Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Wedlocked 20160306

Presentation, a brief presentation of the book and its main issues, history by Katherine Franke and Katherine Franke is a professor of law. The director of the center for gender and sexuality law, which is a wonderful institution that we are happy to collaborate with and she is the author of wedlocked the preils of Marriage Equality, nyu press 2015 just recently out. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transgender justice, issues of gender and grace in the law. She is a legal theorist, academic, activist public intellectual and an amazing human being. I am happy to be celebrating her that afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order with first Patricia Williams who is the james dorr professor of lot condit. She is the author the blonde goddess. You no doubt know her through her monthly column for the nation magazine entitled diary of a mad law professor in which you can subscribe to add ww w mad law professor. Our second speaker will be mignon moore is associate professor. Her recent examines the intersection of race, gender and Sexual Orientation and her recently her first book is invisible families, gay identity relationships and motherhood among black women. Published in 2011, by the university of California Press and was the winner of that 2013 outstanding book award by the American Sociological Association section on sex and a gender. Shes working on a second book project entitled shadow of sexuality. Social history and social support among africanamerican lgbt elders pick art hurt third speaker is the director of law. Kendall thomas is the coeditor of article race theory. Founded the movement and also coeditor of whats left of theory with judith butler. His most recent writing and Research Focused on the long culture of Death Penalty politics, rachel democracy in brazil and lawn politics of liberalism after the obama presidency. Creek please help me welcome Katherine Franke. [applause]. Thank you so much. Im going to move this. So we can all see one another. I teach a room like and i can manipulate these things. Along with my students. Here is the book. Very exciting. [applause]. Thank you all for coming. Its wonderful to have you come out and honor this book and honor thinking about marriage in a competent way. I know so many of you do that in your own work in your own politics and own lives, so i appreciate having company because the perspectives i have on Marriage Equality are not always the most popular within the Gay Community, so you are community right now. Thank you. Thank you to iris for cosponsoring this event along with my own center. When i was in college at barnard college, i went to college across the way here, sodomy was a crime. That was in new york state and many other states, but i moved here from illinois, to a state that criminalized who i was or at least things i did. Twice while i was a student at barnard i was assaulted by police. They hurled homophobic of the fact that me. Another time i was beaten by some guys over here in Riverside Park and police stood by and watched. So, for people of my generation or certainly for me the idea that a lot later we would turn to state regulation as a way to be freer and more equal people, struck me as a strange move. It still strikes me as a strange move. That not many years after our intimate lies were criminalized by the state and we were prosecuted for it, not publicly and privately and thats what i take it to be as private prosecution. That we would invite the state into our intimate relationships and ask the state to regulate them. Thats always struck me as an odd political objective and i thought i would write a book about it and thats what wedlocked is, but i also thought that game gay people are samesex couples are not alone in that experience of having the states regulate their lives in the form of marriage shortly after or in part of the Civil Rights Movement or a movement about the emancipation. So, i turned to what africanamericans went through or actually they werent 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 to marriage now. As a form of liberty and equality. It turns out there is quite a bit we can learn and that is what this book does is it each chapter offers parables for todays movement. Not to quit homophobia and racism as the same thing, not to say that experience of violence and torture and enslavement that black people have suffered in this country is the same thing as what gay people have suffered in various forms of homophobia, but to create with edwards i. E. Describes as a justification between two movements so as we formulate our goals and articulate our values and pursue our political projects today we do so mindful of other movements that we are just opposed with and who can teach us those movements can teach us something about the possibilities and perils of certain political and legal claims. That is what the book aims to do is bring these two movements together, these two moments together to see what lies there and it turns out Marriage Equality does indeed have a racial history. It also has a racial presence and that is one of the takehome points of this book. Its not only be careful what you wish for, but the distinction, the differences between homophobia and racism, the difference between Marriage Equality today and Marriage Equality in the 19th century for newly freed people point out something about the racial endowment that todays Marriage Equality