Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Wedlocked 20160123

Editorial more and reward and in the end instead of six hours we went close to ten hours. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Good afternoon. I am the director of the institute for research on women, gender and sensuality and it is a great pleasure and great honor to be used this afternoon to moderate this panel and the celebration of a wonderful new book, a book on marriage eat quality by catherine frankie. What we are going to do this the afternoon is have some presentations and responses to the book and then open up for questions and discussion. We have assembled a stellar panel of the people who are just the right people to undertake this discussion and introduce them all briefly altogether and they will speak in deep water that we determined. It is all going to begin with a presentation of the book end its main issues of history by catherine frankie. She is the professor of law, director of the center for gender and sexual along which is a wonderful institution if we are happy to collaborate with and the author of wedlock, the perils of Marriage Equality and why you press 2015 just recently on. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transitional justice, gender issues of gender and grace in law, she is a legal theorist, academic, activist, public intellectual and an amazing human being. I am happy to be celebrating her this afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order. We are first going to have patricia williams, professor of law at columbia, the author of balcony of race and rights, the roosters egg, the blind goddess, and you know doubt know her through her monthly column for the nation magazine, diary of a mad law professor in which you can subscribe to at www. Mattlotprofessor bliss second speaker will be the ssc professor of sociology at Barnard College who code directs the Resource Center for Minority Aging Research at ucla school of medicine. Research examines intersections of race, gender, class and Sexual Orientation and her recently first book is invisible families, and a identities, relationships and motherhood among black gay women, published in 2011 by the university of California Press and winner of the 2013 outstanding book award by American Sociological Association section on sex and gender. She is working on a second book project entitled the shadow of sexual out monday, social history and social support among africanamerican elders, looking forward to it. Our third speaker Kendall Thomas is professor of law and director of the center for the study of culture which he cofounded with catherine frankie. Campbell, as his, editor of Critical Race Theory, the key writings that founded the movement and also coeditor of what is left of pherae with Judith Butler and john boehner. His most recent writing has focused on the law and culture of Death Penalty politics, racial democracy in brazil and law and politics of racial neil liberalism after the obama presidency. Tell me welcome Kathryn Frankie liberalism after the obama presidency. Tell me welcome Kathryn Frankie. Thank you so much. Iron teach in a room like this and manipulate these things along with my students. Here it is the book, very exciting. [applause] thank you all for coming, is wonderful to have you come out and honored this work and honor thinking about marriage and a complicated way. I know many of you do that in your own work, your own politics, your own lives so i appreciate having company because the kinds of perspectives i have on Marriage Equality are not always the most popular within the Gay Community. You are my community right now. Thank you. And thank you to i risk for cosponsoring this event along with the center for gender and sexual of moneyity. When i went to college sexually sodomy was a crime. It criminalize to i was or at least things i did. Twice when i was a student i was insulted by police and they hurled homophobic epithets at the. Another time i was beaten up by some guys in Riverside Park and police stood by and watched. For people of my generation, certainly for me, the idea that we would turn to state regulation as a way to be freer and more equal people struck me as a strange move and still strikes me as a strange move that not many years after our intimate lives were criminalize by the state and we were prosecuted for it both publicly and privately, that we would invite the stage into our intimate relationships and asked the state to regulate them, that always struck me as an odd political objective. And i thought i would write a book about it so that is what what what is. I also thought gay people, samesex couples are not alone in that experience of having the state regulate their lives in the form of marriage shortly after or as part of the Civil Rights Movement or a movement about emancipation. Of the people. So i turn to what africanamericans went through or they were not even africanamericans at the time because they were not citizens but what black people in this country went through during and after the civil war when they could marry for the first time and i thought maybe there is Something Interesting to learn from that experience as we have turned in the Gay Community as a form of liberty and the quality and it turns out there is quite a bit weak and learn and that is what this book does, each chapter offers parables for todays movement, not to equate homophobia and racism as the same thing, not to say that the experience of violence and torture and enslavement black people have suffered in this country is the same thing that gay people have suffered, various forms of homophobia but to create a juxtaposition between two movements so as we formulate our bowl, articulate our values and pursue our political projects today we do so mindful of other movements we are juxtaposed with. And who can teach us those movements, teach us about possibilities and perils of certain political and legal claims and so that is what the book aims to do, to bring these movements together to see what lies there and it turns out Marriage Equality does indeed have a racial history. It also has our racial present and that is one of the stake home points of this point, not only be careful what you wish for, but the distinction, the difference between homophobia and racism, difference between Marriage Equality today and in the Nineteenth Century for newly freed people point out something about the racial and down in todays Marriage Equality movement has enjoyed and the ways in which marriage has been an enormously successful method by which to read brand homosexuality as takes the sex out of homosexuality. And to redeem gay people, particularly certain gay couples who are able to be respectable and seem entitled, make a plausible claim of entitlements to the blessings of marriage. In doing so, they contrast themselves to those deserving of exile from the institution of marriage, deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always those are people of color in this country. And so this juxtaposition helps us understand i think how unfortunately some of what we have won in the Marriage Equality movement has been a 0 sum politics or 0 some rights where gay people and some samesex couples have won the right to marry at the expense of others both implicitly and explicitly in the arguments that have been made in the Marriage Equality cases so let me sail little bit about what a couple of the chapters do in terms of the careful what you wish for. Marriage and rights in particular can become a form of discipline, particularly a form of discipline when many sectors of Society Still hate you and that was certainly true for newly freed people at the end of the war. Not the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Reason took new forms, or persisted in old and familiar forms and being able to marry for the first time inaugurated in a way and regulatory relationship and a