher. Michel Foucault.
In fact, when it came to the political logic underlying their arguments, Foucault and gay marriage opponents had a fair bit in common.
Don’t believe me? Consider the below.
1. They both believe that sexuality is a social construct.
That is, that our sexual preferences and practices aren’t inbuilt, but can change according to the norms and ideals of the day.
Sure, the anti-gay marriage lobby say that married, heterosexual love is only “natural”, but if it was so natural, same-sex marriage wouldn’t be such a threat, would it?
To you and me, it probably seems kind of crazy to suggest that allowing same sex marriage would turn people gay in droves. But maybe we’re just not taking a long enough view.
If you agree that despite all the progress of the last 30 years, we still live in a society that makes it easier to be heterosexual than homosexual, it’s not that great a leap to say that there might be a portion of the population who currently identify as straight who might get a little bit more flexible with their sexual preferences if we lived in a society that was truly free of homophobia.
Marriage equality wouldn’t eradicate homophobia entirely, nor would it undo years of romantic conditioning from Disney films and rom-coms. But it would be a significant stamp of social approval that we currently lack, not to mention visible and culturally viable family model.
This is what anti-gay marriage advocates are really talking about when they worry that allowing same-sex marriage will “encourage” people to “turn gay”. Not that it will automatically flip a switch in every straight person, but that by decreasing homophobia, it might make future generations of young people more comfortable with coming out as gay or bi.
I don’t think they’re entirely wrong on that front, and Foucault probably wouldn’t have thought so either. The difference between them and Foucault, is that they think this is a bad thing.
2. They both believe that sex is a site of power and politics.
Foucault argued that the everyday sexual norms we take for granted actually served a deeper regulatory purpose: to incentivize married, straight reproductive sex amongst the bourgeois set, and boost the number of bourgeois babies in the process.
The anti-gay marriage lobby also believes that marriage-between-a-man-and-a-woman-and-between-a-man-a-woman-only serves a deeper regulatory purpose: to incentivise heterosexual unions formed with the intent of producing children. And how do they incentivise these unions? By endowing them with unique social and economic rewards that people who aren’t in said unions are unable to access.
One point that is often glossed in debates around same-sex marriage is that supporters and opponents are working with different definitions of marriage. And not just in the religious sense, either. There is a fundamental mismatch in how and why the two groups value the institution.
While liberal, secular types view marriage as the coming together of two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their life together, anti-gay marriage lobbyists view it as a union for the production of families and children (never mind that a growing number of same-sex couples are building families and having children of their own).
In their view, heterosexual couples with kids genuinely are superior to deliberately childless heterosexual couples and to gay couples, and genuinely deserve to be awarded privileges other couples aren’t.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying these views don’t constitute homophobia. They absolutely do. And like all homophobia, they’re grounded in fear and prejudice. They’re just not grounded in mindless fear and prejudice.
To the contrary, they have a pretty clear political logic to them, even if we disagree with their conclusions. And understanding isn’t just the first step towards empathy and engagement: it’s also the first step to having a useful debate.
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This is a really interesting post. I always wondered what the actual beliefs of anti-gay-marriage people were, beyond the basic level of “EW gays ICKY”, and I’m glad to know they have some form of coherent argument. Wrong coherent argument, but coherent argument.
It means that we can persuade them!
I’m really sorry, but my first impression on reading this article is that it’s basically a tone argument.
Right wingers don’t just want to prevent TLBG people from marrying. They want to prevent us from receiving medical care. They want to take away our jobs and homes. They want us to hide, go away, not be seen. They want to erase us. They want us to die.
Until right wingers acknowledge our right to survive, our right to work, our right to have a roof over our heads, our right to have enough to eat, our right to medical care, our right to have our names and genders respected, there can be no dialogue.
I’ve had to tell commentators this, but I’m disappointed to have to tell an author of a blog post this, but: We’re not talking about two groups of people with relatively equal power debating two valid, if different positions. We’re talking about one group of people – cissexual hetero people – with tremendous amounts of institutional power, including police power, over TLBG people.
Also, I’m getting a strong whiff here that the LGB people you’re talking about are white, cissexual, currently abled, and middle or upper-class. (Disclosure: I am white, trans, physically and develop/mentally disabled, formerly middle-class but long-term unemployed, partly because no-one wants to hire a trans woman.) I mean, that’s the default, right? And that “default” needs to be challenged. Here in the US at least, the situation for LGB people of color, with disabilities, and other intersecting oppressions goes far beyond marriage rights. Same thing with trans folk, which you don’t even mention. I value my right to use a public bathroom without fear of being abused or arrested; to receive medical care without being abused for being trans; to have a job; far, far over my right to be married.
Hello guest blogger, on this point, I think you have it wrong: “But it would be a significant stamp of social approval that we currently lack, not to mention visible and culturally viable family model.” Instead of social approval, I would replace it with legal equality. The gays don’t give a damn about what a professional bigot thinks of them, because with equal protection under the law, the bigots are free to hate, but it is powerless. Yes, social approval would eventually increase, but it is powerless. Equal protection under the law is in and of itself the ultimate goal. What ever happens after that doesn’t matter.
Happy holidays.
Flex.
My point being that attempting to be “fair and equal” just doesn’t work in the context of institutional power differentials; “fair and equal” *always* winds up favoring those with institutional power.
And really? I’m not interested in the motives behind homophobia, whether based on religious views or not. Cuz like Jay Smooth says: It’s not about who [they] are, it’s about what [they] did, and what they did and are doing is furthering the oppression of TBLG people.
well I love Foucault and I am not in favour of gay marriage. I don’t campaign against it but I don’t believe the institution is worth supporting by anyone, gay or straight.