movement has enjoyed. And the ways in which marriage has been an enormously successful method by which to rebrand homosexuality as i say in wedlocked to take the sex out of sexuality. And to redeem the people in particularly certain gay couples who are able to be respectable and seemed entitled, makeup possible claim to entitlement to the blessings of marriage. In doing so, they contrast themselves to those who are deserving of exile from the institution of marriage, who were deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always people of color in this country and if so this just position helps us understand, i think, how unfortunately some of what we have one in the Marriage Equality movement have been a kind of zero some politics or zerosum rights working people and some samesex couples have won a right to marry at the expense of others. Both implicitly and explicitly that has been made in the marriage aquatic cases, so let me just say a little bit about what a couple of the chapters doing the careful what you wish or. Marriage and rights in particular can become a form of discipline particularly a form of discipline when many sectors of the Society Still hate you. That it was certainly for newly freed people at the end of the war. Its not that the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Racism took new form. Persisted in old and familiar forms and being able to marry for the first time inaugurated in a way a new regulatory relationship and a new disciplinary relationship for black people with the state. So, when black people coming out of enslavement who lived together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly in many cases and in their relationships broke up, in any population that will be the case. People took 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 render them subject to the convict leasing system that was developed after the end of the civil war because there was this body of workers that were available to do the agricultural work that enslave people at them before. The convict leasing system with more deadly for black men than was agricultural work while enslaved. So, marriage rights particularly the laws of marriage lots of divorce and the laws of monogamy around marriage ended 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 effects of slavery in the crushing reality of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. What i think we see today as well, of course there is a enormous backlash against there was an enormous backlash against plaque electing that the war and there is a backlash against samesex marriage rights now mostly done undertaken in the name of religion, but not always and to the extent that we have had smooth sailing today on the rights of samesex couples to be married, it has been local in many contexts and in many parts of the country marriage rights are not something people feel they can exercise because they dont feel free to come out. They know they will be retaliation against them. Date experience or metabolize that fear and tends against the backdrop of this message from both people in the Gay Community and out of the Gay Community who say being married will civilize you, will tame those wild sort of lascivious urges of gay men who dont know how to sign up for one among one another and commitment monogamous. We have heard the same thing about africanamericans at the end of, that they somehow had savage sexuality that needed to be disciplined into the institution of marriage so that the civilizing aspect of marriage, the values it carries has its own portfolio. Sometimes overwhelm the values of the communities that seek to exercise these rights in the book tries to answer that as well or to address this. One other place where i think there is a similarity or at least a particularly compelling lesson to learn from the historical connection is about how he right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marry. Not on the level there are some people who go around america in every state with this diagnostic problem of over marrying. Not that kind of compulsion, i mean. But, the state will compel you to marry. So, the 19th century we saw even before the end of the civil war in order for fleeing slaves, slaves with whom were leaving the plantation to the safety of northern troops who set up refugee camps, around the military operation that they were conducting in the south, a minister was placed at the gates of many of these they called him contraband camps, but refugee camps and you could not gain entry into these cancer that marrying. That was seen as the most pressing problem. That these folks were coming in and complicated familys. Of course, people had lost their spouses and their children and their owners had sold them away in these families were reassembling a comely to the safety of this refugee camps and the northern soldiers and missionaries running them said we cannot let you in in those debauched families. We will marry you at the gate. So, the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry in many contexts and we see that today as well, not just generally, but here, university. As soon as in new york state we gained the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolish this domestic partner benefits. Said you have a year to marry her partner and if you dont they will be kicked out the health and. Shocking, that a Secular University would get in the business of promoting and enforcing marriage and thanks to the organizing of a bunch of us