new disciplinary relationship for black people with the state. And so when black people coming out of the enslavement who lived together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly in many cases and their relationships broke up which in any population will be the case and people hook up with new partners mostly black men were prosecuted for bigamy or adultery which was a felony, which meant they would lose their right to vote which would put them in prison and renders them subject to the convict leasing system developed after the end of the civil war because there was this body of workers that were available to do the agricultural work enslaved people had done before. The convict leasings system was more deadly for black men than agricultural work while enslaved. Marriage rights, particularly the law of divorce and lot of monogamy and around marriage end ed up giving the state a new power to discipline, punish and sometimes kill black men just at this moment when they were freed from the crushing affects of slavery and the crushing reality of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. There is an enormous backlash against there was an enormous backlash against africanamericans at the end the war and theres not backlash against samesex marriage now mostly done undertaken in the name of religion but not only. To the extent we had smooth sailing today on the rights of samesex couples to marry it has been local in many contextss and many parts of the country, marriage rights are not something pete people feel they can exercise because they dont feel free to come out and they know there will be retaliation against them. They experience or metabolize that fear against a backdrop of this message from both people in the Gay Community and outside the Gay Community who say being married will civilize you, will tame those wild sort of lascivious emerges of gay men who dont know how to sign up for one another and commit and the monogamous, we heard the same about africanamericans at the end of the war that they had savage section walid that needed to be disciplined through the institution of marriage of the civilizing aspects of marriage, the values it carries in its own portfolio, sometimes overwhelm the values of the communities that seek to exercise these rights and the book tries to answer it as well or address those questions. One other place there is a similarity or at least a particularly compelling lesson to learn from the historical connection is how the right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marry. On the level of there are some people who marry in every state, they have a diagnostic problem of overmarion. There is not that kind of compulsion. The state will compel you to marry. In the Nineteenth Century we saw even before the end of the civil war in order for fleeing slaves who were leaving the plantations, the safety of northern troops to set up refugee camps around military operations they were conducting, a minister was placed at the gates of many of these they called contraband camps that refugee camps and you could not gain entry into these camps without marrying. That was seen as the most pressing problem, that these folks were coming in in complicated families. People had lost their spouses and their children and their owners have sold away and they were reassembling and coming to the safety of these refugee camps and the northern soldiers and missionaries that were running some said we cant let you in in those debauched families, we are going to marry you at the gates of the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry in many contextss and we see that today as well not just generally but at columbia university. As soon as in new york state gained the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolish domestic partner benefits and said you had a year to marry your partner and if you dont they will be kicked off of the health plan. Shocking but the Secular University would get in the business of promoting and enforcing marriage, think to the organizing of a bunch of us at the university we got them to reverse that policy. But not for different sex couples. The president had promised they would keep domestic partner benefits for same and different sex couples because in new York City Domestic Partnership Law recognizes same and different sex couples but they only reinstated domestic partner benefits samesex couples so actually now the university discriminate against straight people. Gay people are paid for, samesex couples are paid more in the sense that you can get benefits for your partner whether or not you married but if you are heterosexual or have a different sex partner you have to get married. These are some of the difficult questions that have come up in history around marriage and how marriage ends up overwhelming the politics of a Larger Movement that might have wanted to recognize more complex families both for africanamericans and for gay and lesbian people today and we have launched queer families as the subject of gayrights in the same way we fought for them 10 or 15 years ago. Many of us who were early advocates working on issues of lgbt family rights sought marriage as actually a problem. It was a sexist institution written, legally to preserve property and usually male property. Creating viable life outside marriage was our political project and something happened. Something happened and the movement got overtaken by marriage politics. One last thing i want to offer and i would love to hear from my colleagues alike feel badly we are racial desegregated up here. I may integrate the cable. Have never talked publicly about this but when i was in college, coming awakening as Many College Students to to the lesbian. I describe myself as gay. I was reading may sarton has a lot of vested, a poet and novelist and memoir, very well known in the 70s indeeds and she wrote a journal of solitude, very moving and important for me and many of my friends and as i was coming out, i thought i am going to be lonely when i am told. She wrote about being old and alone and i worried that the only way to not be alone when you are old is to be married and i didnt want to be heterosexual and i didnt want to be married so i wrote her a long letter and she wrote me back so here is what she wrote me, i wont read you the whole letter, this is oldfashioned typing. She said the you imply what you want as law as a sideline and solitude as the main current. I dont see this as possible. Love without commitment is pretty cheap. This is where marriage comes in. I read you were terribly afraid of being caught and people to marry because they want marriage often find themselves caught. It looks to me as though you have never loved a man enough to want to marry him. Which was true. And it is as simple as that. When you do and i hope you will, there wont any argument and wouldnt you want children . She goes on to discuss how lonely the life of the unmarried person will be and she hopes that i wont be that person so let me quote quickly from Justice Kennedy. Bad decision from the Supreme Court recognized their constitutional right for samesex couples to marry. Among the things he says is this. Marriage response to the universal fear that a lonely person might call off only to find no one there. Offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . There is no life of this and dark loneliness if you are and married . This is the price of winning the right to marry, life outside of marriage with a huge use its board find yourself there for complicated reasons is a grim, lonely, dark life. That is not a clear value in my mind. I think we can look to the Africanamerican Community to see enormous resilience, creativity and flourishing in life outside marriage. Thank you so much. [applause] it is a wonderful to be part of this conversation. 