In an interview with Foucault he suggested he was not in favour of gay people mirroring heterosexual people’s relationships including marriage, either.
You make out there are two sides in this issue: a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’. But Foucault said ‘nothing is fundamental’ and would see this issue as more complex as do I
While I agree that the anti arguments can be deconstructed in the way you have described, I think you’re confusing cause and effect.
They don’t both believe that sexuality is a social construct.
As you said, they believe that heterosexual love between a man and a woman is the only ‘natural’ amorous form of love, and therefore they don’t actually believe that it is constructed. What they do believe is that homosexual (or anything other than hetero) love is constructed, and if they’re afraid that people will suddenly ‘turn gay’, it’s because they believe that the widespread acceptance of non-hetero relationships will create social pressures outweighing the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality. You’re right on with sex being a site of power and politics, but I’m not sure if most of them have a refined enough abstract sense of those terms for it to constitute a personal belief
I think #1 needs a little more nuance. It’s pretty inaccurate to claim that socially conservative folks view sexuality as a social construct. They really honestly believe that bit about heterosexuality being the only natural way to be, which is totally contradictory to the social constructionist view. Instead they see homosexuality (or anything other than monogamous, reproductively viable heterosexuality) as a perversion that one can fall into given the right environment. It’s more like having stunted growth or arrested development (not achieving one’s true potential or god-given “destiny,” if you will) due to a toxic environment. This is a bit different from Foucault’s view. Way different, actually. In the Foucauldian view social constructs are relatively value-neutral artifacts of historical and cultural contexts. But there’s nothing value-neutral about it in the socially conservative view. It would be accurate to say that they both believe that the cultural environment has a profound impact on sexual development. But the similarity ends there.
*ahem* what phil said. Here’s to writing almost identical comments at the same time. Cheers!
well, it’s true!
No. Foucault or no Foucault, there can’t be a dialogue with Christian fundamentalists over gay marriage/homosexuality issues. (Trans issues…well, they don’t “believe in” transsexuality, so dialogue there is also a non-starter). Their framework for understanding sexual orientation is as a competing religion.
And the Christian right? Doesn’t believe in other religions. More to the point, they don’t believe that people of other religions actually believe their own faith/lack thereof. (Hence the fundie emphasis on how SINCERE a believer is). Heterosexuality is Correct in exactly the same way that fundie-brand Christianity is Correct. There cannot be two (or more!) ways. And so, by extrapolation–and I’ve heard fundie pastors come very, very close to this–if homosexuality is natural, God is not real.
Unless the entire mindset of American fundamentalist Christianity for the past 150 years alters radically, “dialogue” is pointless.
I have a lot of reactions to this post. First and foremost, I want to challenge the discourse of human rights that is being employed here . To my mind, human rights are things the individual NEEDS in order to survive and function in the world: clean food and water, sufficient shelter, descent affordable accessible health care, access to employment and education, protection from violence and exploitation, etc. Marriage is not something a person NEEDS in order to function and therefore absorbing it under the umbrella of human rights is, at best, a profound stretch, to my mind.
Also, this argument takes for granted that marriage is a legitimate means of dispersing resources to citizens/individuals in the first place. While we might want to argue that it is unfair that same-sex couples don’t have access to the benefits accorded to heterosexual married couples, demanding same-sex marriage doesn’t change the fundamentally unjust nature of marriage itself – it only changes who is allowed to share in that injustice. Marriage – as it is currently formulated within the US (and most other countries) – allows citizens to access all kinds of benefits not available to to non-married, and that, to my mind, is intrinsically unfair. People shouldn’t be penalized for choosing not to marry (regardless of their sexuality) and that is precisely what the institution of marriage does. Marriage is essentially an institutionalized bribery system whereby the government says “If you organize your sexual, economic and domestic life into one particular configuration, we will give you lots of bonuses and rewards.” But the problem is that governments shouldn’t be in the business of rewarding/coercing particular kinds of intimacies amongst its’ citizenry in the first place. (I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this topic. Hence the rant)
However, I also think that if people want to pursue the argument over same-sex marriage with Christian conservatives, probably the most productive way to do it is to challenge the notion that there even are such things as “men” and “women” on a biological level. One of the funniest and most frustrating things about this debate is that, on both sides, people seem to take for granted that the categories “man” and “woman” are obvious biological realities and that they are easily and readily defined within the law. In point of fact, different states in the US have different biological definition of who counts as male and who counts as female, some states don’t have any definitions at all, and the federal definitions of gender/sex often stand at odds with particular state definitions. As such a single person might be male in one state and female in another and therefore their marriage might be heterosexual OR homosexual contingent on what legal system they happen to be enveloped in at the time.
Without a universal system of sexing/gendering people, which we currently don’t have, it is both preposterous and fundamentally incoherent to be talking about “heterosexual” and “homosexual” marriage. Those categories are legally meaningless without universal criteria for determining people’s sex/gender.
BTW, I am not actually advocating that we make a universal system for sexing/gendering people legally. I seriously doubt we even could. What I AM advocating is that we make a point of arguing on a regular basis that biological sex is not a cut and dry thing and therefore trying to make or enforce laws which are predicated on biological sex is, fundamentally, an exercise in futility. It’s an intrinsically nonsensical endeavor.
There are bigots on both sides of the argument – and although you wouldn’t know it from reading Rachel Hills’ piece, plenty of queers who, like Foucault, don’t support gay marriage:
http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/05/01/the-gay-case-against-gay-marriage-and-gay-bigotry/
While liberal, secular types view marriage as the coming together of two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their life together, anti-gay marriage lobbyists view it as a union for the production of families and children (never mind that a growing number of same-sex couples are building families and having children of their own).
