7/20/2006

Is Marriage Racist? Radical Queer Perspectives

This entry contains two separate bodies of writing. Section 1 is by Mattie U. Richardson, PhD, Priya Kandaswamy, PhD (almost!), and Marlon M. Bailey, PhD. Section 2 contains some of my own (radical, profeminist, queer) thoughts on the subject of marriage.

I (Julian) would like to publicly thank Dr. Richardson, (very soon to be) Dr. Kandaswamy, and Dr. Bailey for this first section, which is entirely their writing, not mine. Their work is titled “Is Gay Marriage Racist?” I came upon it in the book “That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation”, edited by Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, who also holds the copyright (2004). Mattilda/Matt is also a contributor to the collection of intellectually rigorous, politically liberal to radical writings by people of many communities and ethnicities. It was printed in Canada, was published by Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, NY, and was distributed by Publishers Group West. I have contacted all three authors to make sure they are fine with their work being put on this blog-site, in this way. They have each given me their permission to do so.

Immediately below is information about the authors of this (personally, to me) extraordinarily useful question-and-answer formatted discussion. Their bios are accurate as of July, 2006. I have typed up what is listed with each of their names as the information appears in the back of the book, That’s Revolting! and added additional biographical information, provided to me by each of the authors.

I cannot find another more succinct, politically astute, and significant contribution anywhere else. I believe their voices more than adequately lead us deeply into a very important, hopefully on-going, radical political discussion.

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Mattie Udora Richardson is a writer and activist. Her work has appeared in a variety of anthologies, including Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers, Does Your Mama Know: Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, Sisterfire Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, and This Is What Lesbian Looks Like: Dyke Activists Take on the 21st Century. She is currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the African Diaspora Studies Program.

2006 update: Mattie U. Richardson, Ph.D. is now an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UT Austin.

Priya Kandaswamy is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the intersections of race and gender in the U.S. welfare state’s efforts to regulate sexuality, control labor, and police the boundaries of citizenship. Priya currently resides in Oakland, California, where she is exploring the radical possibilities of urban gardening.

2006 update: Priya Kandaswamy is working on finishing up her Ph.D. and is currently an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Portland State University, which is where she may be contacted.

The following bio is modified from That’s Revolting! so as not to be redundant with more current information that follows.

Marlon M. Bailey, PhD was an ABD Dissertation Fellow in the Black Studies Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. Marlon’s dissertation work is entitled “Who’s Doing it Now: Conversations with Brian Freeman on the politics of Black Gay Performance,” in The Color of Theatre: Race, Ethnicity and Contemporary Performance. Marlon earned a BA in Theatre/Speech Education from Olivet College, an MFA in Theatre Performance from West Virginia University, and an MA in African American Studies from UC Berkeley.

2006 update: Marlon M. Bailey is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He earned a PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality in the African American Studies Department at the University of California-Berkeley. In the Fall of 2007, Dr. Bailey will be an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.

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Is Gay Marriage Racist?

A Conversation with Marlon M. Bailey, Priya Kandaswamy, and Mattie Udora Richardson

This conversation was inspired by the question-and-answer section of a panel presentation of the same name, which took place at New College of California in the spring of 2004.

Question: I understand that historically marriage has been an oppressive institution, but can’t queer community change marriage and make it just? Can’t queer people—by virtue of our experience building our own family structures, support systems, and definitions of love and commitment—transform marriage?