84 inviting me and congratulations catherine, wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting excavation of this history imaginable. Comparative study between the two efforts for Marriage Equality comparative study aside the case studys in your book are absolutely fascinating, totally absorbing and quite revelatory of the life circumstances in slave men and women in or out of marriage. And one of the things i was most impressed with in these interwoven stories was the line between intimacy and the untouchable and the question you raise in the subtitle is one of the perils of Marriage Equality. The question of whether it is marriage the does all the work assigned to it in a comparative sense to the Marriage Equality for gays i think it will probably be addressed more thoroughly, i am going to narrow my reflections to a different set of observations and that is because for those who have read anything i have written, i right constantly, i am here because my great great grandmother was married off by the wife of a slave owner, she chose the light skinned women among the house servants should marry for the saving ultimately of her own marriage. As catherine note in some of these stories, what i want to note here is marriage among africanamericans in the effective since the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes in several histories a significant number of slave marriages were overseen by the boners, master , maste,r dimension of that history came through the ministrations of the wives of the owners and slaveholders and that prompting of the union of slaves to some degree operates like any other marriage. It makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. And eliminates the dangerousness as well as perversions of sexuality but marriage among africanamericans both antebellum until 1967 is a doubleedged thing, purifying, respectability, underscoring dangers of black sexual bodies. Those first africanamerican marriages were a ritual after all performed against the backdrop of the breeding farms kathryn talks about in the book. And mysteriously light skinned house servants and and name a blacks of incest disguise as production of inventory rather than progenitor. It was and still is a ritual prompted most particularly justified most poignantly as of way of corralling the unregulated of black sex, sex with black bodies. All this is interesting to me as a kind of formal genuflection toward the repair of fringe white families. Reading from histories of the time there was something to be said about how, if marriage left africanamericans freed but not free, it did the same for slave Holding Families particularly women in that it had at least as much to do with reinforcing not just the legal but moral status, sexual assignations the only recently had begun to be publicized or acknowledged from the history of Thomas Jefferson through is made. This is a dramatic history of family as the property of the institution replied to a Cultural Landscape torn, scarred, appended by the unspeakable. So marriage operated in this double sense as a pathway to salvation and sealants i think this dimension is accompanied by what is marked in the words we use and dont use even to this day. I am struck out in todays world the marriage among africanamericans is very peculiar when it comes to africanamericans not so much when they marry but when they marry outside the race, think of the use of the word by racial. It is a formal recognition of a certain line of defense not accorded to those who are just the product being tossed around in the back of slave cabins. There is legitimacy according to the lineage, the recent lineage in particular of intermarriage, formal marriage between blacks and whites in modern times the children of who will be called by racial if for only a temporary period, when they get out of the presence of one black and one white parents. It is a kind of recognition, legitimacy accorded to the lineage of the whites or non black parent that doesnt otherwise work in our vocabulary. It gives a comfort when obama first came, to speak of him as by racial. He has a white mother and loved her so he wont be like al sharpton. But he is normalized, release stereotyped and made non exceptional, he is just another black man. He always was that theres a shift in nomenclature particularly among those who dont like him. So marriage among or with africanamericans has this extra burden of operating to simultaneously proclaim and denied the rambunctious of our lineage. The language by which we assign the benefits of marriage uses racial category to narrow or expand perception of who is more like whom, tells us to be considered marriageable or untouchable. Our happened of varying relentlessly promiscuous nature of our american identity renders us blind to how intimately we are tied as akin to family and intimate, consider ethel mae washington williams, the daughter of United States senator strom thurmond, the one he had by his familys black made. Notice how theres no mark of thurmond in the lengthy name and she lived alive as the negro, that an africanamerican, i attended an all black college that in her 70s when Strom Thurmonds paternity became publicized she was agreed designated as by racial in the media. Even with that definition she was always referred to as a child by his made. I have not been able to find any reference to her as his child. Outside. As the family sociologist who uses intersection of race, class, gender and sex you al at this, i was particularly interested in thinking about how the ideas in this book play out with peoples lives today. Particularly those who are experiencing the aftereffects of the Marriage Equality movement. Sociologists we talk about, like to ask questions, like to talk to people and use this data as one basis for evaluating information. What if anything do we go by using marriage and platform using stigma associated with same sex desire. Consider relating to population who stands at juncture of two seemingly disparate groups katherine uses in her arguments, people who are black and gay. Throughout the text the persistent overlap of categories of white and gay versus africanamerican and deviant each dimension of inequality is led to legitimacy by alignment with the other. I will respond to some of the arguments in katherines book considering analysis were not present there, experience of africanamerican lgbt people and intraracial relationships among blocks as they relate to the Marriage Equality campaign. So for the past 12 years or so focused on intersection of race and lbgt and racial Group Commitments and various other aspects of life and meaning making among black same gender loving people. I see Marriage Equality as a public issue that provide ad vehicle through which sexual minority who is also have membership in racial or ethnic or cultural category can develop a conversation about their sexuality with family members and others in their community. The use of Marriage Equality as representation of lgbt rights to may have gaye sexuality as private sphere that they act out under cover secret or secondary status whos public openness about who the identity groups are and provides a voice among multiple identity status. There are other issues important to minority sexuality populations that we could have used. Lgbt homelessness and foster youth and challenges reserved by ahn can williams at the institute shows. Employment discrimination is another relevant topic. Access to Quality Health care is important issue particularly for transfolks and sexual minority elders. Why marriage . Katherine argues in the minds of Larger Society marriage has been largely remains kind of a test that the Africanamerican Community is seen as failing. In my First Reading of the material i was somewhat put off by this and other statements like it, feeling like it does a disservice to those couples who have and are succeeding at marriage. Advantages that blacks gain in society or special status of married people of any agent or ethnicity receive. Removes any agency or