here at the university, we got them to reverse that policy. But, not for different couples in the president had promised they would actually keep domestic partner benefits for same and different sex couples because in new york city are Partnership Law recognize samesex and different sex, but the only reinstated for samesex couples, so now they discriminate against gay people. Samesex couples are paid more in the sense you can get benefits for your partner whether or not you marry them, but if you are heterosexual or have a different sex partner you have you marry. So, these are some of the difficult questions that i think have come up in history around marriage and around 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 we have lost queer families as kind of the subject of gay rights. In the same way we fought them, 10, 15 years ago. Many of us who were early advocates working on issues of lgbt or queer family rights saw marriage as actually a problem. It was a sexist institution written to legally comfort ties to preserve property and usually male property and creating viable life outside marriage was our political project. Something happened. Something happened and the movement got overtaken by marriage politics, so one last thing i want to offer him and i would love to hear from my colleagues. I feel kind of valley we are racially segregated appear. I may integrate the tables. I have never talked publicly about this, but when i was in college here in barnard, i was sort of coming awakening as many undergraduates students due to being a lesbian and i was reading as a lot of us they. She was a poet and novelist who is very well known in the 70s and 80s and she wrote a journal called the journal of solitude. It was very moving and importance for me and many of my friends. As i was coming out i thought, im going to be lonely when im old. Old to me at that point. She wrote about being old and alone. I worried the only way to not be alone when you are old is to be married and i really didnt want to be heterosexual and i really 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 to read the whole letter. Typed like oldfashioned coming out typing. Remember that . She said what you want is love as a sideline and solitude as the main current. I dont see this as possible. For level of how commitment pretty cheap. This is where marriage comes in. I reach you with terribly afraid of being caught and people who marry simple because they want marriage do often find themselves caught. It looks to me as though you have never loved a man enough 20 marry him. Which was true. [laughter] its as simple as that. When you do and hope you will, there wont be any argument and then wouldnt see when 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, lets me just quickly from Justice Kennedy and that the burger felt decision. It is a decision from the Supreme Court recognizing a constitutional right for samesex couples to marry and one of the things he says is this marriage response to the universal year that a lonely person might call out only to find it knowing their. It offers hoping companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . There is no life other than just dark loneliness if youre unmarried . This is the price of unfortunately when the right to marry is that life outside of marriage, whether you choose it or you find yourself there for coveted reasons is a grim lonely dark life. Thats not a queer value. In my mind, and i think we can look to the Africanamerican Community to see enormous resilience, creativity and flourishing in life outside of marriage. So, thank you so much. [applause]. Scenic it is so wonderful to be part of this conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me and congratulations, kathryn. Wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting throughout of this history imaginable and comparative study between the two efforts for Marriage Equality comparative study aside, the case studies in your book are absolutely fascinating, totally absorbing of the life circumstances of enslaved men and women in a row to marriage. One of the things i was most impressed with in these interwoven stories was the valuable line between tbilisi and untouchable. The question you raised of a subtitle is one of the perils of Marriage Equality. The question of whether it is marriage that does all the work in a comparative sense to the Marriage Equality for gays. I think will probably be addressed more thoroughly than i buy mignon moore and kendall. My observations, for those of you that have read anything that i have written i write costs only about my line item here because my great great grandmother was married off by the wife of a slave owner who chose the light skinned it will hit marry for the saving, i think, ultimately of her own marriage. So, as catherine notes in some of the stories, i think that what i want to note here is that marriage among African Americans really did a fact and, i mean, affect in the affective sense the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes in several history of significant number of slave marriages were overseen, shall we say by owners, by the masters. In another dimension of the history is the degree to which much of that permission to marry kim about as much through the mail owner property, but through the civilizing, uplifting and ever so self interested ministration of the wives of the slaveholders. That prompting of the union of slaves to some degree operates like any other marriage, it makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. To some degree it eliminates the dangerousness as well as the perversions of sexuality, but marriage among africanamericans both antebellum police until 1967 is a double edge think. Purifying, respectively making, but also underscoring the dangerous untouchability of blacks sexual bodies. Those first africanamerican marriages were a ritual after all performed against the backdrop of the breeding farms that kathryn talks about in the. And the mysteriously light skinned House Service and unable acts of incest, disguised as production inventory rather than progenitor. It was and still is a ritual prompted most particularly and justified most poignantly as a way of formally corralling the unregulated boundless response of black sex. So, all of this is really interesting to me that the kind of formal genuflection towards the threat of white families, reading white womens history of the time there was something to be said about how if marriage left africanamericans to read, but free it did something of the same thing for slaveholding families particularly the women in that it had at least as much to do with reinforcing not just the legal, but the moral status of terrified white wives. The sexual accident nation that has only recently begun to be publicized or knowledge from the history of Thomas Jefferson only through not enough. This is in auto. [inaudible] so, marriage continues to this double sense as a pathway to salvation, but as a sealant against the leakage of miscegenation. Again, think this affective dimension is accompanied by all the dodges marked in the words we use and dont use even to this day. I am struck by how in todays world the benefits of marriage among africanamericans in the status conferred is very peculiar when it comes to ask americans. Not so much when they marry, but when they marry outside the race or transgress as perceived as racial brown grease. Think of the use of biracial. It is a kind of formal recognition of a certain line of descent that is not accorded to those who are just the products in the back of those slave cabins. There is legitimacy according to the lineage, the recently age in particular of intermarriage formal marriage between blacks and whites in modern times, but the children of whom will be called biracial if for only a temporary carrier and that is to say when they get out of the dozens of that one black and one white parent. It is again the recognition, legitimacy agreed to the lineage of white nonblack parent that one is otherwise mark in our vocabulary. I think it was a kind of comfort to when obama first came upon to speak of him as biracial. Is a white mother and he loved her, so he wont be a big note of that race al sharpton or such, but i mean stereotyped made unexceptional, he is just another black man. He always was, but there is a shift for some particularly among those that dont like him. So, marriage among her with africanamerican has this extra burden of operating to simultaneously proclaim the night of rambunctious this of our lineage. The language which we assign the benefits of marriage uses racial category too narrow or expand our perception of who is more like home, tells us who can be considered veritable or untouchable. Our habit of burying the relentlessly promiscuous nature of our american identity renders us blind to again, washington blames. The daughter of United States senator strong thurman, the one he can buy his familys black maid. Notice how she has no markup thurman in the name. She also let her life as a negro in an is an africanamerican attended an allblack college, but in her 70s when the paternity became publicized she was suddenly redesignated in the media as biracial. Even with that designation 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. Or take tiger woods and cements who are thought of as africanamerican or biracial, but rarely as asianamerican. There is something unspoken and indicative about african descent and its dangers in american society. This kind of vocabulary not to vote again the intimacy and untouchability, a site, smell of black bodies, the aesthetics of beauty and desire. Marriage is only one site where one can remark on this anxiety. The affected nature of rachel boundary in his perverse transgression are all of us sympathy and supervisors and associational contagions. After all, and anti belly and. The retribution catherine describes as being rained down on the left behind wives and children of freed soldiers extended not only to those wives and children, but to anyone deemed sympathetic. This was human since the that leaves its traces to this day from the use of the term to some of the interesting and empathize or both black clouds that her movement elizabeth unesco describes provision. It uses the speech of the subject, but only to mimic the nature from which it has been extricated to us to parity. That is why perverse discourse is always based on what appears to exclude the dark side to which it owes its existence. Handed to me is affective dimension that we have traced through all the cases in katherines wonderful and intriguing book. [applause]. [applause]. Hello. I have had some laryngitis, so bear with me. As has been stated thus far in different ways, Katherine Franke exciting and superbly written new book, wedlocked the preils of Marriage Equality looks at the role of marriage and liberation movements formally inflate people and for samesex couples. She asks what kind of freedom and what kind