I really like this paragraph. There is a really huge divide between different people’s perception of what marriage is. I think you could go beyond this and add the economic reasons for marriage as well. In our society, people want to own their own homes and it is impossible without a double income. I see marriage as an economic contract between two people to share expenses over a lifetime in order to maximize their economic power. I’m not interested in marriage because I don’t think human romantic relationships should be about money. My relationship with my partner is about love, and nothing else, but my parents relationship is pretty obviously about meeting goals by putting two incomes together.
In the right wing world, people need to be in families- traditional ones, under one roof. The idea of remaining single or living in a group household is non-existent in their world, unless maybe it is a temporary thing in between ages 20 and 23. I see absolutely no reason to sign a contract tying me to one person forever- why? It would be different if I planned to have kids- I don’t. I have no solution for the best way to raise kids in a non-traditional family: only that our society really, really hates the raising of children in anything other than a nuclear family, and this needs to change. I guess I’m starting to ramble here: I just wanted to add another point to the list.
Well, that’s the crux, you know. Here in the US, queer rights don’t currently exist. We don’t have the same human rights as the majority. We don’t have protection and in many places it is the legal option to deny queer folks jobs, housing, insurance, and health care. Because of this, and because homophobic framing refuses to admit these lack of rights, same-sex marriage has become the stop-gap measure — not necessarily to access these rights, but to simply get those of you who are blind to the actual status of our rights to participate in some damn form of dialogue.
My partner (of six years) and I moved to New Mexico in 2009 — bad economy be damned. We had to change our auto insurance because our carrier refused to cover in NM. Now, both of us co-own both cars. Both names are on the titles; both names are on the loans. Apparently though, none of this matters to a homophobe. The Allstate agent flat out told us that the only option she had was to list my partner, the co-owner, as a “friend”, which increased our insurance 4x. Four fucking times. With me being unemployed. She then had, I dunno, the moral fortitude, the social backing, oh, say, the power, to ask me straight to my face “have you ever been married?” I pointed to my partner and said “like right now” and she swallowed some obvious bile and said “no, I mean REALLY married.” We got cut-rate insurance through someone else. Glad we had that option.
A week later I was interviewing for a job at the University of New Mexico. I was madly overqualified. Could have done the job in my sleep. I was asked why I came to NM in such a bad economy w/o a job. I replied that my spouse had a job transfer. I the honest answer and one that is greeted with 100% approval when coming from a straight person. Not for me. I lost the job because when they asked me why I didn’t have a wedding band (!) I corrected their assumption and made it clear that my spouse is female. I only wish they had cut me loose from the interview at that point because it was grossly obvious that they thought I was deceiving them by using the word “spouse.”
I can laugh at this now, but at the time I had been unemployed for four months and it was not a matter of shits and giggles but a matter of, yeah, you guessed it, human rights. Without a job, without money, I wouldn’t have all those lovely items you listed above as “legitimate” rights.
I appreciate you sharing your opinion; I appreciate that you apparently don’t have to worry about how transient and fickle your rights are. Please realize though that the marriage issue is very much the focal point of our human rights, no matter how much you (or I) don’t like it. My experience was fairly benign. But the point of discrimination *was* marriage and the ability of someone else (someone in a position of power) being able to re-define for us what our relationship should mean socially and economically, and yes, on a human rights level.
@RachelA – two thoughts.
First of all, I agree with you that marriage as a legal category that dispenses benefits and privilege that nonmarried people don’t get is fundamentally flawed, because even if we extend it to same-sex couples it still privileges a specific type of relationship (monogamous romantic sexual partnership between two unrelated people) over other types of living arrangements or life partnerships. And, you know, I say this as a queer woman who has always been :/ on the focus on same-sex marriage because I want a long-term partnership that fails on several of those grounds and hence would still be discriminated against even if same-sex marriage were totally legal everywhere. However, I’m not really sure what arguing about the definition of rights has to do with it, and frankly arguing that we shouldn’t use the word “right” for same-sex marriage as the first thing is not going to make a lot of queer people read what comes next in any sort of benevolent frame of mind. I myself had to stop, pause, and come back to it to discover I actually agreed with your second paragraph.
Also, although arguing about definitions of sex and gender might indeed be a way to sort out the marriage thing, reducing something that can be literally life and death for trans people to a neat logical trick for same-sex marriage arguments leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Let’s at least think about the possible consequences that line of argument could have for people who are violently oppressed by legal categorisations of sex and gender right now.
1. They both believe that sexuality is a social construct.
That is, that our sexual preferences and practices aren’t inbuilt, but can change according to the norms and ideals of the day.
It always annoyed me when people, both opponents of gay marriage and supporters, argued about whether or not it’s a social construct or just how you’re born. As someone who believes gay marriage should be legal–that perhaps we should even pass an amendment making it so, since there are people who are up into “what the writers of the Constitution really intended”–I never let myself argue against it being a social construct, because whether or not it is a social construct is simply beside the point. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s the way their brains work, because that doesn’t matter how you treat them! They’re human beings who deserve the same rights as other human beings, as long as they are not violating the rights of others. And they’re not. So let them get married!
@ QGrrl I do understand what you are saying about these incidents of discrimination. But the point I was trying to make (in the second paragraph of my post, which it seems like you didn’t read) is that all of these benefits and privileges that you were denied SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ATTACHED TO MARRIAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Marriage should not be a ground on which institutions, public or private, disperse privileges to people, period. That is intrinsically unjust and that was/is my basic point.
