SSM: THE END OF GAY LIBERATION? Rabble.ca

...But a funny thing happened on the way to City Hall. It turns out that queer communities themselves offer some of the most compelling and legitimate critiques of gay marriage. You'd just never know it from watching the evening news, because the debate has generally been portrayed as a civil-rights issue.

In fact, pro-marriage organizations like Egale have been careful to frame the issue in those terms. The typical pro-marriage perspective as set forward by Egale and others is succinctly expressed by B.C. litigant Jane Eaton Hamilton, who married Joy Masuhara last summer in a double ceremony with Tanya and Melinda Chambers Roy in Toronto: "Whatever one thinks about marriage, there is no question that it is a powerful and portable institution that tells a public story about love. Every citizen should be able to avail himself or herself of every civil right."

However, framing gay marriage only as a battle for civil rights excludes critiques that examine the issue in a broader social context -- critiques that are central to queer theory and queer politics, and are currently dividing queer communities over the issue. ...

On this point, Noble has the agreement of Jillian Sandell, assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies at San Francisco State University and author of several papers on queer politics. Sandell explains: "There's a certain anxiety about a perceived decline of the so-called traditional family but really there isn't necessarily a decline. It's not that there ever was a traditional family of mom, dad and two kids -- the sort of idealized family that sometimes people associate with the 1950s."

As Sandell also points out, there have been all kinds of extended families and kinship relationships throughout the historical period and the nuclear family has never necessarily been predominant. It also seems relevant to note that currently even heterosexual couples may often choose to remain unmarried, since many people are now aware of divorce rates and our more secularized culture is slowly opening up to alternative arrangements. Sandell is also careful to point out that the traditional conception of family is tied heavily to capitalism. "Family is the site of social reproduction that supports the market economy," she says. Whether that family is heterosexual or homosexual, it serves the same function.

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posted by Eve at 4:15 PM | link

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