of equality does the capacity to marry actually mobilize. The book reveals that gaining rights can bring about disadvantage in other ways, particularly when the group in question does not have full equality. She states quote a close look at the history of marriage among africanamericans and the newly one rights of samesex couples illuminate how gamy getting marriage rights can come at the price of stigmatizing other groups in ways of life emerges outside. As a family sociologist and focuses on intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality. I was particularly interested in digging about how the ideas in this book play out with peoples lives today. Particularly those who are experiencing aftereffects of the Marriage Equality movement. Sociologist, we like to talk about we like to ask questions and talk to people and we like to use this data as one basis for evaluating information. What, if anything, do we gain by using marriage is a platform for reducing stigma associated with samesex desire . I would like to consider this question as relates to a population who stands at the juncture of the two seemingly desperate groups catherine uses in her argument. People who are black and gay. Throughout the text, the persistent overlap between the categories of fighting gay versus africanamerican and deviant, subtly strengthen race and class equality because each dimension of inequality is led legitimately by till i met with the other. Im going to respond to some of the arguments in catherines book by considering the analyses that were not present there, which are the experiences is africanamerican lgbt people and interracial relationships among blacks as they relate to marriage called the campaign. For the past 12 years or so i have been focused on the race and lgbt sexuality through such concepts as identity, motherhood, racial consciousness, racial Group Commitment and grace other aspects of life and meaning making among black same gender loving people. Icy marriage according as a public issue that has provided a vehicle through which sexual minorities who also had a membership in racial or ethnic or cultural category can develop a conversation about their sexuality with family members and others in their committee. The use of Marriage Equality as a representation of lgbt rights have not help move rights in the privates beer as a behavior that individuals act out in secret and undercover of shame or secondary status to one that initiates a public openness about who members of these identity groups are and provides a voice around those who have multiple identity statuses. There are other issues that are important to sexual Minority Party wishes that we could have used in this campaign. Lgbt homelessness and foster youth, they seem challenges. We couldve used employment employment this clinician. That is another relevant topic. Access to quality healthcare is also an important issue. So, why marriage . Catherine argues in the minds of Larger Society quote marriage has been in largely remains a kind of test at the Africanamerican Community is deemed as feeling. 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 at succeeding at marriage and ignores the advantages of black again in society or the special status that married people of any race or ethnicity receive. It removes any agency or self empowerment from africanamericans finally presenting the ways that some groups apologize all blacks are careless status. I know this was not the intention. I know that intention was to call awareness to the Structural Racism that vilified as africanamericans. A vilification that they are we cannot seem to get away from no matter what our actual behaviors are and i do think that she does present argument also in the book. So, i find that africanamerican groups in particular the topic of marriage is particularly relevant as a point of entry into discussions of lgbt and indian acceptance in that it serves as a physical response to the stigma that is often associated with a wider range of Family Structure among blacks. The stereotypes of men who fail to hold up to their responsibilities. The stereotypes of black women as sexual permissive. Being to choose single motherhood over a stable union. Weddington black community civilize the attempt of a couple to conform to notions of perspective only. To show to their families and others in society that they defy these negative stereotypes and that they can create the stable families. So, marriage offers the conventional and some might say conformist presentation of self to the images of gay counterculture. But because of the racialized concepts in which samesex marriage among africanamericans is taking place, for that community it becomes a radical and transformative act. Ive spoken with couples who say that having a wedding and removing the ability of their parents to engage and dont ask dont tell with themselves and their partner, by drawing a line in the sand, they are risking rejection of disappointment from adult siblings who favor uncle. Wedding like the pastor of the church grew up in no affirmatively, yes, i have taken on this lifestyle and they will openly live within and many with a religious Wedding Service actually had the audacity to enter got to recognize them as the union. So anyone who has any knowledge of black religious communities can see the radical nature of this supposedly conformist behavior. I am not trying to take away from the beautiful and persuasive arguments that kathryn makes an wedlocked regarding