And as I also said, allowing same-sex marriage doesn’t fix the injustice of the system. It simply changes WHO is affected by the injustice of the system. People who choose to organize their lives/intimacies around non-romantic partners (regardless of their sexuality) are just as victimized by this system as people with same-sex partners. Allowing same-sex marriage does nothing to make the system less victimizing. It just changes who the victims of the system are.
Hi all, Rachel-author-of-the-guest-post here. Thanks for taking the time to engage with the post – one of the reasons I wanted to share it with the Feministe audience is that you’re all whip smart, and talk about gender, sexuality and politics in a way I don’t find in a lot of other sites.
A few thoughts in response to your comments:
- GallingGalla, I agree with you that “We’re not talking about two groups of people with relatively equal power debating two valid, if different positions.” That’s why I found the idea of addressing “both sides of the argument”, as I was instructed to, so challenging. Because I don’t think the conservative arguments against same sex marriage are valid – not only because of the power inequalities you describe, but because they are rooted in fear and a belief that GLBT people are inferior. When I’m dealing with arguments that make me angry though, I tend to deal with it by trying to deconstruct them – figure out what the people who are making those arguments are really talking about beneath the rhetoric. Hence this blog post. I absolutely take your point on the privilege of the LGB couples I spoke to for the article. And I agree that the issues you lay out in your comment have a greater impact on people’s lives than the right to marry (although some of the other commenters lay out some of the reasons that right is important).
- For context, the feature that inspired this post was an overview of the push to legalise marriage equality in Australia at present. Based on your comments, it seems that same-sex de facto couples in Australia have more rights than they do in the US (although these rights are relatively recent). Hence the sense amongst the LGB couples I spoke to (and the opponents I spoke to, for that matter) that marriage was largely about social recognition. FlexSF, I don’t think any of the couples I spoke to were particularly hung up about what the professional bigots thought of them: the social recognition they referred to was more the social recognition anyone gets when they say “my husband” or “my wife” – having your relationship taken as seriously as a married hetero couple’s, and being awarded the same rights in the same straightforward way (although yes, the fact that we give greater recognition to married couples has problems in itself).
phil – You’re right that, as we both said, social conservatives (well, the ones we’re discussing here, at least) believe that heterosexuality is natural and, as Rachel_in_WY said, anything other than heterosexuality is “a perversion that one can fall into given the right environment”. I would simply argue (as have many, many others, and as may the two of you) that they can’t be all that secure in their supposed “natural” superiority if they think that treating GBLT people decently and equally constitutes this dangerous environment. They may not register it in any concrete way, but in their heart of hearts, they appear to believe that heterosexuality has to be vigorously promoted in order to be sustained.
I think there is a fundamental difference between saying this is a broken institution and this institution is so broken that I’m comfortable with it being used to harm people. I dislike marriage as a general rule. By its very nature its excludes people who are polyamorous and focuses life partnerships on sex which may also be harmful to people who are asexual. Life is complex, we should be able to contract our living arrangements in whatever ways make sense for us at the time. But while I’m working on that…I’ll also continue to work for equality where ever I can get it.
Well, I need to be able to see my SO in the hospital. My friend needs to be able to retain custody of her daughter if her partner passes away. Another friend of mine needs to be able to live in the same country as her partner. Marriage is a bundle of rights that we give out to some people and not others. Some of those rights aren’t very important, but a few of them are crucial to life.
Also, to put on my pollyanna hat for a moment, we all NEED social acceptance. We need to feel connected to one another. And intentionally excluding someone from the social group based on non-harmful behavior is denying them access to a critical part of human experience, love and acceptance.
@Kaz
I didn’t mean to suggest that the intrinsic falseness of the gender binary should merely be used as a rhetorical tactic for obtaining same-sex marriage. I do apologize to anyone who interpreted my suggestion as being fundamentally opportunist.
Rather, I would reframe my comment to say that we desperately need a larger societal conversation about the falseness of the gender binary and the way it affects not only same sex couples, but also transpeople and intersexed people (who actually were the group I was most saliently thinking about when I wrote my original comment).
I strongly believe the artificial gender binary is one of primary causes of homophobia, transphobia and the unjust legal and medical treatment of both of those groups, as well as intersexed individuals. I think all of those groups stand very much to gain by the act of publically calling into question the usefulness of the gender binary, and I therefore advocate that happening within pretty much any context, the gay marriage debate being just one potential context amongst many.
It’s more a privilege argument than a rights argument, to me. It’s more about scarcity fears. To wit, society has always had heterosexuals in charge, so I’m afraid that if more people feel comfortable coming out, I”ll lose some of my power. I think liberals have a tendency to believe more in the idea of abundance, which is the opposite of scarcity fears.
Kristen
But I don’t think supporting marriage helps us get nearer equality. When (and I think it will be when) gay marriage is achieved, I doubt the gay marriage campaigners will carry on campaigning for polyamorous people, asexual people and queers to live their lives however they choose.
Some people gain rights that they didn’t have before. That’s closer to equality than we were before. As for the other point…if you believe we can only achieve true equality by leveraging powerlessness then we can never really achieve equality. We have to be invested in each other to make this shit work.
@RachelA – ah, okay! yeah, that I can agree with.