Mattie U. Richardson: The United States has never been a just society as far as African Americans are concerned. The very first promise to freed slaves was that they would be allotted forty acres and a mule—a promise which has yet to be fulfilled. African Americans have repeatedly attempted to transform the institutions of the U.S. to meet our needs and to create a space for us as full citizens. We have tried to reform the state from the inside, becoming police officers and elected officials; we have relied on legislation to “correct” racism—to no avail.
Black families have been maligned by state and local officials as “pathological,” as they were described in the infamous Department of Labor report issued by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. Even though our families have always been defined as deviant, African Americans have often looked to heterosexual marriage to afford us respectability. Historically, neither the granting of marriage rights to Blacks during Reconstruction in the nineteenth century nor the relatively recent dismantling of interracial marriage laws in 1974 has legitimized or protected Black families from destructive state interventions like incarceration and the seizure of children by the state. In fact, marriage has been used against African American people, held as an impossible standard of two-parent nuclear household that pathologizes the extended families that are integral to both our African ancestral and African American cultural lives.
I think that, as a people, our continued search for American inclusion is a tragic one. The U.S. will never embrace Black people as we are, no matter what legislation is passed. Just because there are laws on the books does not stop the state from invalidating and destroying Black families by incarcerating our loved-ones by the millions, terrorizing our neighborhoods with local paramilitary police forces, and placing our sexuality under constant scrutiny by state welfare agencies. Until we as Black queer people speak our own truths, what passes for gay rights will do very little for us. Let’s not jump on the white lesbian and gay bandwagon without assessing our own political needs and goals.

Marlon M. Bailey: I do not want or need the U.S. State to ratify or legitimate my intimate relationships to merely prove that I am human. I am not heterosexual, nor do I want to be heterosexual; therefore, personally, I have no use for a heterosexual institution like marriage. Yet, I see this forum as a very important opportunity to begin to grapple with some of the complexities of same-sex marriage, especially when we begin to see it in the context of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Not everybody’s relationship to the state is the same; therefore, people’s different investments in same-sex marriage or lack thereof should be discussed.

Question: My lover is in the hospital and I can’t visit her because I don’t have spousal rights. Wouldn’t gay marriage help me to help my lover?

Mattie U. Richardson: First of all, I think that everyone should have the right to choose whomever they want to visit them in the hospital and to make decisions for them. Sadly, it’s often women’s spouses who get them in the hospital in the first place. I want to choose who visits me in the hospital, who makes my medical decisions, and who receives my Social Security benefits. Maybe I want my nephews to receive my benefits, not my partner. It should really be up to me.
This question about hospital visitation is always linked to the issue of gaining access to spousal health insurance. I think it’s ridiculous to have health care contingent upon employment status. In fact, I want all of my lovers to have health insurance! I’d like for society to truly honor families in their diversity and to actually have a commitment to the health and well-being of everyone—regardless of citizenship, marital and employment status.

Question: My lover and I had a brutal custody battle when we split up, and since she was the biological mother, the courts gave her full custodial rights and prevented me from seeing my child. Wouldn’t legalizing gay marriage allow me to see my daughter?

Priya Kandaswamy: Not necessarily. While many of its advocates argue that gay marriage would secure parental rights for gay and lesbian couples, I think this actually depends on a lot more than marital status. In the U.S., race is the strongest determinant of whether or not the state chooses to recognize your parental ties. Black families are the most likely of any racial group to be disrupted by Child Protection authorities, and 42 percent of all children in foster care in the U.S. are black. If being married doesn’t protect straight black families from having their children taken away, it’s unlikely that it will protect queer black families. It is incredibly important that we organize to have non-biological ties to children recognized and respected. While marriage might offer limited protections to some people, it will not change the racist and homophobic practices through which Child Protective Services determines who is fit or unfit to be a parent. Unless we change these practices, I don’t think that any of our parental relationships are really secure.

Marlon M. Bailey: We should not assume, in a racist, sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic society, that all people will have access to the so-called rights and privileges that marriage purports to offer. Black people, especially Black queers, have never been able to rely on the state to see us as equal citizens entitled to the rights and privileges granted to our white counterparts. For many Black people, marriage has never been the answer to these problems simply because Black people’s social institutions are not seen as institutions worth honoring. We are locked out of these so-called protections even when we adhere to the social strictures that are supposed to enable such protections.

Question: My lover was recently deported because he couldn’t get a green card. We are domestic partners, but the courts didn’t recognize the status. Wouldn’t marriage have kept us together?

