Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
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Marriage
Question—culturally privileged status of couplehood (viii)
[M]arriage law ensures that privileges and benefits accrue to those who
are willing to limit their outwardly acknowledged sexual relations to one other
person, and to oblige themselves to the care and maintenance of that person and
any chilfren that result from this union, “forsaking all others,” as the
Protestant Book of Common Prayers
puts it. This last dictum is important: marriage law may to a certain extent
financially reward those who can limit the horizon of their social obligations,
but it also allows the state to forsake the burden of caring for dependents.
(viii)/ Crucially, cultural and legal recognition of same-sex couples would do
nothing to enfranchise the relationships that have also been fundamental to
queer life: friendships, cliques, tricks, sex buddies, ex-lovers, activist and
support groups, and myriad others. (ix)/ What would the world be like if
intimate couplehood did not have to function as an economic safety net for so
many people? At the very least, I wished that if core human needs had to be met
by private constituencies rather than public funds, people could share their
perks within whatever small-scale social configurations they chose—in short,
that institutions including the state would cease to make a singular form of
love and sex into the matrix for its allocation of resources./ I have come to
wish, more simply, that there were no such thing as legal marriage for straight
people, gay people, or anyone else—no mechanism that privatizes and
automatically packages together such incommensurate elements as the sharing of
material goods and shelter, expectation of ongoing sexual relations, extension
of institutional benefits, and social recognition of a relationship./ I have
come to desire the final disappearance of what Michel Foucault labels the
“deployment of alliance,” or the state’s maintenance of a social order by
fixing the routes by which names, property, and other protected forms of
cultural recognition travel. (ix)/ Yet the Foucauldian “deployment of
sexuality” is not the endpoint I hope for either (nor it is Foucault’s). The task is still, as he says, to imagine
and put into practice new ways of being in relation, and I would add, to
imagine representational possibilities commensurate with these new modes of
connection: to produce something like a deployment of affinity. (ix-x)/ A
state that promotes marriage also disenfranchises people whose primary
affinities do not get into the couple form and contributes to a culture that
stereotypes these people as isolated failures, as immature and/or sexually
indiscriminating, or as part of some mysteriously primitive social systems.
(2)/ a monogamous, enduring, opposite-sex dyad with biological reproduction as
its ostensible raison d’être (5)/ global sexual imperialism, promoting marital
couplehood as a regime of sensation, subjectivity, and social affinity that can cut across existing
registers of race, class, nation, and even sexual orientation to produce
something like a spousal planet. (6)
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“Structure of
feeling” (Raymond Williams)—new senses of collective being felt viscerally, in
advance of their institutionalization in discourse. (5) sensuous sociability (43)
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Wedding as the
“nuptial pageant” (xiii)
many weddings worked out fantasies about collectivity and publicity:
the desire to be part of something publicly comprehensible as social, to create some group form for which the bourgeois couple
was not metonymic but antithetical or just irrelevant. (xiv)
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Anachronism as
Queer politics
The very form of a text, then, is part of how it works out the
relations among suppressed or forgotten histories, the limitations or
possibilities of a particular moment, and their imaginative transformation into
a different future—the relations among has been, what must been, and what could
be. This, too, is central of my understanding of queer politics: the idea that
what has failed to survive, often most legible as mere residue in a cultural
text, might be a placeholder for the not-yet. Working with literary and filmic
text, I aimed to disinter two things: a history of the dialectic between the
wedding form and the institutional control of heterosexual couplehood, and a
future of possibilities for making minoritized or subjugated affinities between
people more culturally legible. (xiii-xiv)/ to “queer” something is at once to
make its most pleasurable aspects gorgeously excessive, even to the point of
causing its institutional work to fail, and to operate it againt its most
oppressive political results. (xv)
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Social
melancholia (9)
melancholia for effaced forms and practices of relationality rather than a singular love object—and the insistent
return of what has been effaced. (9) いいコンセプトだな。Matriarchy as social melancholia?/ social melancholy,
or a response to the process by which culture forecloses the possibility and
even intelligibility of certain attachments as signs of the social (37)/ They
also suggest melancholic attachments to social forms that might contest the
primacy of nationhood without elevating hetero-reproductive kinship (40)