@Kristen J. – I support marriage equality. However, I have to admit that it’s a pretty bitter thing for me – because as an asexual person whose ideal relationship would be a not-quite-romantic nonsexual life partnership with possibly multiple people of my gender, I’m still screwed. And like quiet riot girl, I have to be doubtful that once gay marriage is achieved all the people campaigning for gay marriage will turn to campaigning for poly people or asexual people or people whose primary relationship is nonromantic or people who are long-term cohabiting with family members to have equal rights. Furthermore, I think that in some ways gay marriage will make it even harder for me and mine to become equal – e.g. because what I’d really need is for marriage to be a ceremony that no longer confers any kind of legal status and civil unions which allow unions that aren’t based on monogamous sexual romantic relationships to replace them in terms of benefits etc, whereas marriage equality further cements marriage-as-a-special-status.
As said, I still support marriage equality. But it galls me that a lot of the time it feels as if I’m being asked to wait my turn, which is probably never going to come.
RachelA: I agree and I now focus most of my campaigning in gender issues on destabilizing the gender binary/discrediting it.
But I think the campaigns for gay marriage are based on a belief in the gender binary and rely on that concept to stake their claim.
The ‘couple’ is two people in a binary relation, which marriage reinforces. And many arguments for gay marriage rely on the idea that sexuality is ‘innate’ which reinforces the binary and essentialist views on sex and gender.
Kaz – You are being asked to wait your turn, and it won’t come in this campaign by this group of people, in my view.
Don’t wait your turn! Fight for what you believe in now! I believe in better civil unions for everyone.
You have read it right. And thanks for the rest of your post, which all follows form this one observation.
The benefit of SSM isn’t direct for you; in fact as you say, it’s pretty inconsequential. But the indrect benefit is real. SSM is a bunker buster aimed at the psychogical heart of all this traditionalist homophobia; that’s why the trads are fighting so hard, in ways they have never bothered with before. There were always sweeps of gay bars in the old days, and gay bashings that went uninvestigated and unprosecuted, but never any constitutional amendments. That shows how central they see this issue to be. A defeat on this point will be a body blow for their whole bigoted worldview.
I wonder at what you mean by “productive”. I can assure you that that approach is going to end the conversation before it gets started with 99% of those people.
Well the same goes for voting rights, equality before the law, the right to raise your own children and a whole lot of other rights.
First – what Quiet Riot Girl said. Second – why does anyone else have anything to do with getting you your rights? After Prop 8 went down, there was all this recrimination against black people – how dare they be so ungrateful after all gay people have done for leftish causes! Well, black people owed us nothing. Period. Different struggles. Help someone if you want, for its own sake. Besides, who cares what whoever is asking you to wait for.
In my understanding part of the reason why gay marriage wasn’t on the political agenda earlier in Australia was that the question of marriage deeply divided the queer community. Many saw campaigning for marriage as elevating an institution that enshrined ways-of-being that they didn’t identify with, that they saw as regressive. This argument has been made very articulately by various people over the years.
I think this is a bit simplistic: “While liberal, secular types view marriage as the coming together of two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their life together, anti-gay marriage lobbyists view it as a union for the production of families and children (never mind that a growing number of same-sex couples are building families and having children of their own).”
You make the conservatives sound like automatons, which they are not. They are cultural, loving beings just like progressives are cultural, loving beings. It’s just that one believes that culture is malleable and that that’s a good thing, and the others believe that culture is brittle, and that changing culture or include a broader range of people in that culture will break it. I guess instead you could say that whereas the crux of the progressive argument centres on the love between two people, the crux of the conservative argument centres on a prescriptive view of family and children.
Also as Rachel A says says very well, Another pivot on which the marriage debate SHOULD move is whether marriage should be a means of distributing resources. I haven’t heard this debated enough. Why should the state mediate what kind of relationship should be awarded privleges? Why can’t people register any committed close inter-dependent relationship in order to get such privileges?
Or, for that matter, trans folk, binary-gendered or not.
We have same-sex marriage in Canada. And, as some people have said in the comments – it’s done very little for us queer people who are neither middle-class nor monogamous, and nothing at all for trans* people. Back when marriage was still hotly contested, middle-class monogamous LGB folks needed us – they needed our voices, our votes, our anger. I supported them back then, because I believe that LGB people of faith should be allowed to express their love in a religious manner, because marriage has a lot of positive cultural baggage even for secular queers, and because I hoped that straight people, seeing that gay marriage did not bring about the end of the world, would rally to our side. Now the LGB peeps for whom marriage was the main signifier of equality seem to have dropped the fight, and I’ve become pretty bitter about the so-called LGBT movement.
The thing is, I live in a small and extremely conservative town. There is no gay scene, no gay hang-out, no matter how small. The queer section of the local dating site is either empty or has a few straight or bi married women asking for threesomes, usually with a footnote mentioning that the initiative comes from their husband. I have a complicated gender identity that I am still in the process of figuring out and I have been the target of physical intimidation and violence on the basis of my perceived gender expression and sexual orientation before. I can’t conceive of being in a committed relationship requiring marriage – I can’t conceive of being in any kind of romantic relationship at this point, period. I would just like to feel for once as though I am not living a horrible lie, and without fearing violence or economic retribution if I am “found out.” And there are many people worse off than me – poorer people, trans* people, queer people of colour, people without supportive families. There is so much that middle-class LGB people with all their power could do to help us, and yet the mainstream outlets have become depressingly silent.
@Kaz,
IMO, society is a mess with people using power to enforce certain ways of being. The end goal is to reform society such that all non-harmful ways of being are supported. Getting from here to there is a battle fought on a million different fronts with some people fighting to survive while others are fighting for acceptance. Some of those battles are more easily won than others.