selfemplowerment by africanamericans only presenting ways some groups pathologies all backs regardless of the status. The intention was call awareness of the Structural Racism that vilifies africanamericans. That we can not get away from no matter what our actual behaviors are. I think she presents that argument also in the book. So i find that for africanamerican groups in particular, topic of marriage is particularly relevant as a point of entry into the discussions of lgbt identity and acceptance. It serves as physical response to this stigma that is often associated with the wider range of Family Structures among blacks. The stereotypes of men who failed to hold up to their responsibilities, stereotypes of black women as sexually permissive. Beings who morally choose single motherhood over stability of a marital union. Weddings in black communities symbolize the attempt of a couple to conform to notions of respectability and shelter their families and others in society defy the negative stereotypes and create stable families. So marriage offer as conventional and some might say conformist presentation of self antithesis to images of gay counter culture. Because of the racized context samesex marriage among africanamericans is is takes place it become as transformative and radical act. Some couples saying having a wedding removing parents from saying dont ask dont tell with their partners. Drawing a line in the sand risking disappointment from adult siblings or favorite uncle. Pastor in church they grew up in know affirmatively yeses they have taken on this quote, unquote, lifestyle. Theyre going to openly live with a mate. Many who have a religious Wedding Service actually have the audacity to want their god to recognize and bless their union. Anyone who has any knowledge of black religious communities can see radical nature of this supposedly conformist behavior. So im not trying to take away from the beautiful and persuasive arguments that katherine makes in wedlock regarding critical move of marriage as a force in social movement that are about liberation. I dont disagree with that. But im saying it is precisely because marriage holds such as important idealogical position in the minds and experiences of so many different groups that it is a useful and important frontier. The Marriage Equality movement is useful in a way that is separate from the question of the kind of equality, capacity to marry might actually mobilize wedlock also critiques the lbgt movement for overwhelming white ness that characterizes campaign at time of 2008 political debate. Between the 2008 election and 2013 Supreme Court position i saw a shift in the lgbt organization tried to quote, unquote sell the Marriage Equality. My wife and i elaine were married in 2012 shortly after new york recognized same sex unions. We were one of crazy couples a lot. We got married three times that year. Weve been together for 10 years. I guess we had to go all out when we finally decided to commit to it. Once our wedding pictures were published we were approached by evan wolf freedom to marry campaign. Through the experience i saw genuine effort to expand the representation of samesex couples in the public eye. There were images of older couples, folks in the south and mid mountain regions of the country, latino women, africanamerican men, even some conservative religious couples. Sult of that work several Different Things happened for us. We were on the cover of black enterprise magazine, conservative business magazine for black businessminded people. So i say this as an aside to show the ways the movement recognized and tried to rectify some of its prior mistakes and the way those images are uses nod just in lgbt organizations but other groups and outlets as Supreme Court case moved forward. Now wedlock argues that marriage with samesex couples both reflects and reproduce as new form of respectability so yearned for in many sectors of the Gay Community. She says removing the marriage ban removes the quote, badge of inferiority for whites in a way that it does not and can not do for blacks because of race. While i agree i also see important class differences in the extent to which Blacks Experience this disadvantage. Some ways, the book crosses an imaginary line when it only depicts marriage as quote, a site of failure and dysfunction for many africanamericans because i see where middle and upper middle class africanamericans are able to benefit from many advantaged and legitimacy marriage brings. Class status grants them certain privileges. This is true even in religious communities. I recently interviewed rahim, an africanamerican gay man. He lives in a large Southern City with his husband and two adopted children. He was raised in holiness Pentacostal Church which is conservative denomination. He has a graduate degree. Works for a biotech company. His husband is pastor of a church that keeps traditional pent cost al beliefs but welcoming to everyone including lgbt people. They live in a grand house. Together they bring in six figure income. I like to say six figure income that does not start with a one or a two. When i asked how he and his family were faring in the conservative state in the south, he told me only experience in enormous amount of love and support even from those who quote, might not support the lgbt community. He said that when he walked around with his daughter in baby carrier even with his husband in the south, black people said to him rarely have they seen black men so actively involved in raising their young children. They say it is not norm in their experience with men. So here the Comparison Group for the community has not been heterosexual couple, meaning are the children worse off being raised by gay men instead of a married man and woman. They appear very well off. Isnt that great for the children as well. This is one area where racial context and communitys experience around black men and families sets up a dynamic may have not even considered in discussions about gay men raising children. His money was able to buy his family out of the negative experiences that others report. Although wedlock argues that africanamericans have not been able to use marriage to quote, rebrand blackness in the way that sanitizes racist stereotypes, this black couple has been able to at least silence or protect themselves from the harm affiliated by those stereotypes and i can think of other heterosexual black couples similarly situated who use this status, this income, this education, to shield themselves but i will say, again,ars its head from tie to interject itself into their lives. They can not escape that. Their money can not escape that racism. And i suspect this truth is as at the heart of katherines argument. But it appears the drag of two subordinated statuses based in race and Sexual Orientation do not affect their lives on a daily basis. So what do lgbt communities who are africanamericans say about Marriage Equality as this vehicle to liberation . I see two primary responses. This past spring the institute for research on africanamerican studies here at columbia had a panel in harlem about the meaning of Marriage Equality for africanamericans. Darnell moore was on the panel. For those that dont know darnell, he is brillent africanamerican writer advocates for lgbt youth in newark. He came from low income family where people did not marry. They raised children with help of mother and sisters. Relationships with men were fleets or short term. They were mainly learning about how to survive. Marriage was not priority. It influences lukewarm feelings for marriage. There were other pressing needs in the population that he works with like having a safe place to live and those kind of things. So, for his remarks, i say that this focus on Marriage Equality may not be useful particularly to those unpartnerred or socioeconomically disadvantaged. So in this sense katherines argument is right, even for interracial