Priya Kandaswamy: It is true that theoretically if you and your partner were able to have a legally recognized marriage, it may have allowed your partner to remain in the country. However, I think that there are a couple of important things to consider before taking this as a reason to endorse gay marriage. The first question that I would ask you is: Was your partner really deported because the two of you couldn’t get married? Or was s/he deported because of racist policies that readily exploit immigrant labor while at the same time forcing millions of immigrants to live in constant fear of deportation because the state refuses to grant them legal status in this country?
It is true that for some immigrants, marriage can be a path to obtaining legal status. However, not only is the process of gaining legal status through marriage contingent on the INS’s recognition of your marriage as one made in “good faith,” but this process also places a great deal of power over an immigrant in the hands of their citizen spouse. The requirement that immigrants prove to the INS that their marriages are legitimate and not just a means to legal status has meant that immigrants of color, who by virtue of the racist discourses surrounding immigration are more likely to be seen as “cheating the system,” often have a much harder time gaining legal status than white immigrants. In addition, many feminist activists within immigrant communities have drawn attention to the ways that an immigrant’s dependency on her citizen spouse for legal status in this country can produce or at least exacerbate exploitation and abuse within a relationship. As a result, in many cases, immigrant women are faced with the dilemma of having to choose between remaining in an abusive relationship or deportation. Given that domestic violence is not only a problem for the straight community, I think it is important that we take seriously the inequalities that gay marriage might produce in relationships between citizens and immigrants. It seems better to me to focus our political energies on fighting for broader changes in immigration policies that might enable immigrants in this country to live better lives regardless of their marital status.
It is really important that you bring up the particular concerns of queer immigrants as these concerns are often very marginalized within queer political organizing. I think that radical queer politics must address the multifaceted forms of oppression that queer immigrants face in this country. This means not simply thinking about queer immigrants in relation to their citizen partners, but developing a complex analysis of the ways that capitalist exploitation of immigrant labor, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia affect the lives of queer immigrants. Most immigrants in this country come from places in the world that have been devastated by U.S. military operations or U.S.-sponsored economic policies. When they get to the U.S., many of these immigrants are forced to take poorly paid jobs with long hours, few benefits, little upward mobility, and few, if any, labor protections. To top it all off, they are denied most public services, and often their very presence in this country is criminalized. So, it seems to me that a radical queer politics needs to, at the very least, take a firm stance against U.S. military and economic colonialism abroad, support struggles of workers everywhere, and oppose racist state policies that criminalize immigrants. This seems much more in line with the long-term interests of queer immigrants as a group than struggles for gay marriage.

Question: Obviously gay marriage shouldn’t be the main priority for queer struggle—I know this is just a first step, but don’t we have to support gay marriage if we want to further struggles for full equality and civil rights for all queers?

Marlon M. Bailey: The crux of this movement is led by white, middle-class gays and lesbians who would largely benefit from same-sex marriage (Log Cabin Republicans, for instance). These people already have a considerable amount of upward mobility, so marriage is the icing on the cake. However, what these white queers are not concerned about, or at least it has not been expressed, is the vast majority of people of color who do not enjoy such social mobility and who are largely disenfranchised, and who need health care and don’t have it, etc. There has been no sustained critique of marriage from the white queer community, no mention of how it has been situated as a marker that Black people are compared to. While Blacks are seen as being outside of marriage and therefore deemed a dysfunctional people, meanwhile the state is consistently engaged in various schemes that undermine Black social institutions that support our kinship structures. And, let’s be honest, the white queer community, in large part, is extremely racist. Therefore, Black queers should be highly skeptical of any movement where we are being asked to jump on the bandwagon because at the end of the day, we are not the ones who stand to gain anything.