But very rarely has one group explicitly been granted privilege at the expense of another. Some white women did it with suffrage. The HRC has done it with people who are trans. But I don’t think that’s what is happening here. There was no choice between gay marriage and free contracting. Free contracting harder battle. Even harder is the battle for the right of children to be free from abuse, a right in conflict with our current family structure. Would it be fair to say that we’re asking children to wait their turn when we inevitably win on civil unions but don’t on children’s rights?
Anne O.: You make the conservatives sound like automatons, which they are not. They are cultural, loving beings just like progressives are cultural, loving beings.
Prove it. I haven’t seen evidence of critical thinking from them since the 1990s, and every passing year confirms that the Borg do exist.
Kristen J: But very rarely has one group explicitly been granted privilege at the expense of another.
History says you’re wrong. White non-property owning men got the vote at the expense of white women and African Americans. White women got rights at the expense of African Americans. African Americans got their rights secured at the expense of gay men and women. And so on..
By explicitly granted, I mean explicitly granted. As in the kyriarchy says explicitly you can have this but only if you help us not give them that. Which I agree has happened, but for the most part I don’t think it works that way.
Nice.
My point is that it doesn’t matter that these things “should” never have been attached to marriage. My point is that they are. Deal with it. Don’t redefine what human rights are because you don’t like the strings that society attaches to things.
Thats something of a false standard though, isn’t it? Given that this discussion is happening in the context of Foucault I think we ought to remember that stated intentions don’t really matter much. Power doesn’t tend to work explicitly. The kyriarchy didn’t get to be the kyriarchy by being blunt, obvious, and procedural. Power accumulates by creating a system which invisibly reinforces itself. The kyriarchy is a self-replicating system, a memetic force which survives by passing itself off as the Truth.
The 19th century WASPs who looked down on Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish, German, and Slavic immigrants didn’t have to hold a meeting and say “if you just push the blacks around we’ll agree to call you white.” By mimicking the dominant other ethnic groups managed to claim the title of Whiteness, part of that cultural mimicking included hating the right people. Indeed, it went further than that because these newly minted Whites needed to find someone new to occupy the exclusionary social space they were trying escape. None of this needed to be conscious, none of it needed to be explicit, but if you look at actions and effects the process begins to become pretty clear.
I think that the unconscious process of “you can have this only if you help us keep that from them” is especially important in the context of the gay marriage discussion in relation to African Americans because it gives us some insight into the means by which the Kyriarchy is able to put pressure on an excluded group in order to advance power. The harder you push down on an excluded group the more the excluded group will want to find relief. As a result the excluded group looks for means of becoming powerful, they find another group weaker than themselves and exert pressure on them (think of the man who has a bad day at work and yells at his kids because he can’t yell at his boss on the macro-level). In the process both oppressed groups get hurt, but the kyriarchy becomes stronger because more people are invested in holding power. Oppressed peoples are turned against one another, each trying to prove how oppressive they can be in the hopes that they can be absorbed into the Oppressor category rather than the Oppressed. The kyriarchy becomes stronger because all it is is a knot of rules and regulations to which we violently hold one another.
The real kick, though, is that (from a Foucauldian point of view) no one really holds power and so no one can ever really be free from oppression. Power isn’t something held by some in order to control others but rather it is a system off oppression designed to change the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of those upon whom it is practiced. There is no warden who gets to leave the prison in the evening, no master class which is not subject to the constraints of power, no Primal Father who serves as the exception that proves the rule. The goal we’re all racing to doesn’t actually exist. Its why revolutions and elections come and go but things remain the same.
@ Q Grrl
“It doesn’t matter that these things ‘should’ never have been attached to marriage”? Are you kidding me? Are you actually kidding me? If structural injustices don’t matter, then what is the point of any of this? Why bother having political debate or working to correct any injustice at all?
I mean by this logic, the injustices you’ve suffered – the employment discrimination, the unfair insurance premiums – don’t matter, either. After all, marriage is heterosexual. That’s just the way the system is currently structured. Deal with it.
Your argument fundamentally boils down to accepting the status quo because it’s the status quo. That’s patently absurd. Marriage is a social construct and the benefits we attach to it are ARBITRARY. There is no objective reason why we need to structure marriage in the way that we do, or attach institutionalized benefits to it in the way that we do.
I do understand why you want access to the benefits currently attached to marriage; but acquiring them through the obtainment of same sex marriage doesn’t stop marriage from being a fundamentally victimizing institution/system. It would simply stop YOU, in particular, from being a victim of it.
People of ALL sexualities are victimized by living under a system that dispenses benefits and privileges to individuals on the basis of marital status. No one – gay, bi, straight, asexual, or other – should HAVE to get married in order to access the rights and privileges that we’ve ARBITRARILY attached to this one particular over-valorized form of intimacy.
And I am not going to just “deal with” that. That kind of mentality is EXACTLY what allows these systems to continue victimizing people, myself being one of those people. I personally choose to eschew romantic relationships entirely, as a long-term lifestyle choice. And guess what – I should not be taxed more because of that choice! I should not be prevented from putting a platonic friend on my health insurance because of that choice! I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO GET MARRIED AT ALL TO BE TREATED EQUALLY UNDER THE LAW!
I simply refuse to just “deal with” my own inequality. I am sure you can understand that.
As an aside, if you can redefine them, it’s a desirable human privilege, not a human right. So preferential taxation, for instance, is a privilege – not a right. Being treated equitably ought to be a right. It’s just one that’s fairly consistently flouted.
Kristin: The suffrage movement made a concious decision to kick abolitionists to the curb in order to get the vote for women, and the abolitionists split to get black men the right to vote. So they each explicitly decided to trample over another oppressed group in order to get their rights. And the population at large thought letting black men vote was less threatening then letting women have the vote. (Granted, it was another century before anyone of African descent got the vote, but in theory, black men were allowed to vote after the 14th Amendment was passed.)
