Beyond Marriage: The Couple

As to marriage and love. I believe these are probably the most tabooed subjects in this country.

—Emma Goldman

"Marriage of two margins," the phrase Sara Suleri uses to designate the coupling of feminism and postcolonialism (758), will serve as my point of entry into the discourse of feminist theory. If in order for other thoughts to emerge there is need for an initial point of rupture, for a burst of laughter, then Suleri's phrase will be my enabling laughter moment. For it is, of course, laughter that welcomes the prospect of feminism getting married: a laughter that laughs the thought that, indeed, ironic as it might be, a vocabulary of marriage is often employed to describe feminism's alliances with other projects.

Batya Weinbaum discusses a certain "courtship" that feminism entered more or less willingly in the early days of what is now known as its second wave. But it was probably starting with the publication of Heidi Hartmann's representative essay for dual systems theory, "The Unhappy Marriage of Feminism and Marxism: Towards a More Progressive Union," that an impressive number of feminist texts began to make use of the metaphor of marriage to refer to a relationship between feminism and other intellectual projects. Much attention has been offered to the opening paragraph of Hartmann's essay, the paragraph that introduces the marriage motif. My intention is to look at it anew, taking it out of the context of its initial formulation and subsequent readings, in the hope that these lines might be put to a different use, perhaps given another chance:

The "marriage" of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce.

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Hartmann's marriage metaphor, like any metaphor, will reproduce itself, irradiating outward and contaminating its milieu. A whole familial idiom of marriage and romance will consequently become familiar to feminist theory. Illustrative in this respect is Lydia Sargent's anthology of responses to Hartmann's essay, which plays with the range of marriage vocabulary. Some of the titles in this anthology include: "New Left Woman and Men: The Honeymoon is Over"; "The Incompatible Ménage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism, and Racism"; "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Can It Be Saved?"; "Marxism and Feminism: Unhappy Marriage, Trial Separation or Something Else?" Through metaphoric uses such as these, the word "marriage" and its semantic family ("honeymoon," "divorce," "separation," "ménage à trios" etc.) has decisively entered the feminist idiom.

The problem is that in time metaphors become clichés, losing their metaphoricity and entering language as "invisible" words. If we are to believe Nietzsche's claim in "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense" that all words in a language have forgotten metaphorical origins, it might be said that the marriage metaphor has by now reached this point of invisible solidification such that, whether it appears between quotation marks or not, we simply do not see the word marriage and its ideological baggage when used to stand for relation in general. Marriage becomes synonymous with relation. This is how I would explain the use of this word in Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham's 1997 Introduction to Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives. In the course of their historical narrative of feminism's engagement with Marxism, written in a style that could hardly be called playful, when the authors reach this point in feminism's history, they simply state: "A marriage between marxism and feminism was called for. Debate turned on the terms of the arrangement" (6). The word marriage and its "semantic family" are common language in feminist scholarly literature.

Let us push further. By tracing the marriage metaphor and its corollaries, feminist theory can be read as a courtship narrative: a chase...