case. Marriage equality can not be only story that the movement brings to disenfranchised communities. They have to also show they care about and realize the importance of other issues, bread and butter issues, poverty, unemployment, racial profiling, inferior grocery stores, Inadequate Services but other black lgbt leaders looked past specific example of Marriage Equality and used it as a tool to promote greater understanding and acceptance interracially with the group. So theyre trying to think of how to maintain and build relationships and how to stand proud and openly express this gay identity that is simultaneous with the racial identity. One expressed goal for the work is to challenge and conquer their own homophobia. In addition to working, change the minds of racial group they want to build the groups selfacceptance of their own Sexual Orientation destigmatizing and transforming the meaning of gay sexuality. My last comment, i want to say there is potential i see for samesex couples to radicalize marriage because of lack of sex differences between partners and greater equality that comes from it. There are differences can exist in gender presentation but those do not translate to gender inequality. The gender inequality that a century of sociological literature found in heterosexual relationships through mens advantageses in labor force and other social institutions. Simply put, some women may dress in boyish fashion but lack mens institutional power and do not and can not assume hedge mon nubbing masculinity. Instead couples making decisions how to lead their lives based on other factors besides sex and Power Distribution in these relationships are not based in gender and theyre not even based who has the greater economic power. So i see the potential for these relationships to create Something Different within the state of marriage. I say this while agreeing with wedlocks assertion that the institution of marriage was and still is structured around gender roles and inequalities. My time is up. So i will stop here but i want to say that, despite my sociological interpretation i really, really enjoyed this book and i enjoyed the arguments that have had with folks but i also enjoy the premise, the very premise of the pitfalls to using the law in this way. So i do appreciate that. I thank you for your time. [applause] good afternoon, everyone. I apologize in advance for my voice. I dont know if i caught what mignon has. But im going to give it a go. Ive always thought that the best scholarly work is scholarly work whose lines of inquiry and analysis and of argument give rise to more questions than the author of the works can possibly undertake to address or answer. There is a lot to say about this wonderful book. I do hope that we have a chance for a more extended conversation than the, our 9minutes or so we set aside this afternoon will allow. So, in that spirit i want to use my allotted time to say a bit about four panels that i think would make a wonderful Conference Program on this extraordinary new book by my Dear Colleague katherine franke. The first panel would be a panel on method and it is suggested to me by this formulation a formulation which we see in a number of places in the book, but ill quote it here. Katherine writes at one point that the books central conceit associates two eras and two Civil Rights Movements with one another. What she doesnt say but which i think ought to be stressed here is that the books Central Project also associates two methods. Wedlock brings together the preoccupations and procedures of two critical, of two critical perspectives, one, Critical Race Theory and the second queer legal theory. In a kind of hybrid thought style whose modes of inquiry and analysis challenge the asum tiff structure that take race, sex, sexuality and gender i might add as separate identities and siloed experiences. I always liked ray charles image of the categorical mysogenation of sexuality and race and gender and trying to understand this analytic methodological hybridty. Charles suggested race, sexuality and gender and ethnicity are coterminus and enmeshed in a way in object rooted in intersection alty, that two or more separate identities or experience meet in a particular place only helps us partially apprehend. Katherine is calling instead for a connection analysis. She calls it social tiff. Similar to convergence and divergence, to continuities and discontinuities as katherine sigs. Frankly the obvious fact that race and sexuality ought not have some would have us belief preclude careful investigation of both race and sexuality and of how they come to be with they are in part precisely through their difference, right . This is the old poststruck alist chess nut of identity in difference. The book give us, concrete on the ground and extended elaboration of the importance of holding on to both of the chains at once. Put another way, race and sexuality and gender are different but they move and live and have their being in and through and around one another. Wedlock reminds us that this attention to identities as they are shaped and as they take shape in and through difference is a crucial resource for making sense of what civil marriage means and of the work it does at the current, in the current con juncture for gay and lesbian people as well as people of color whatever their gender or sexuality. Conceptually i think this means tracking the movements and manifestations here with respect to the law and politics of marriage of race as sexuality and sexuality as race. Sexuality is raced we might say, i have said that and race is sexualized, right . Sexuality is a technology of racial power and race is a technology of sexual power. As we know for example, from the work on the idea of sexual racism, right . So katherine frankes account of gay and lesbian marriage as a story that is closely connected, not only closely connected to but, as a story about race, i think represents an enormously valuable contribution to the work of those who are situated at the intersection of Critical Race Theory on one side and queer legal theory on the other. And she does it through this idea of aggragation. She is calling in effect one might say for aggragation of race and sexuality which recalls in a kind of reverse mirror image an argument in her earlier work against the disaggragation of sex and gender. So this attention to and her delight in the thought experiment that is possible when one engages in a kind of a Free Association historically informed to be sure but a Free Association of sex and gender offers us a rich analytic tool for tracking the shifting and supple and fluid movement of marriage law across multiple multidimensional axe sees. The book allows us to think in terms one might say about the condensations, combinations and rye combination, the dynamic fluid character of, mixed modal character of marriage law. A feature of marriage law that is essential to the stories she tells both about africanamericans in the postbellum period and about gay men and lesbians. This allow us to see norm tiffly white character of the Marriage Equality movement at least arguments in legal terms werent explicit, and heteronormatively a use i shout to earlier this season on empire. All Marriage Equality law. My important point wedlock stages an encounter if you will of crt and queer legal theory that allow us to understand in the words of my friend the scholar lubinio, the places where race no longer talks about race precisely and par docks i cannily by talking about it through Something Else and elsewhere. What asks lubiano that race help us think about that race does not name to which it is nonetheless connected . In my own work i suggested that one of the things race helps us think about is sexualities. Katherine shows us in wedlock, one of the things thinking about gay and lesbian sexuality think us about which demands we think about is race. One might be called racesex