Mattie U. Richardson: The mainstream white lesbian and gay leadership is extremely arrogant to assume gay marriage as a “last barrier” to full citizenship when many of us will never see full equality or civil rights. Lesbian and gay mainstream marriage advocates have proclaimed that their inclusion will complete the U.S. march towards full equality for all of its citizens. This argument is a slap in the face to everyone who continues to experience institutionalized oppression in this country. The fact that they reflexively refer to African American civil rights struggles as their point of comparison for equality that has been “won” does two things. One, it falsely establishes that Black people and gay people are mutually exclusive population sets. Two, is a boldface disregard for Black history and an act of disrespect to Black people who continue to face the violence of racism every day.
Furthermore, not every queer desires to base their families on the model of the two-parent household with 2.5 kids. Every time white lesbian and gay leaders trot out some well-heeled homosexual couple who own their own house, have six figure salaries, and live the American dream, they do violence to the numerous forms of intimate arrangements and loving parenting that do not conform to mainstream ideas. For example, not so long ago my partner and I accepted the challenge of caring for my teenage nephew. During that time I had to interact with several state and local agencies that did not recognize us as a legitimate family even though I am a close blood relative. The first institution that challenged our legitimacy was the school my nephew attended, which did not see my partner as an equal guardian with me. The second was the state welfare office. Being a graduate student earning poverty wages, I applied for general assistance for such necessities as food. I was humiliated and denied aid because my sister did not relinquish her parental rights.
In reality, this is a lesbian and gay agenda, not a queer one. Our families are more “queer” than simply having two parents and children; we have kids enter our lives from our extended family, from our neighbors and friends. We have multiple intimate partnerships; we live in bodies that are not exclusively “male” or “female”. Many of our genders and the genders of our lovers are not recognized by the state at all. Upon closer inspection, marriage is not even a first step for addressing the needs of queer people.

Question: I agree with your points, but isn’t it true that at the very [base], marriage is about love and any way that two people can express that love for one another is progress?

Priya Kandaswamy: I would disagree with your assumption that love is actually at the foundation of the institution of marriage. Rather, I would argue that marriage is a legal institution that is fundamentally about preserving property relations. Not only does the marriage contract have its historical roots in the ownership and exchange of women, but it has been a key mechanism through which material wealth has been kept in particular families. In addition, the centrality of anti-miscegenation laws in U.S. history also demonstrates the ways that marriage has functioned to police racial borders and preserve white privilege.
Ultimately, whether people love each other and whether people get married are two very different questions. The state recognizes a very particular kind of love relationship to which we as queer people ought to aspire. For me, radical queer politics has always been about challenging the boundaries of what counts as “love.” One doesn’t have to be in a monogamous, long term, same sex relationship to love other people. One of the things that I think is most unfortunate about the gay marriage movement is that its implicit message seems to be that framing our relationships in ways that the state might recognize is more important than defining our practices of love on our own terms.

Section 2:

When I speak of marriage, I am only referring to something socially real, not a current fantasy, nor a future dream. I am discussing a real patriarchal sexist, heterosexist, and racist institution in these United States (and elsewhere), which has been a key site of and vehicle for the maintenance or strengthening of white supremacist power, male supremacist power, and heterosexual male power over heterosexual women in particular, oppressing them, while more deeply marginalizing non-heterosexual but sexually active people, as well as non-partnered and/or asexual people.

Gary Zukav, a white, heterosexually partnered male writer about dominant human culture and its relationship to his understandings of the human soul, has called, in the effort to help create a more humane humanity, for an end to legal and religious marriage as we know it, and for it to be replaced, however that can happen, with what he terms “spiritual partnership”. This concept, which is intended to be a non-institutionalized lived-reality, is also meant to foster and nurture a possibility, a hope, that love-in-union between two adults can be spiritually-emotionally-physically healing and beneficial to each partner’s growth as a person. He makes the assumption, a humanistic one, that spiritual growth means becoming more humane, closer to what some call God, and also “more just”. He is recommending this new form of relating to those who are or may one day be in long-term intimate adult personal partnerships. He is encouraging that demographic to embrace mutual spiritual growth over the patriarchal institutionalization of the oppression of women, among other problems with male supremacist State-sponsored, and male dominant Religion-controlled, one man-one woman unions. Zukav is not a homophobe, and accepts that such liberatory unions can exist between two women or two men as well.