this critical view 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 its important ideological position in the minds and experiences of some a 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 the capacity to marry might actually mobilize. Wedlocked also critiques the lgbt movement that characterize much of the campaign to cooley among the time of the 2008 political debates. Between the 2008 election in the 2013th Supreme Court decision i witnessed a shift in the lgbt organization to try to sell the country and Marriage Equality. My wife and i, elaine, we were married in 2012 and shortly after new york recognize samesex unions and we were one of those crazy couples that got married a lot. We got married three times that your. We have been married 10 years, so i guess we had to go all out when we finally decided to commit to it and was our wedding pictures were published we work approach by the freedom to marry campaign and through that experience i saw a 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 Region of the country, latina women, africanamerican men and even conservative religious couples and as a result of that work several Different Things happen for us. We were on the cover of black enterprise magazine, a rather conservative business magazine for black businessmen to people. So, i say this as a site to show the waves and movement recognize and try to recognize private some of its prior mistakes in the images were not just use in lgbt organizations, but other groups. Wedlocked argues that marriage for samesex couples reproduces a new form of respectability so youre in for a many sectors of the Gay Community. She says removing the marriage removes the badge of inferiority for whites in a way that it does not and cannot do for blacks because of race. While i agree, i also see importing class differences in the extent to which a Blacks Experience the disadvantage, so in some ways the brook crosses an imaginary line when it only depicts marriage as quote a sigh of failure and dysfunction for many africanamericans. I see where middle and upper middle class africanamericans are able to benefit from many of the advantages and legitimacy that marriage brings. Their class status grants of certain privileges and this is true even in religious communities. I recently interviewed an africanamerican gay man who lives in a large Southern City with his husband and two adopted children. He was raised in a holiness to costal church, which is a conservative denomination. He has a graduate degree in works for a biotech of a. His husband is a pastor of a church that keeps traditional pentecostal beliefs, but is welcoming to everyone including lgbt people. They live in a grand house. Together they bring in sixfigure income and i like to say its a sixfigure income that does not start with a one or two. So, when asked how he and his family were faring in this conservative statement south, heat of his only experience with this enormous amount of love and support even from those who quote might not support the lgbt community. He said when he walked round with his daughter in a baby carrier even when he was with his husband in the south am a black people have said to him that really have they seen black man so actively involved in raising their young children. They say this is not the norm in their experience. So, here the Comparison Group for the community has not been a heterosexual couple, meaning are the children were sought being raised by gay men in sit of men and women. Look at these men. Are present and involved in the childrens lives and thats a good thing and they appear very welloff and isnt that great for the children as well . This is one area where racial context in the communities experience around lack families sent up a dynamic that may not have even be considers in the discussion about raising children. It was also clear his money was able to back his family out of the negative experiences that others report. Although, wedlocked argues africanamericans have not been able to use marriage to quote rebrand blackness in the way that sanitizes race stereotypes. Is black couple has been able to at least silence or protect themselves from the harm affiliated by the stereotypes. I can think of other heterosexual black couples with similar situated that use this status, his income, his education to shield themselves, but i will say again, institutional racism rears its head from time to time and interjects itself into their lives. They cannot escape that. Their money cannot escape that racism. I suspect this truth is at the heart of kathryn target. But, it appears as though the drag of two subordinated statuses based integration and Sexual Orientation this not inspected their lives on a daily basis. So what is lgbt communities who are africanamerican say that Marriage Equality at this vehicle to liberation . Welcome i see two primary responses. This past Spring Research of a africanamerican study had a panel in harlem about the meaning of Marriage Equality for africanamericans and Darnell Moore was on that panel and for those of you that dont know darnell, hes a brilliant African American writer and activist who does many things including advocating for lgbt at youth in newark. He said he came from a lowincome family or people did not marry. Women raised children with help of their mothers and sisters. The relationship they had with men were for different reasons. They were mainly worried about how to survive. So, marriage was not a priority. And influenced