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  • When Marriage Falls:Queer Coincidences in Straight Time
  • Tom Boellstorff (bio)

I proffer this essay to a specific audience—those, like myself, with a commitment to both "queer theory" in some sense of the term and a critique of marriage that draws on concerns with its politics of recognition (and disrecognition of the unmarried), the place of marriage in capitalist production, and the inequalities and violences so often found within marriage and so often linked to hierarchies of gender, race, and class.1 I pitch this essay in an exploratory register, resisting a framework that would equate "offering solutions" with the horizon of relevance and political efficacy. Proscription is not the same thing as critique. While I do suggest an alternative mode of conceptualizing time, this suggestion is an invitation to conversation and debate. I am interested in questions like the one posed by Geeta Patel: "How can we think subjectivity through other possible times, given that subjectivities in the 'modern' are inseparable from particular ways of narrating time?"2

This essay considers the possibility of a queer theory not necessarily opposed to marriage. This is a tricky proposition, because some prominent arguments in favor of "same-sex marriage" claim it will "civilize" gay and lesbian persons into upholding "traditional" norms of monogamy and propriety. As the Gay Shame collective has noted in their "End Marriage" statement: "If you look at the rhetoric of the freedom to marry movement and the Republican Party their similarities are frighteningly apparent. In their ideal world we would all be monogamously coupled, instead of rethinking the practice of 'coupling.'"3 Granted, some working for what they term "marriage equality" are careful to note that marriage may not work for everyone.4 But the Gay Shame statement is accurate in that "same-sex marriage" rhetoric commonly celebrates that possibility as a means to normalize queer sexuality and elides the relationship between marriage and "the reproduction of patriarchal relations," a relationship long demonstrated by [End Page 227] feminist scholarship.5 A prominent example of an author aligned with this rhetoric is Andrew Sullivan, whose writings have been astutely critiqued by a number of scholars, including Michael Warner and Lisa Duggan.6

I explore the possibility of a queer theory that does not foreclose the support of what I provisionally term same-sex marriage. Such a stance remains aligned with scholars like Warner and Duggan in terms of an attention to how marriage has been deployed in the service of normalization, in linked symbolic and political economic registers. But many queer theoretical positions against same-sex marriage share a temporal horizon with both the Right and "pro-gay" arguments for same-sex marriage. This conceptual, practical, and ultimately political horizon is at its core the linear, millenarian framework of apocalypse that I name "straight time." This is not just a pun: straight time is an emically salient, socially efficacious, and experientially real cultural construction of temporality across a wide range of political and social positions. I hypothesize that straight time is shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse, and that naming this temporality and speculating on possible alternatives might productively inform discussions of same-sex marriage.

I focus on the United States, where millenarianism has a particular historical and contemporary reference.7 In unpacking this implicit millenarian temporality, I suggest a queer time of coincidence as one possible alternative, a queer time in which time falls rather than passes, a queer meantime that embraces contamination and imbrication.8 From this standpoint, supporting same-sex marriage might be thinkable in terms of a time that "falls" in coincidence with (and thus "queers") straight time, in the sense that we say "May 23rd 'falls' on a Tuesday." In its coincidental engagement with straight time, such a queer temporality might contribute to the "fall" of marriage itself.

I thus hope to use the question of queer time as a point of entrée, to inquire about the possibility of a queer theoretical argument that neither participates in normalization nor renders itself averse to the dynamics of complicity and derivation that are, after all, central to most articulations of queer politics, analytics, and ethics. Note that I have...

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