Queering Freedom

Epilogue: A Political Note against Same-Sex Marriage

201 Epilogue A Political Note against Same-Sex Marriage As Dean Spade, the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, puts it, “Everything changes when we aren’t trying to climb into their marriage boat” (2005). As the same-sex marriage debate spurs ever higher levels of national anxiety across the U.S., I want to offer a few closing words on the transformations that a queer response brings to these debates. Given the national and global political climate we are facing early in the twenty-first century, the need for effective coalitional resistance has arguably never been higher. And yet, sadly, this same-sex marriage debate has reinstalled identity politics and all of its divisiveness at the heart of gay/lesbian lives and politics: you are either for or against same-sex marriage. And we witness once more the great divide-and-conquer, polarizing power of phallicized whiteness in advanced capitalist cultures. Because I am a white, monogamous, middle-class—but also queer— lesbian, this debate has consequently landed me squarely in the kinds of contradictory positions that I have described as a part of queer consciousness. For example, as a lesbian living in a “red state,” I must sign petitions against legislative bills that would write a definition of marriage as heterosexual into the state’s constitution; but as a queer, I refuse to undertake any political activism on behalf of legalizing same-sex marriage: I am against both banning and legalizing same-sex marriage. In the wake of this debate, such is the mess that many of us find ourselves living. In these closing pages, therefore, I bring the theory I have developed in this book to bear on this specific political problem for two reasons: first, as an example of what a socio-political reframing in light of this theory might look like; and second, to suggest ways that we might queer this specific debate and reframe the same-sex marriage movement so that it is not implicated in the interlocking systems of domination at work in the U.S. As I 202 Epilogue do throughout this book, I draw on those who have gone before me: many excellent essays are now articulating a queer critique of “the same-sex marriage movement” and critical conversations are circulating among queer political groups across the nation.1 I do not pretend to do justice to the complexity of these conversations, particularly as I leave sex radicals’ critiques of the normalizing function of monogamy2 aside and focus specifically on the race, sex, and class dynamics at work: marriage is too white, too reliant on sexual identity, and too immersed in the class structure for us to look upon the extension of its domains as an unqualified success. My hope is that these closing pages, albeit brief, will serve as a historical marking of where some queer responses to the same-sex marriage movement stand in 2005—lest these critiques become part of those “lost pasts” that signal the amnesiac triumph of the systems of domination I have diagnosed here. Same-sex marriage is not an issue of identity politics. While it has been framed as an issue of identity politics and group rights, that frame only masks the systems of domination that this movement to legalize same-sex marriage is—perhaps unintentionally—corroborating. The frame of identity politics always invokes the concept of the liberal individual and the narrative of desire—two dynamics that I have diagnosed as constitutive of the interlocking systems of domination at work in cultures of advanced capitalism. Samesex marriage, therefore, is about these interlocking systems of domination. If we must distill it into identity politics, then it is not about gays and lesbians, but about the white-identified, patriarchal, Christian-centric middle class. It is about the triumph of advanced capitalism and its ongoing cooptation of all attempts at resistance. That sounds harsh, I know. And to the thousands of gay and lesbian couples who made their pilgrimages to the steps of San Francisco’s city hall to get married in February 2003 or the thousands of gay and lesbian families that have been fighting for these rights over the last several years, it must also sound rather obnoxious. The institution of marriage is arguably the most powerful institution in the U.S.: it holds immense emotional and symbolic power over most of our lives. Particularly because the wedding industry flourished in the 1990s, it is unsurprising that...