While Gary’s critique is, from his point of view, from his place of privilege, compassionate and wise, I do not come to a radical critique of the institution of marriage from such a place, although Gary’s voice and perspective have been important in my own inquiry into the patriarchal institution of marriage. I have been and currently remain a complete outsider to this very large U.S. institution of social control and regulation of human action, including of human sexuality-as-racist sexism. I am a permanently single gay asexual (think “Jewish atheist”). Marriage holds no personal interest for me, nor do I imagine, given my own set of privileges, that I’d “need” it, as some people may, to gain social status, economic security, state citizenship, or respectability within my community. My largely “outsider” experience of this institution is that it is not only profoundly misogynist and heterosexist—which, imho, goes without saying, but that it is also deeply racist and classist. I would add irreparably so, because of all the foundational premises on which the institution is perched, having to do with the supposedly natural or God-given existence of a gender binary, which in patriarchy is a woman-hating political hierarchy. Women are still, in my limited experience among white middle class folks, “given away” by father figure to groom, and are expected to nurture their husbands in ways disproportionate to how husbands are expected to nurture their wives.

Within this specific-yet-dominant cultural experience, marginalized, oppressed groups’ affectional and relational practices are measured as legitimate or not. I do believe that one man and one woman who are intimately partnered, if well-practiced in the art of rooting out of themselves the interpersonal privileges and damage that gender and sexism does, can have a non-sexist, egalitarian, mutually loving relationship. However, I must add that I don’t know of any relationships like this within the institution of marriage. I know men and women who believe that’s what they have, but upon closer inspection, power-and-task-imbalanced gendered roles, hurtful communication dynamics, emotional and affection patterns of withholding and neglect, or mistreatment and abuse, expressions of sexuality-as-sexism do, in actuality, present themselves routinely in even the most “progressive” heterosexual marriages. This systematic inequality and harm happens in traditionally and historically oppressive ways to women.

Some Leftist men say that women want this institution more than men do. Certainly there are plenty of heterosexual men who would prefer not to marry, for many reasons, most of which revolve around men’s sense of “freedom”. I am not sure what this freedom-in-practice is, in reality, separate from heterosexual men’s learned, acted-out desires to be sexually sexist with several women instead of (allegedly) one. Marriage may serve some heterosexual women, who, in patriarchy, generally experience significantly limited options for economic and emotional security and support, and social acceptability, compared to men. Due to all of the above, I find these progressive to Leftist men’s arguments that heterosexual women want marriage more than men do to be self-serving, and a loop-hole excuse men use to maintain the institution and their sexist behaviors in and beyond it.

I know of no enfranchised, empowered, privileged straight men who are politically organized against this institution, especially for women’s sake. It remains that place where some commitment-phobic straight men are reluctant to go, but who, once inside, benefit significantly, materially-spiritually, often while hurting and degrading their female spouses by neglecting and/or abusing them, by using pornography, or by using other women as pornography, sometimes including their wives. This is not to say women don’t have agency in choosing to marry. It is to say that women’s agency does not emerge from and exist in the structurally empowered, socially statused gendered body that men are privileged to know and live as. It is to say that a belief that women’s life-long agency is equal to men’s, in patriarchy, perpetuates a socially compulsory denial about the actual condition of women’s agency in male-dominated and male supremacist societies.

This is not to say love cannot and does not live there; it is to say love is usually maimed there. It is also to say that when a more egalitarian love does live there, it does so despite the demands of the institution of marriage, not because of them. Some liberal to progressive people I know personally work to make their marriages “non-traditional”. Generally what they mean is “more egalitarian”, less bound to patriarchal expectations and imperatives. That phrasing reinforces my point. Usually at this point in any discussion with straight men about marriage, the man will tell me how untrue everything I’m saying is about his own, special marriage. But as Stan has noted elsewhere, exceptions don’t disprove the rule.

On other topic threads at this blog, there have been some discussions about marriage-as-a-patriarchal/sexist-institution, and it has been examined, in a preliminary way, for its value to some heterosexual male political radicals who, though supportive of many other radical lesbian-feminist agendas, do not seek, in method and practice, to eradicate this oppressive social structure. By “eradicate” I mean an intellectually reasoned, emotionally-spiritually grounded, politically principled rejection of, and an active dismantling of the institution of marriage, systematically, over time.