or sectionrace, effusion i think represents an important insight about how to understand this moment in the history of Marriage Equality law and politics. The second panel would be a panel about law as a structure of feeling. It would focus on those aspects of the Marriage Equality debate which are about the emotional and sensitive. About physical and psychic, if you will bodies. And the term bodies here is essential for me. Katherine at one moment in the book talks about going through these archives in the south and finding locks of hair, right . And finding pieces of quilts that people sent along with their petitions for widows benefits and seeing the smudges of fingerprints on the papers that people who couldnt sign their names but wrote x left when they, when they were writing to the government seeking war widows benefits. This attention to structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williamss phrase, or as i put it here, to the body i think offers us an insight into what Marriage Equality law is doing that bears directly on a second point that cath lynn makes which i think is absolutely crucial. She asks more than once how it is rightsbearing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the rights they bear . She framed it this afternoon in her own remarks as the moral lesson to be careful what you wish for, right . How is it that rightsbearing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the rights they bear . Shaped in ways that show how rights and freedom are only contingently related. That is how the benefits of rights may come at the cost or the price of certain kinds of freedom. For katherine this is a paradox. I think it is a important i think i said to identify and describe this paradox but i think we also need, and this is what my ideal panel would do, we need to try to explain and understand it. So the question would be, what drove the marriage Rights Movement so willingly into the arms of the law. What was the consideration that led gay men and lesbians to enter into what might be called a marriage contract, not just with one another but into a marriage contract with the state. Now katherine suggests that gaining the right to marry o kind of emancipation for burden of social objection to gays and lesbians. First that the marriage license marks a kind of social belonging and recognition of equivalence and second, because it serves as kind of credential that vouches for the legitimacy and quality of the couples relationship but over and above these utilitarian features of marriage that make it something gay men and lesbians have come to want, are other nonutilitarian dimensions only be rendered visible if we understand the freedom to marry as being not only about the right of gay men and lesbians to marry one another, about the right i can put it this way to marry the law. To marry the state right . We still need to see Marriage Equality law as a body of sex laws. What do i mean by that . Line means simply that Marriage Equality lot, certainly this is true if we look in the line of cases, Marriage Equality lot is now recognized and will be talked about as a branch of family law. But i want to suggest that Marriage Equality lock and also be seen as a branch of what might be called post gay and lesbian sex law. When we married the state, the law as men of my generation used to say the law becomes a kind of top. We bunt to be covered by the law. Younger people say my generation said top and bottom, younger people say dumb and some. Is will play wonderfully on cspan. We will see how you write it down. What animates this is an imagined desire to be topped by the law which is live in the bodies of gays and lesbians but which exceeds an instrumental account of material benefits of marriage. I am struck by how quickly the argument that marriage confers 1100 or so benefits that they men and lesbians are not getting, gives way to an argument about the importance of the california case of feeling married, feeling in my bones, a feeling in my body that i am married. I call it 6 law because i believe this year earnings to feel married is a sort of them body pleasure. I am lining up here. Bodies and pleasure. Even though marriage law in many ways made possible by this, we need to think about the ways in which it is still the site for a kind of afterlife which has to do with desires and pleasures and bodies at the level of our collective ideological imagination. So it is a fantasy. But marriage law, the comparative historical and critical accounts catherine gives of the africanamerican and lgbt campaigns for Marriage Equality would gain a lot by plumbing and engaging in extended analysis. The expressive and affective dimensions of these two struggles to win civil marriage and it would also put us in conversation with scholars who are working on law and the emotions or more generally the ways in which the law not always is about the instrumental practical business of regulation and institutional design but is also about emotion, imagination and what Raymond Williams called the structures of feeling that underwrite this body of law and policy. This is important to keep in mind for Cultural Studies approach that looks a lot as a cultural form. By talking about body, pleasures, desire, i think we need to not lose sight of the ways in which there is an erotic at work in this area of the law and in this marriage contract which i am suggesting, the state is inviting us to join. There is a lot more to be said about that but i will be the subject since mary and is looking at me anxiously. I have two more panels. This is the point, i am thinking of the opera lulu which i saw last night and the ways in which alan burke, the composer of this opera does a really brilliant job of focusing on the compulsory character of marriage, a moment when lulu says her nexttolast has been says that is why i married you and she says but you didnt marry me. Husband says that what did i do . She says i married you. Thinking about this, in what sense has the state married to us . Even as it is inviting us to think we are gaining fruit and autonomy and agency which is about self ordering i think that is an important area of further investigation. The third panel briefly will be a panel on marriage and what i like to call the roots of respectability, the ways in which marriage laws are more regulation. When you can compare the parallel convergence and divergent histories of racial respectability and homosexual respectability and investments alternately in racial reputation and moral reputation, ideas of maturity, civilizing process marriage represents but the point i would want to make is the reproductive post gave virtual family since the gay and lesbian family raises children and reproduces without procreation. It couldnt be more respectable. How to have children without sex. That is the story of the new post gay, post sexual family. What are the wages of respectability . Respectability is a regime of self surveillance. The story about how blacks reported other blacks who then got caught up in the machinery of criminal law, once marriage at been conferred and they violated the laws of marriage, a story about Community Self surveillance. 