The fact that you think things shouldn’t be like that, doesn’t change the fact that that’s how they went down. Any human population is a small-minded, simplistic creature, so it must be spoonfed change.
Look, at bottom I (a cisgendered, white, disabled woman) don’t care whether I like certain people getting married. (Though in reality, I like civil unions for everything.) I care that people’s right to equality under the law is respected. I would make the same argument if we had a law that said neo-Nazis couldn’t get married. (I am not comparing gay people to neo-Nazis, I was in fact trying to find as big a contrast as possible.) The law of the land, according to the US Supreme Court (and if our government is accepted as legitimate, they are the arbiters of the law), in Loving vs Virginia (the case that ended anti-miscegenation laws), says:
“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial [or sexual orientation based] classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.” (Wikipedia) *Brackets mine, obviously.
That’s all. If it’s one of our basic rights, it’s one of everyone’s basic rights. Period. Anything else is unconstitutional.
I think you make a good point that the Foucauldian notion of power, and its operations, is far more diffuse and implicit than our more traditional conceptions of power, which represent it as explicit, hierarchical and being held by one identifiable person or group.
However, I would strongly question your interpretation of Foucault that states power is only ever oppressive. Foucault certainly acknowledged that power CAN be very oppressive. But he also argued that power is highly productive; power is what produces our identities and the range of possible behaviors and practices we can engage in and take up. This is both a blessing and a curse and Foucault believed that power was inherently paradoxical, in that sense (at least, that is how I understand his work).
Also, as you state, power isn’t unilaterally held by any one person or group, in Foucault’s formulation. He very much believed things COULD change and that power differentials could be — and in fact always were — in the process of being re-negotiated. Foucault’s notion of power, in fact, was not that it is fixed and immovable. Quite the contrary. He argued that power is highly fluid and the kinds of people and practices it accrues to is always very much in flux.
However, you are right to acknowledge that he didn’t believe there is an “outside” to power. There never is going to be a “happy end to history,” to use the Marxist term. Power will always be present in every moment of our lives, simultaneously enabling and constraining us. Power is the fundamental condition of our existence, and it is always in the business of opening up certain possibilities for us and, as an inevitable corollary, closing down others. But my readings of him strongly suggest that the particular ways in which power operates and gets deployed on the individual CAN always be altered and re-negotiated.
In other words, you are right that there is no getting rid of power. But there IS always the possibility of changing how it acts upon individuals and groups. We don’t have ever have the power to get rid of power, but we do have the power to change power, make it work to our advantage and restructure it so that it does not victimize us. (Although, as Foucault also acknowledged, that is never a fully innocent endeavor. While some people/groups might stand to gain a great deal in certain restructurings of power, other people/groups may very well stand to lose something in the process as well. And while I don’t think Foucault conceptualized it as purely a zero-sum game, I think he was very cognizant that all political action has the potential to negatively impact some people. Which is precisely what produces our ethical obligations to others in the first place. But while politics may never be innocent, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t ever worthwhile)
This is the kind of horrible thing that happens when most of the legal junk associated with marriage becomes available to any (?) two humans that want to sign the paper.
Horror! Chaos!
You’re right, I am reading into the text there, I should have been more clear. Still, while I’m not positive Foucault would have agreed with me that all power is oppressive, I believe that you could make an argument that that is the natural evolution of his thought. Foucault was a product of the psychoanalytic age. He focused on the definitions and actions of madness early in his career because thats where his roots were. He pretty clearly bought into Freud’s structural model and often used that lens to examine the world. Perhaps he might not have said that all power was oppressive, but I feel it would be difficult to read Foucault and end up at the conclusion that power is anything other than restrictive. Especially if you look at his later work, when he was focusing on biopolitics, governmentality, and moving away from the socialists politically, power begins to become more and more something Foucault talks about in a negative light.
Just because power is oppressive doesn’t mean it isn’t productive. From a psychoanalytic perspective the same processes which make Christian fundamentalists hate gay people also prevent most of us from committing murder. I suppose that aspect of power might be seen as a blessing and a curse, but I feel it would be a misreading of Foucault to stop there. Foucault had said that the three writers who had the biggest influence on him were Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. He specifically referenced the revolutionary nature of these thinkers, the flavor of them trying to radically change reality by changing the ways in which we looked at it. I think that, by the end of his life, Foucault was beginning to see the blessings of power as a biproduct, something which happened so that power had a more stable environment in which to replicate.
Its also probably worth noting Foucault’s own relationship to power and the kinds of power he chose to write about. We’re talking about a man who was told it was wrong to be gay, whose personal sexual life focused on exploring the boundaries and means of power, and whose public political life was marked first by resistance to the status quo and then by resistance in general. The topics he chose to write about were instances in which power had hurt people. The History of Madness looks at the ways in which power used mad persons to create exclusionary space. Discipline and punish approached power as a meme but ends with a summary that is pretty hostile to even the kinder-gentler discipline of the modern age. In the lectures that I have read power is, at best, treated as something neutral. While Foucault’s rhetorical style tends to be descriptive rather than judgmental, I find it telling that power almost always ends up looking vaguely sinister and abusive. After all, while we’re talking about power from a philosophical point of view (and experiencing the privilege which allows us to do this for fun on a Saturday morning) there are real people being denied real social benefits because of who they fell in love with. Sure, maybe the system also does some good things, but I’ve never had much respect for utilitarianism.
