{"id":378,"date":"2014-10-28T15:46:10","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T19:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/?p=378"},"modified":"2025-05-12T16:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:25:11","slug":"am-dialogues-unequal-at-what-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/2014\/10\/28\/am-dialogues-unequal-at-what-cost\/","title":{"rendered":"Unequal in the Eyes of the Law – Response: At What Cost? Marriage Law in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The morning of June 26, 2013, I sat cross-legged on the floor, anxiously toying with the engagement ring on my left hand and refreshing the various news sites open on my laptop. I thought, with outrage, that if the \u201cDefense of Marriage Act\u201d (DOMA) was upheld, my wedding ceremony would be nothing more than a futile and insulting mimicry of the \u201cright\u201d to love and marry.<\/p>\n

Proponents of gay marriage sought to help LGBTQ people gain rights within <\/i>the political, social, and legal systems in place within the United States. This was an assimilationist strategy employed across \u201crights\u201d movements throughout history, and it trickles into every facet of our daily lives as well: parents use the desire for their children to fit in, for example, to justify enforcing binary gender roles.[1]<\/a> Assimilation is thus viewed as a necessary condition for happiness.[2]<\/a> Judith Butler has (rather famously) described gender as \u201cwhat is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure.\u201d[3]<\/a> Who hasn\u2019t experienced both the anxieties and pleasures of gender performance? Similarly, when the Supreme Court rejected DOMA, I began saying, with pleasure, \u201cnow I can have a real <\/i>wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Warner has critiqued the current tendency of LGBTQ organizations to attempt to \u201cwin acceptance by the dominant culture, rather than to change the self-understanding of that culture.\u201d[4]<\/a> My desire for a gay wedding, a real <\/i>gay wedding, relied on an inherently paradoxical assimilationist understanding of what makes for a pleasurable life. In this way, we might think of the \u201claw\u201d as both the literal and symbolic proxy for cultural \u201cnorms,\u201d proscriptions, and phantasmatic circulations of power. As Lisa Duggan writes, \u201cthe history of civil rights struggles in the United States shows us that formal legal equality does not provide more resources, greater political power or better lives. Too often, legal equality is an empty shell that hides expanded substantive inequalities.\u201d[5]<\/a> If we take anything away from the continuance of often-obscene race and gender stratifications in the United States, it is that acquiescing to heteronormative culture in the form of legal same-sex marriages necessarily involves sacrificing radical queer potential. This sacrifice is ultimately inimical to the interests of everyone on the \u201coutside\u201d of heteronormative power. And, as Cathy J. Cohen has asserted, this is in fact \u201cmost of us.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

With the approach of my now federally recognized wedding date\u2014October 12, 2014\u2014the anxiety I felt on June 26th<\/sup> returned with full force: white dress shopping, music selections, invitations\u2014who walks down the aisle first? The decisions my partner and I were making were highly gendered, raced, and classed. To make matters worse, many of our choices were attempts to \u201cde-gay\u201d ourselves and the wedding. It became increasingly clear that the pleasures afforded by an assimilationist approach to our lives were constantly subject to failure. With this said, I understand why parents choose to encourage, and at times demand, the gender role conformity of their children. I also understand why the legally afforded \u201crights\u201d won by the gay rights movement are important\u2014and for many, absolutely necessary\u2014to building and sustaining happy lives. Yet, as Audre Lorde has famously argued, \u201cthe master\u2019s tools will never dismantle the master\u2019s house. <\/i>They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a cost to social, cultural, and legal \u201crecognitions\u201d: acclimatization within –\u00a0 and to – \u00a0a heteronormative framework ultimately leaves an imperfect and unequal structure intact.<\/p>\n

My partner and I postponed our wedding. As proponents of liberationist agendas argue, it is only with the complete destabilization of marriage\u2014and the legal restrictions surrounding it\u2014that we will begin to achieve meaningful equality.<\/p>\n

-Sarah O\u2019Connor<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Emily Kane, \u201cNo Way My Boys Are Going To Be Like That! Parents\u2019 Responses To Children\u2019s Gender Nonconformity,\u201d Gender & Society <\/i>20 (2): 149-176.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/a> Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness <\/i>(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3] <\/a>Butler, Judith. \u201cPerformative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.\u201d Theatre Journal <\/i>40 (1988): 519-531.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]<\/a> Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life <\/i>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 50.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]<\/a> Urvashi Vaid, Lisa Dugan, Tamara Metz, and Amber Hollibaugh, \u201cWhat\u2019s Next for the LGBT Movement?\u201d The Nation, <\/i>June 27, 2013, accessed September 22, 2014, http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/blog\/175015\/whats-next-lgbt-movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]<\/a> Cathy J. Cohen, \u201cPunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies <\/i>3 (1997), 457.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7]<\/a> Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde <\/i>(Random House: Crossing Press, 2007), 112.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The morning of June 26, 2013, I sat cross-legged on the floor, anxiously toying with the engagement ring on my left hand and refreshing the various news sites open on my laptop. I thought, with outrage, that if the \u201cDefense of Marriage Act\u201d (DOMA) was upheld, my wedding ceremony would be nothing more than a … Continue reading Unequal in the Eyes of the Law – Response: At What Cost? Marriage Law in the United States<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":328,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}