2. Respectability is a kind of death sentence i might say. The respectability politics of Marriage Equality represent a kind of what the South African judge called the right to be different. The ask for formal legal equality has nothing to do with the right to be different and i believe that aspect of it is an invitation to see marriage ecology as a response or as an effort to banish race, the twin stigmas and age and criminalization that was in the Supreme Court, struck down in lawrence vs. Texas and as kathryn notes, historical antecedent in the story of good blacks policeing bad blacks as she puts it and i do think we are going to see what she calls the afterlife of homophobia continue to play itself out in this self surveillance and almost better absence of interest in the gay and Lesbian Community to a whole range of issues that affect the lives of a men and lesbians like mass incarceration, the Death Penalty and the like about which i have written and fourth and finally i would like to see a panel at the conference on wedlock, on marriage law and sexual democracy or the deferral of sexual democracy, marriage lot to be more precise and neil liberal sexual policy. It is curious to pursue a civil rights strategy that nests of full form of public citizenship within marriage, distinctly private domain, it is curious and it is consistent with the merging logic of neo liberal family law to the extent the Marriage Equality law is species or branch of neo liberal family law. By privatizing sexual politics and socializing the private privilege through the stigma that attaches to non normative intimate associations in the gay and Lesbian Community, the beneficiaries of Marriage Equality law are going to profit from the extension by the stage of the legitimacy to their relationship which effectively shuts down struggle which i certainly have all my adult life seen myself to be a part of, and another way is marriage ecology changes sexual politics by nesting of freedom struggle for the right to sexual pleasure, by investing a freedom struggle which in fredric jamesons terms places the question of pleasure as a political issue squarely on the public agenda, in a claim for formal legal eat quality. Of privatized formal legal e. Quality, by nesting this freedom strugglers humanrights to be different to be a right to sexual pleasure within a movement for marriage rights, Marriage Equality effectively crowds out in kathryns image certain forms of democratic convention, and practices of sexual freedom which we have yet to imagine, so this closure i think is a price that we have not even begun to take the measure of but i am pleased that my colleague Kathryn Frankies book has given us a tool kit for thinking through some of the difficult and intractable problems in the enormous challenges that those of us who still believe that there is dignity to the struggle for sexual liberation will need in the years to come. Thank you very much. [applause] since the conference is not yet scheduled, we will take some time to discuss the book and these responses. If anybodys fantasy is to have such different and rich responses to anything one has just published by think it is a tribute to this wonderful book, catherine, would you like to respond to any of these questionss before we open it up . I would rather hear questions and work my responses into answers to your questions but hopefully also answer your questions. The floor is open. Thank you for the work you have done. And transitioning to becoming an academic and a lot of your work has been helpful in thinking things through particularly your work, professor more and working at ucla. I ask, prof. Thomas what brought up one thing, a really big way to think about what Marriage Equality has taken us away from. Why did Marriage Equality become that issues that now has a lot of gay people saying we have full equality. At the same time the epidemic has become in the realm of criminal blacks actuality, i have seen that law in the state of missouri where doing my research, very strict criminalization loss, about also in our realm that gave gay people have no concept of, when mike braun was killed a few days before he was killed, hiv activists i worked with were doing something with hiv, not really considered, you dont see hiv come to visibility in that way yet these things are very related selling wonder if your book has offered, if you thought about this and if you have seen hiv as a role in why these movements become so different. Say a little bit and the for to my colleagues for their thoughts. I was an hiv discrimination lawyer before was an academic. I spent a lot of time working on hiv related issues the 4 we had term aides to describe it. In the 1980s so much of that work both on professional and personal level was about thinking about care and who we care for and who we should care for and we thought kinship very broadly than because of the discrimination people who are hivpositive were experiencing for families of origin and sometimes their own partners were dying also and so we saw each other having a Community Responsibility to take care of each other because there were no other resources. This is during the period of reagan and horrible statesponsored violence against people who are hivpositive so to go from that period of sacks, a gay sex which womens are to melody was invisible so it was a men specs being toxic and a threat, not to mention perverse and deviant and would kill you, to what we see now where we legally the store we are told in the Marriage Equality movement, the off fantasy is we only 0 legal and other responsibilities to the people we mary and not to the Larger Community of people we previously saw as in and also that sex is somehow sanitized with in the institution of marriage and no longer a threat. What kendall said about the respectability of having children without sex was delightful. We are told a very different story and what i find so remarkable and reflect on in the book quite a bit is how successful that read branding has been, both as a story we tell the outside world but also a story we told ourselves about who we are and to our families are and who and how we should love one another. Barry something enormously lost, i think, in that news story telling in one of the chapters where i talk about the afterlife, homophobia, somewhat ironically but not entirely celebrate Anthony Wiener as the new subject, a man who loved sex, lots of it, lots of it publicly and the Gay Community had nothing to say about sex for sexs sake when not that long ago we had a lot to say about promiscuity. Sex with lots of different partners, people you didnt know necessarily and how to both have sex and take care of your partners but we were speechless in the face of any wiener so i think it is a kind of fatality both literally and figuratively of the Marriage Equality movement the we dont speak it anymore and it is at our peril certainly. Collect a couple of questions that really could you please just have a question and not a link the comment . Looking forward to reading the book, thank you so much. I can clearly see what you are talking about in terms of the strategy, the safe strategy taken and the road not taken so my question is in terms of legal strategy and marriage inequality, what with the road not taken have looked like, the better road not taken have looked like, and what can we retrieve from that road that was not taken . We worked very hard on domestic partnership, a civil union laws, forms of recognition so we had a range of ways to create some legal or Financial Security for our non marital relationships and what was nice about domestic partnerships and civil unions is they allow you some room to innovate. And didnt invite the state into setting the terms of what your relationship was. By and large, the Gay Community has dropped defending those alternative institutions and the legal strategy was to villified them as secondclass status in order to win marriage right and i dont think we needed to say that in order to save the state refusing to recognize samesex couples as entitled to marriage is a constitutional problem, we could have both. Walking and chewing gum was something we didnt do when we could have. The other road not taken is that we could have won the right to marry in a different way. Without leading with dignity. We could have met the argument, the claim with something that looks more like the quality on the level of excluding samesex couples from marriage is a form of statesponsored homophobia or heterosexual hatred towards gay people just as in loving versus va. The Supreme Court said laws that dont allow white people or criminalize white people who marry people of a