his lukewarm feeling for marriage. He said there whether pressing needs in the population that he works with like having a safe place to live in those kind of things. So, for his remarks i say that this focus on Marriage Equality may not be useful to take lily to those who are on partnered or socioeconomically disadvantaged, so in this case kathryns argument is right here in in that Marriage Equality cannot be the only story that movement brings to disenfranchise communities. They have to also show they care about and realize the importance of other issues, breadandbutter issues, poverty, unemployment, racial profiling, inadequate services. But other black lgbt leaders have look past specific examples of Marriage Equality and used it as a tool to promote greater understanding and acceptance into racially within the group. So, try to think of how to maintain and build relationships and how to stand proud and openly express this gay identity that simultaneous with the racial identity. So, when expressed goal for the work is to challenge and conquer their own homophobia. In addition to working to change the minds of the racial group they want to build self acceptance of their own Sexual Orientation by the stigmatizing and transforming the meaning of gay sexuality. My last comment, im just about i want to say the potential theres a potential that i see for samesex couples to radicalize marriage. Because of the lax of differences between partners and the great quality that comes from it. There are differences that exist in gender presentation, but those do not translate to gender inequality. The gender inequality that a century of sociological register literature has found his heterosexual relationships and other social institutions since they put some women may dress a boyish fashion, but they lack of mens institutional power and do not and cannot assume masculinity. Instead couples are making decisions on how to leave their lives based on other factors besides sex and at the Power Distribution in the relationship not based on gender and not even based in who has the great act of a power. So, i see the potential for these relationships that create Something Different within the state of marriage and i say this even while agreeing with wedlockeds assertion that the institution of marriage was and still is structured around gender roles and inequality. My time is up, so i will stop your. , what to say that despite my sociological interpretation, i really really enjoyed this book and i enjoyed the arguments that i have had with folks, but i also enjoy the premise, the very premise the pitfalls to using the lawn this way. So, i appreciate that and i thank you for your time,. [applause]. Good afternoon, everyone. I apologize in advance for my voice. I dont know if i have caught what mignon moore has, but im going to give it a go. I have always thought that the best scholarly work is scholarly work whose inquiry of analysis and argument give rise to more questions than author of the work can possibly undertake to address her answer. There is a lots to say about this wonderful book. I do hope that we have a chance for a more extended conversation than our 90 minutes or so that we have set aside this afternoon will allow, so in that spirit i went to use my allotted time to say a bit about four panels that i think would make a wonderful Conference Program on this extraordinary book by my dear colleague, Katherine Franke. The first panel would be a panel and method. And it is suggested to me by this formulation, a formulation which we see in a number of places in the book, but i will quote here. Catherine writes at one point that the books central conceit associates to eras and to 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 to methods. Wedlocked brings together the preoccupation and procedures of two critical perspectives, one Critical Race Theory and the second queer legal theory. In a kind of hybrid that style whose modes of inquiry and analysis challenge that assumptive structure of approaches that take race, sex and sexuality and gender, i might add, i separate identities and as i led experiences. I have always liked ray charles image of the categorical message nation of sex and sexuality and gender and race and ethnicity as a way of trying to understand this analytic mythological. Suggested code terminate and enmeshed in ways that on optic, which is rooted in interest sexuality, that you be a i did a two or more separate ideas meets in up to take their place, i think, only helps us partially apprehend. Catherine is calling instead for a connection analysis. She calls it a a sensitive, following edward and its an analysis that is alert to similarities and differences. To convergence and divergence. To continuity and discontinuity. For frankie, the obvious fact that race and sexuality ought not as some would have us believe preclude a careful investigation of both race and sexuality and of how they come to be what they are in part precisely through the difference. So, this is the old poststructuralist identity and difference. The book gives us a very concrete on the ground and extended collaboration of the importance of holding onto both of the chains that wants. 