Still, one of the great things about Foucault is that…neither of us is right. And thats OK, hell, I think thats the point. Foucault described his thought as a tool box, intending for people to take what worked and leave the rest.
I think this discussion ship has sailed, but I just want to say that I think this is the most well thought out post I’ve ever read on this website.
Good for France. The idea of ‘marriage’ is a horrible dinosaur that needs to be flamed out of existence. I’d rather have a civil union any day.
(Signed, someone who’s not getting married anyway because zie’s a Democrat.)
Interestingly, this type of legislation was passed in Alberta, Canada in 2003. Back then it was the (fairly conservative) provincial government’s attempt to prevent the legalization of gay marriage in that province, while still providing legal benefits for individuals who choose to be emotionally and financially interdependent.
“The Adult Interdependent Relationships Act was passed during the fall 2002 sitting of the provincial Legislature and becomes law on June 1, 2003.
This act amends several Alberta laws for people in unmarried relationships involving economic and emotional interdependency. The act covers a range of personal relationships that fall outside of marriage, including committed platonic relationships where two people agree to share emotional and economic responsibilities, and provides a legal definition for an adult interdependent partner relationship. There are two key elements that define an adult interdependent relationship. First, an adult interdependent partner is a person who is involved with another person in an unmarried relationship of interdependence where they:
- share one another’s lives
- are emotionally committed to one another, and
- function as an economic and domestic unit.
Second, to be considered adult interdependent partners, one of the following must apply to the relationship. The adult interdependent partners must be:living in an interdependent relationship for a minimum of three years living in an interdependent relationship of some permanence where there is a child by birth or adoption, or living in or intend to live in an interdependent relationship and have entered into a written adult interdependent partner agreement.
http://justice.alberta.ca/programs_services/public_trustee/Publications_PublicTrustee/AlbertasAdultInterdependentRelationshipsActAndYou.aspx
Jumping in a bit late, not necessarily disagreeing but giving my take on power in Foucault:
As I have utilized Foucault, power is only oppressive when it exists in a system on domination, that is when power relations are so uneven that there can be no exchange of power at all. This is the “extreme” use of power that many focus on, such as military oppression or just any system of out and out violence is an example of power being oppressive. Though, while this visibility of power is the most abhorrent to many of us, it is by and far a tiny fraction of the use of power. That is not to say that there are not far too many cases of these systems of domination, but it is to say that power is so pervasive that we tend to miss it.
Power in this way is not oppressive because it exists in reciprocal relations, perhaps not always completely even, but there are possibilities for resistance and shifting of power dynamics. This is why Foucault talks so much about BDSM, because while the bottom may seem to be powerless to the outside observer, there has been negotiation beforehand and in addition to that a bottom can lead a top by this reciprocal style of power relations during the scene. Whether what power produces is “good” or not is an ethical question, which Foucault did take up later on.
Power is mostly productive in the sense that it produces shared modalities of existence, it creates identity (when homosexuality was legally defined as acts of sodomy you then got a cohesive gay movement and there are other examples where power produces identity), power creates the very ways in which we render the world intelligible. This is the essence of Foucault’s argument against the repressive hypothesis as that repression assumes an innate way to understand the world that can be set free. It must first be produced before it can act on us, and with us. Again, noting to say of whether this particular understanding is “good” or not.
Marriage conveys a social status that serves to legitimize what relationships are valid. Marriage privileges conjugal coupling over other relationships such as poly relationships, non-gender-binary trans/queer relationships, close interdependent non-conjugal relationships such as two senior living together to provide mutual care, an adult taking care of eir parents etc. Power is all about interconnectedness, and a political strategy I can conceive of that would take advantage of this is to move in this direction of presenting all these types of relationships as being de-legitimized by the privilege position of marriage and have this be a much broader push that would encompass these many groups and still attain a goal of eclipsing the privilege of marriage which, as stated by others, would have far reaching effects into how we view relationships and who we see as being able to be in them and in which ways. Marriage, being the only valid relationship with its binary and conjugal normative character, erases non-binary (gender, number of partners etc.) and/or non-conjugal relationships (we always forget about the asexual folk etc.), which are vast in possibility.
Let’s queer up relationships not gay up marriage… a terrible chant… :p
Ostien: Good idea, but I have to agree that it needs a bit of work as a chant.
“They may not register it in any concrete way, but in their heart of hearts, they appear to believe that heterosexuality has to be vigorously promoted in order to be sustained. Rachel @ Musings of an Inappropriate Woman”
Judging by how they go about God-fearing, as opposed to God-following or God-loving, I’d say they think that if Christianity wasn’t culturally mandated, it wouldn’t hold, and anarchy, murders, thefts etc would become rampant. That’s because they think someone needs to fear going into Hell to do right moral things. That they naturally would be morally bad (rather than have their own philosophical (as opposed to religious) moral instincts). Hence how they think of atheists as morally questionable.
So they think that, while heterosexuality is “natural” and desirable, it isn’t the default choice people would make if they didn’t have that stick following them.
In Middle-East countries, I once read that a Muslim man was “putting up” with heterosexual intercourse, to have children. He felt it was an obligation, not anything fun or wanted. He much preferred having unattached sex with other men. Which he felt was more pleasant sexually.
He even went as far as saying that, absent extreme indictions against homosexual love, most men would choose to love men and forego marriage.
He might not be representative, but yes, much like the most anti-gay conservatives are usually attracted to men themselves (but not “acting on it”…until they spectacularly get caught, like Rekers recently), they are the most for extreme measures against its promotion, feeling their attraction is like an alcoholic’s addiction: something to fight against and surmount.