Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage by Nicola Barker (review)

Nicola Barker’s Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage provides an accessible and historically situated critique that combines the class and gender consciousness of radical second-wave feminism with aspects of contemporary queer analysis. Although Barker is a legal scholar and her book is largely concerned with family law and related cross-jurisdictional comparisons, she concurrently asks questions regarding domestic and affective labor, symbolic recognition, neoliberal governance, and economic redistribution. Such issues are raised through readings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and second-wave feminist stalwarts including Adrienne Rich, Paula Ettlebrick, Betty Friedan, and Hanna Hartmann. This book provides a much-needed injection of historically relevant feminist, queer, and class critique into the dismal and often revisionist narratives told by mainstream gay and lesbian organizations campaigning for same-sex marriage the world over.

In the opening pages, Barker makes her framing of the same-sex marriage issue clear, “I argue that the same sex marriage debates tend to focus on access to the institution at the expense of examining what it actually is that some same-sex couples are seeking access to and what it means to be married, legally, socially or ideologically” (12). Through this statement, Barker attempts to sidestep the distracting for/against debate around same-sex marriage and asks readers, as a number of other scholars and activists have, to pull back and take stock—from both historical and contemporary perspectives—of what this thing called marriage is (and has been) and why gay and lesbian people are demanding access to it. Barker continues, “Arguing that same-sex couples should have ‘equal rights and responsibilities’ precludes the question, not only of whether legal ‘rights and responsibilities’ are in themselves a good, but also whether law can provide ‘the solution’ to inequality” (169). Indeed, the disparity between legal equality and the distribution of life chances amongst minority peoples who have already gained formal equality under the law in the United States reiterates such a crucial concern.

The first three chapters of the book look at the myriad legal provisions for relationship recognition, same-sex and otherwise, throughout the West and what potential benefits and responsibilities these different legal forms of relationship recognition might have. The text also includes a comparative jurisdictional look at same-sex marriage litigation among the United States, Canada, and South Africa, where constitutional, federal, and provincial/state laws all vary, and where material geopolitical differences that marital status influences, like access to health care and immigration, differ radically. This broad comparative overview would be useful for talking to both students and same-sex marriage activists about the extremely narrow vision of relationship recognition currently championed by mainstream gay and lesbian organizations working within what many regard as the “nonprofit industrial complex.” These organizations, which operate through an elite set of professional-class organizers who are subject to the whims of wealthy donors and foundations, have ignored queer and/or feminist critiques of marriage from its own constituents, as documented at length in Jay Cee Whitehead’s The Nuptial Deal: Same-Sex Marriage and Neoliberal Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) and have largely controlled the discourse around the same-sex marriage debate through costly media campaigns. The comparative analysis offered by Barker allows readers to see a bigger picture of comparative family law while cancelling out the boisterous background noise of the oversimplified and divisive same-sex marriage debate.

The remaining three chapters problematize the arguments made in favor of same-sex marriage by activists and academics. Barker does this through a thorough class (feminist-socialist) and gender (second-wave feminist) analysis. By working with these two historic feminist lines of thought, Barker offers many insightful and productive critiques that challenge the neoliberal framework in which the question of legalizing same-sex marriage is couched. For example, Barker observes that the legal consequences of marriage often work against people...