Some radical men do not call for its demise due to this being an implausible or impractical goal. I would note here that “the plausibility, practicality standard” does not stop radical white heterosexual men from calling for an end to the institutions and other structures that most harm or hamper them and some of their human interests—such as a call to end military war and a call to end capitalism. Sometimes, if rarely, white heterosexual men even call for an end to patriarchal structures—whether manifested in values, practices, industries, or systems—infused with male supremacist ideological imperatives. Sometimes, if rarely, white heterosexual men call for the elimination of those structures that would, if successfully eradicated, tremendously benefit women’s interests too (if those interests are for freedom from systemic, oppressive, misogynistic injury to body and soul). But, more typically, more commonly, white heterosexual radical men propose, support, or utilize a more liberal remedy of allowing more people access into those oppressive social structures.

Typically, for example, men of every sexual orientation self-servingly say that the pornography industry is benefited by having lesbian-produced pornography, ignoring that the pornography lesbian women produce is still the graphic depiction of objectified, fetishized females-as-sex things—perhaps produced for women’s enjoyment, but often used by heterosexual male viewers too, who then pride themselves on only getting off to that genre of allegedly “woman-empowering porn”. (A feminist question here is: does the defense, distribution, and consumption of this material harm or empower women-as-a-class, especially racially and economically non-privileged women?) This conceit also ignores that fact that it is white heterosexual men who are the controlling corporate pimps and consumers within the industry. This is not to say, in recent years, that women aren’t also pimps and profiteers in the industry. However, lesbian-pornography producers, if lesbian, are still fringe when compared to the better-known corporate conglomerates. Female, trans, and male producers of pornography, with few exceptions, maintain an apologetic to enthusiastically activist political stance to men’s most extremely misogynistic pornography. This lack of clear, vocal opposition and systematic political organizing against pornography, serves a special if relatively marginal role in undermining the feminist anti-pornography position, thereby aiding in the protection of the power of corporate pimps. (I do not pretend, in other words, that the power of lesbian pornography producers approximates that of straight male producers, structurally or economically, even while it is unquestionably dangerous and destructive to a feminism which seeks to free women from male supremacist societies and their sexualities.) Men being “pro-lesbian porn” can be paralleled, to some degree, with heterosexual men being pro-gay marriage.

My main point is that radical white men—heterosexual and gay—become liberal on matters that serve their (and my) socially constructed white and male interests. I have fallen into this trap, at times, and have been called on it, thankfully, but not usually or often by white or otherwise structurally privileged men. (Note: the responsibility and burden of calling out race-privileged men on their sexism and racism disproportionately falls to women, and too often, specifically to women of Color, who are already unfairly shouldered with the task of calling out men of their own ethnicities.) I believe principled pro-feminist, anti-racist, anti-heterosexist activist men have to call one another on this dangerous tendency among radical men to preserve what we want, at the expense of white heterosexual women’s, white queers, and queers of Color’s political interests in survival and a quality of life beyond survival.

Dominant cultural marriage, in the U.S., has a deeply racist history. African, and then African-American born male slaves, were not recognized or treated by whites and a newly forming White Supremacist State as human. Nor were women of any race. This country was founded on very partial principles: on values of democracy among and freedom for white heterosexual property-owning men. Resultantly, African and African-American girls and women, were, I would argue, the most vulnerable group of human beings to white men, along with Native American women. These women, like too many white wives, were considered and treated as chattel property or worse, and in this “land of the free” were systematically raped by white men. This legacy of racism and misogyny continues to be a serious impediment to women’s liberation in the U.S. After Black males in Amerikkka were recognized, very marginally, as human, there were serious social, lethal consequences for participating in “inter-racial” marriages, particularly between a Black person and a white person (one man, one woman). Miscegenation, as it was termed, was and still is seen by white supremacists to be ruinous to the white race.

