Gay Marriage and the War on Terror

In fall 2004, when Joan and Sally were conceiving this issue of Hypatia, my partner of twelve years and I were in the midst of a ground-shaking crisis in our relationship. We were living separately at the time, and I remember driving through West Coast early winter rain from Eugene to Portland on one of those pain-drenched weekends, reading the big white signs with red box-letters in the farmers' fields along Interstate 5: marriage = one man, one woman. A few months before, Multnomah County had begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Hundreds made their way to the Portland courthouse. Acquaintances described to me, in rich detail accompanied by radiant smiles, their joyful lesbian weddings (every few minutes, it seemed). When not in the presence of the happy couples, I was fond of citing Katha Pollitt, who I believed at the time had already had the last, best word on gay marriage: "When gay friends argue in favor of same-sex marriage, I always agree and offer them the one my husband and I are leaving. Why should straights be the 'only' ones to have their unenforceable promise to love, honor and cherish trap them like houseflies in the web of law?" (1996, 196).

All of the hubbub provided a bizarre, accidentally cruel, backdrop to my struggle to put one foot in front of the other, take care of my kids, teach my classes, eat. Mostly, I just tried to ignore it. I was focused, when I could focus at all, on things that seemed very far distant from the long lines of happy same-sex couples outside the Portland courthouse, or the bigot's slick missive left on my front porch declaring "Last Chance to Save Marriage in Oregon!" I was writing and speaking about the war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the presidential-military antics of our Commander in Chief. I didn't know that, eventually, I wouldn't be able to think or talk about the war without talking about gay marriage, in spite of my overwhelming desire to plug my ears and hum dirges whenever the issue was raised.

I busied myself with trying to analyze the rebuilding of American national identity on a hypermasculine model of invulnerability after September 11, 2001. The Bush administration's policy of preemptive war, apparently based on the need to "man up," had led to the toppling of two governments and the death or disability of thousands of U.S. soldiers and Afghan and Iraqi citizens. At the same time, I was aware that each of the two wars was explicitly and strangely tied to a racialized project of "women's liberation" by the Bush administration itself—we might say the administration took up and occupied the discursive site of a global Western (and Christian) "feminist" subject who set out to free the oppressed Muslim woman. Laura Bush became the spokeswoman for this strange women's liberation, asserting in a Thanksgiving radio address in 2001 that "the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women" (2).

I was working with a document associated with the war effort, Harlan Ullman and James Wade's 1996 National Defense University publication Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, which, I couldn't help but notice eventually, deployed complex narratives of racialized homoerotic violence. There was frequent reference to penetration, but especially to "penetrating the penetrator," so that the whole document took on a tone of violent heterosexist homoeroticism. In the midst of U.S. military adventures, the use of torture by American troops and intelligence officials became an international scandal, and the dominant images from Abu Ghraib prison featured white women sexually humiliating Iraqi men—even while the strategies of torture and humiliation included the racialized homosexualizing of the prisoners, who were forced to simulate fellatio with one another and photographed repeatedly with their anuses exposed.

It became apparent to me that I couldn't not think about this complex of narratives in connection with the panic that had been building domestically over the prospect of legal gay marriage...