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Capitalism and
marriage
capitalism’s unmaking of the nuclear family, a process in which
shopping, consuming, and advertising actually create constituencies that
compete family ties. (9) the paradox whereby the rhetoric of consumer culture
seems to idealize the nuclear household, while the conditions of capitalist
production—the separation men’s and women’s workplaces along with the rise of
leisure activities outside the home—actually contest the dominance of the
domestic nuclear family form. (31)/ the new associative possibilities that the
cash economy fostered into those of love and sexuality (128)/ privatization of
property in marriage and its circulation on a newly emerging market (129)/ [On
usury] Not only does usury reproduce money outside a productive labor economy,
it actually fosters, ongoing relationships of indebtedness between people,
perhaps best captured in the word “interest.” This contrasts with the simple
exchange of commodities for money, which ordinarily depersonalizes, equalizes,
and limits the relationship between the transacting parties. (141)
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Privatizing/publicizing
function of marriage
once a means of subordinating a couple’s relationship to a larger
social network, marriage has become more and more a means of separating a
couple from broader ties and obligations. The wedding’s contradictory
restrictive and expansive, privacy- and publicity-making qualities (11)/ By the
mid-nineteenth century, the middle-class English wedding was marked by new
aspects—the white dress, veil, honeymoon, father giving away the bride—that
marked both the emotional seclusion of married love and highly polarized gender
roles that enabled the marital couple to function as the smallest possible
economic unit (26)/ wedding’s privatizing and collectivizing functions (27)/ If
the state comes into being and maintains itself by regulating sexual and
reproductive relations, then the dissolution of marriage into a contract
regulated by the couple threatens, at its most extreme, to dissolve the state.
. . . . Thus, as Anglo-American juries shaped marriage, it became a contract
that once entered into, established two status relationship: one between
husband and wife, and one between the couple and the state. (107) She exhorted
its citizens not just to vote but to emote together and rhetorically
reconfigured disenfranchised populations as “feeling” subjects who were worthy
of political rights by the very strength of their sensations. Thus marriage,
thought it could not literally ally states and remap territories in the United
States as it had in monarchical states, allowed the subject to access,
rehearse, and deploy a set of emotions that, in turn, served to bind him or her
to a larger democratic entity. (109-110)/ [“civil wedding” two contradictory
goals] to represent the “first instance” of the state and yet also prove the
state’s prior existence by submitting the couple to its regulation of the
affections; and to forge ties among members of an entire polity and yet also establish
a properly dyadic cross-gender marriage. (111)
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Marriage in 19th
century US
Begninning in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, state and
eventually federal governments renewed their supervisory role over betrothal
and marriage, and the ceremony expanded to include large numbers of lay
witness. (12) Governmental regulation of marriage in the United States
intensified only in the mid-nineteenth century. At that point, the United
States reestablished jurisdiction over marriage by reviving the policing
function that banns had once had, developing a series of prenuptial tests that
would determine the fitness of the couple to marry, and conflating fitness to
marry with access to citizenship. (22)/ Beginning in 1855 with laws that
insisted that a foreign woman’s nationality would follow that of her U.S.
husband, the federal government began to make marriage into a central
technology of women’s membership in the nation. In 1907, the U.S. wives of male
noncitizens were automatically expatriated: women with unruly desire for
“foreigners” were considered expendable citizens. (22-23)/ The third test was
monogamy: in the 1860s, the U.S. government made couplehood the official sexual
form of the Untied States by outlawing polygamy, a prohibition that continues
to this day. Indeed, Utah gained statehood in 1896 only after the Mormon Church
explicitly repudiated polygamy. (23)/ By the early twentieth century, marriage
was tied to the reproduction of a physically healthy population through state
laws requiring tests for venereal disease and restricting marriage between
blood relatives. (23-24)/ [More on polygamy and other complex marriages in Chap
4, especially on 136]
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Protestant
marriage
While the Catholic Church saw the secular family as its primary
competition, then, Protestant saw it as a primary ally, an extension of and an
analogy for the state’s authority. . . . they used civil marriage as a
reenactment of the covenant with God, which interlocked the subject with God
and secular authorities including magistrates, masters, fathers, and husbands.
In this sense, through Protestant marriage seemed to release its participants
from a tangle of institutional mediations, it actually just embedded them in a
new set: those of the secular state. (18)/
