American Marriage: A Political Institution

Conclusion: “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?”

Conclusion “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” Marriage as a Political Institution I set out in this project with two central aims: to understand the role of marriage in U.S. politics, and to understand the role of U.S. politics in marriage. I approached these questions historically in order to examine the development of each in relation to the other, giving particular emphasis to moments of major change in U.S. politics. What I found was a patterned tension between marital obligations and rights, a tension that defined marriage in a series of passionate conflicts across the eras I examined. I was thus led to a series of interlinked questions: Why do Americans find marriage so important as an expression of political identity? Why do conflicts over the institution recur? And, ultimately, what kind of politics does marriage produce? These questions point to marriage as deeply embedded in U.S. politics, such that the institution acts as a fulcrum between two crucial and constitutive elements of the U.S. nation state: liberal conceptions of rights and feudal notions of obligations operating through the embodied statuses of race, gender, class, sexuality , and national origin. So conceived, marriage holds together and defines both of these fundamental but disparate aspects of American political culture and thus becomes central when questions of difference, hierarchy, and inclusion are at stake. Marriage is similar in scope and design to other political institutions—it limits and defines norms and practices as it shapes the interests of those inside and outside its reach. As a political institution, marriage and family can do the work of the state, whether that work is to fortify state-bound white supremacy as Julie Novkov has argued, to play a bureaucratic role for the state as Patricia Strach has revealed, or to provide a form of governance outside the state as Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan have shown.1 This book 148 Conclusion contributes to the growing literature of political studies that shed light on the role of marriage and family in institutional and state development.2 Marriage can act upon citizens, limiting and shaping their actions, desires and interests. But institutions such as marriage not only shape identities and structure hierarchies. Those identities and hierarchies define and produce the practices and imperatives of institutions. For instance, we know that marriage has historically shaped gender by assigning men and women different familial roles. We know that marriage shaped our understandings of race historically, through the prevention of interracial marriage, and by normalization practices that worked to pathologize black Americans. We know that the institution has shaped our understandings of sexuality by historically limiting its availability to heterosexuals. But as we have seen in these examples from U.S. history, the meaning and role of marriage as a political institution is not static. Political actors also act as a shaping force on marriage . So even though marriage and divorce rates fluctuate, the salient pattern is continued contestation and subsequent institutional renovation over time.3 For example, the role of gender in marriage changed when women began working; the legalization of interracial marriages altered the role of marriage in maintaining racial and economic difference; and finally, marriage promotion policies changed the institution’s relationship to the state. The efforts of state and non-state actors, policymakers, judges, and journalists to challenge , recast, or maintain the political status and role of gender, race, class, and sexual identities have served to dynamically shape the institution as well. Thus marriage constitutes politics, and politics constitutes marriage. The question is when, how and in what ways. Just as marriage is not static, nor is it apolitical. Examining the context in which struggles occur is important to any analysis of the institution. Marriage and family are unique institutions in that they link diverse elements of social, political, economic, and private life, yet are generally not considered political or open to political debate. By understanding marriage and family as embedded in state development, and state development as embedded in marriage and family, we can see how the work of the state is achieved through supposedly non-political sites. In other words, this dual embeddedness reveals how cultural discourses and practices determine institutions. The relationship between obligations and rights in marriage politics demonstrates the way that institutional imperatives express seemingly contradictory ends. In each case I examined, the repressive tendencies of marriage were matched by movement towards forms of acceptance, and forms of inclusion were matched by regula- [3.23...