different sex is a form of white supremacy. It is a powerful claim, powerful argument from the Supreme Court the we never heard again. But we could have borrowed the power of what the law does and what motivates the law inert equality fight but instead that some samesex couples should be blessed by the institution of marriage in order to dignify or recognize the dignity and in part that was an appeal to Justice Kennedy whose middle name is dignity. I saw something on lined says maybe his take on dignity will also help the abortion cases that are before the court this term. I think absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think there is something and dignified about getting pregnant and wanting to terminate the pregnancy or to have the power yourself to make that decision that is very different from the kinds of claims that were made or the arguments made in the Marriage Equality cases. Here i am answering the question and we wanted to accumulate a few. That is the case. Nobody had their hands up. We have time for maybe three questions. And some final remarks. So far we have limited our commentary to domestic politics and the Marriage Equality movement as it happened in the west release the u. S. But of course another Marriage Equality has been globalize or transnational lies not only through that but this sector of samesex marriage and seems like the same sex irrigationmarriage provision bill relates to respectability politics but another kind of politics so we saw in the last couple weeks the state department, can apply to have their partners come to the u. S. Only if they had not been able to get married in their country, only if they had been together and not been able to get married. I am curious if you could comment on the Marriage Equality amendment affects respectability and dispose ability. That is a great question. I think if you accept the proposition which i hope you will gains of Marriage Equality not just in the United States the globally have been taking place within the shadow of neil liberal capitalism, and the privatization of dependency, the appreciation of the social welfare state. Not the we ever had one here but the repudiation of the social welfare state in other parts of the world, that is going on. Has represented, then i think what we can say about that specific policy is as a strategy, as a regulatory strategy it is about the distribution of these now privatize dependencies. And so if you cant get married in the country from which your partner comes and we will allow you to get married here so it is a question of really about the allocation of this totally privatized right to be dependent through the institution of marriage and this relates to the question professor russell ray is. I was involved in 2006 with a group of activists from a variety of different parts of Civil Society to produce a document over the course of the weekend called beyond gay marriage. The goal was to try to defend not only the plural forms of kinship and intimate Association Gave clinton, lesbian and clears developed in the absence of our rights of civil marriage but also to be true to the larger vision of the game lesbian struggle as a struggle for sexual liberation. I would have added in my formal remarks for all people. That is why it is a question about sexual democracy writ large. And so i think the challenge at the local level, brought orientation with respect to questions of policy is to try to fashion ways in which we can drive a wedge between this idea that access to social benefit should be contingent on it hinge on whether or not you are married. That relationships of dependency of to be governed i what our former colleague Martha Fineman called the sexual family. That is the proof of the problem. But it is perfectly consistent with the logic of the liberal capital and the contract into which those persons who get married, whatever their Sexual Orientation alongside fat, all so seeing what i think might be called as the emergence of a new Sexual Orientation. You have pomo norma to the heterosexual not as to the, the alignment of the normative, the normal with marital status with the you are gay or lesbian or heterosexual, i think is a moment of sexual realignment which in many ways corresponds to the moments of racial realignment we have seen in the age of neoliberalism, so i think it is a difficult but important question that you ask but we have to see the connections between the national, the transnational, and Global Capital under neoliberalism. If i can had one more thing, one of the chapters in the book in the historical sections talks about why northern soldiers or missionaries were forcing newly freed people to marry and it was explicitly in order to privatize dependency. They explicitly said we dont want to pay for these 4 women and children. We would like to have the men serve in the military and or be sharecroppers but we want the men to be responsible for the dependency needs of their kids. Martha fineman all the way down in the work that she has done in thinking dependency and privatization of into the family. We dont say it as explicitly today but they said it very honestly that and there is a lesson in that comparison. One other thing i want to mention about that dependency is the last chapter in the book looks at gendering of samesex couples through the process of divorce and what judges are doing in divorce courts or family courts are turning lesbians and husbands and gay men into wives in many contextss because all those judges note are heterosexual relationships. By law they never had samesex couples before them. The rules of shall divorce assume gender inequality. Courts dont know how to see families that think responsibility independency differently, than at deeply gendered for. Feminists have worked hard to change marriage law in order to account for gender disadvantage in heterosexual relationships but how those rules get picked up and applied to samesex relationships when they go through divorce is shocking to some samesex couples who thought they had a different deal than what marriage law entails. One partner becomes the husband and the other partner becomes the wife because that is all those judges know how to render legible to demand you then get divorce law does its work and it is about a new liberal idea of the family. We will see if we are able to blow the institution up. I dont know. I hope you are right. We are out of time. Can we take ten more minutes . Are people willing we have a reception, we have booked sales. Lets take one more question. You mentioned you mentioned at the beginning of your talk keep going. Back away from the mic. Discipline and punishment provides the way marriage is operated and normalizing judgment to interpolate and formalized legitimate subjects around the cultural and certainly legal eligibility and so in civilian terms aims to not only let the state empower more effectively but operate more efficiently with more aptitudes then what in your formulation of marriage as Marriage Equality or marriage itself, the structure seek to amplify in terms of the capacity of the subject. That is such as sophisticated question. I dont want to dominate too much, anymore than i already have. The rest of you . You earned the floor. I would agree with some of the comments of professor thomas that we have let neoliberalism economic project and advocates of samesex marriage have signed up for. They want access to the kind of privileges and benefits that get distributed rightly or wrongly through the institution of marriage. If we get universal or Single Payer Health care it wouldnt matter that you were married to someone who had good job or had Health Insurance if we had real pensions or retirement, then it wouldnt matter so much if you could inert your partner at social security, etc. So i do think there is a larger project at stake here that surrendering to the discipline of marriage rather unthinkingly collaborates with