Radical feminists of many ethnicities, particularly, have argued that marriage is oppressive to heterosexual women, also to lesbians. One level of the analysis is that marriage functions as a form of prostitution, with father as pimp, husband as john, and the marriage contract as the binding force that keeps women sexually available to men, while simultaneously economically dependent. Andrea Dworkin’s book: Right-Wing Women (1983), details this. Earlier in “second wave” feminism, in the mid-1970s radical political leaflets written by Nikki Craft took on marriage as an institution harmful to women. Earlier still, Shulamith Firestone wrote about this matter, in The Dialectics of Sex (1970). All three white activist-writers began, for me, a necessary interrogation into the “value” of (heterosexual) marriage and family which has been deepened and expanded by many other voices, especially those coming from communities of Color. I will add that I think it is important to understand prostitution as a very specific system of oppression of women and children, that while may, in some ways, be comparable to the institution of marriage, is not by any means identical to it. Prostitution, specifically, disproportionately impacts on poor and dispossessed women and children, who are more marginalized and “at risk” than many married middle class women. Girls and women are politically socialized to be prostitutes in specific ways. Girls and women are also politically socialized to be brides and wives, but those forms of preparation differ considerably. For prostitutes and some wives, there is significant force used to bring the oppressed to their user, abuser, or master. For other, more privileged wives, methods of compulsory socialization are utilized, including training females to be girls and women, and heterosexually interested in men-as-mates. Sometimes those male mates also turn out to be masters, beating and raping their wives at will.

The feminist argument, as I understand it, is not solely that marriage WAS oppressive to women, once upon a time, and that “thank God” now things are so much better. No. The argument, if I’m recalling it correctly, is that marriage, as a patriarchal institution, is controlled, monitored, and/or regulated by either the Patriarchal State or Patriarchal Religion (or both). The conclusion is that it is CURRENTLY oppressive to women of all sexualities and ethnicities, while affecting some women more harmfully than others, and while marginalizing some women more than others.

I find this analysis cogent, grounded, real, and meaningful. I also find it necessary, if we are to seriously and systematically deal with (i.e., remedy) how women are oppressed in patriarchy. Surely, two methods of placing women in the control of individual men and/or the Patriarchal State and its Religions, is to manufacture (socially construct, often by hand) heterosexuality and make it compulsory, and to privilege the marriage union between one woman and one man as both legal and holy.

Not only as a gay male, but as a “single” and asexual person who supports radical feminist projects to end all manifestations of white and male supremacy, there are at least a couple more matters related to the institution of marriage that need to be further addressed. One, its appalling and unrelenting heterosexism, which, especially on the Right, includes the mandate that women have heterosexually sexist sex and, daily, share intimate physical space with hurtful and dangerous men, and, two, its insistence on privileging one form of love or social adult-to-adult relating—specifically the kind that guarantees the political-not-biological necessity of statusing romantic heterosexuality, heterosexual unions, and heterosexual families—however dysfunctional they are!

Matters of misogyny, racism, heterosexism, and the privileging and institutionalizing of one form of adult-to-adult human relating above all others is not something I have seen the whitemale-dominated Left deal with, when taking up the matter of marriage. Rather, when it comes to this sometimes shaky-yet-still firmly embedded institution, what I have observed is that white heterosexual Leftists speak out “for” it with few, if any, substantive concerns, beyond the concerns of heterosexual men’s “freedom”. Additionally, and not irreconcilably, some Leftist white heterosexual men call for “pro-gay” liberal reforms to this heterosexist institution. These pronouncements, while not in line with the virulent and organized anti-gay bigotry found more often on the White Right, are, on their face and in their practice, still very self-serving. What makes them so is the degree to which heterosexual Leftist men are pro-marriage, for any two adults, without simultaneously owning, exposing, and challenging men’s deeply sexist, male supremacist “interests” in marriage as such.

I am publicly challenging all progressive to radical white heterosexual men to take up this issue as serious to the welfare of everyone who is not male, heterosexual, or white.

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For those interested in further reading on this subject, please go to these websites:

http://www.illegalvoices.org/knowledge/general_articles/is_gay_marriage_anti-black_.html