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. Wedlocked reminds us that this attention to identity as they are shaped and as they take shape in it through difference is a crucial resource for making sense of what civil marriage means. And of the work it does in the current conjuncture for gay and lesbian people as well as for people of color, whatever their gender or sexuality. Conceptually, it means, i think, tracking the movements and manifestations here with respect to the law in politics of marriage and race and sexuality. And sexuality as race. Sexuality as race, we might say, i have said that. Race is a sexualized. Sexuality is a technology of racial power and race is this technology of sexual power. As we know, for example, for the work on the idea of sexual racism. 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 on indoor mislead valued 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 side. She does it through this idea of aggregation. Shes calling in effect one might say where an aggregation of race and sexuality, which recalls in a kind of reverse mirror image and argument in her earlier work, against the disaggregation of and gender. So, this attention to and her delights in the thought experiments that is possible when one engages in a kind of Free Association historically informed to be sure, but a free historic age the story nation of and gender offers us a rich analytic tool for tracking the shifting and fluid movement of marriage law across multiple multiple dimensions. The book thinks and for actual terms one might say about the condensations, combinations and recombination, that dynamic of fluid character, the mix mobile character of marriage law. A future marriage law that is central to the story she tells both about africanamericans in the posterior bellum period and gay men and women, so this allows us to see the normatively white character of the Marriage Equality movements even when the argument at least in legal terms werent explicit. And that heteronormative it he, a fancy word that i will use with a shout out to its use of in the season in empire last vaccine that all marriage quality law, my Central Point here is that wedlock stages encounter if you will of crt and queer legal theory that allows us to understand in the words of my friend, the places where race no longer talks about race precisely and paradoxically by talking about it or Something Else and elsewhere. Whats might race help us think about that race does not name, but to which it is nonetheless connected . In my own work i suggested one of the things race helps us think about is sexuality. Catherine shows us in wedlocked that one of the things think about gay and lesbian sexuality helps us think about indeed demands that we think about is race. What might be called racesex or sex race. An infusion that i think represents an important insight about how to understand this moments in the history of Marriage Equality law and politics. The second panel would be a panel about law, the structure feelings. It would focus on those aspects of Marriage Equality debate, which are about the emotional and sensitive. About physical and psychic, if you will bodys. The term bodies is central for me. Catherine at one moment in the book talks about going through these archives in the south and defining finding locks of hair 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 could not sign their name, but wrote acts left when they were writing to the government seeking war widow benefits. This attention to structures of feelings to use Raymond Williams 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 catherine makes, which i think is absolutely crucial. She asks than once im how it is writes bearing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the rights they bear. She framed this afternoon in her own remarks as the moral lessons to be careful what you wish for. How is it that these subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the race they bear part shaped in the way they 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 catherine, this is a paradox. I think its important as 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 lock . What was the consideration that led gay men and lesbians to entry in to what might be called a marriage contract . Not just with one another, but into a marriage contract with the state. Catherine suggested getting the rights of marriage has marked an emancipation from the burden of social objection for gays and lesbians. First, in that the marriage license marks a kind of social belonging and recognition of equivalents and a second, because it serves as a kind of credential that pouches for the legitimacy and quality of a couples relationship. Over and above these features of marriage that make it something gay men and lesbians have come to want our other non utilitarian dimensions that can 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, but the rights to marry the law. To marry the state. What Marriage Equality law has done, catherine said, is to radically refigured the meaning of homosexuality by re crafting gayness around status or stable identity rather than sexual acts, so we have seen opposition here between identity, Sexual Identity and sexual acts. The law as men of my generation used to say, the law becomes a kind of top. We want to be covered by the law. My generation says top and bottomment younger people say dumb and sub. This is going to play wonderfully on cspan. But i think what animates this is an imagined desire to be topped by the law, which has lived in the bodies of gay men and lesbians but which exceeds an instrumental account of a material benefit to major. Im struck by how quickly the argument that marriage confers 1100 or so benefitses that day men and lesbians are not getting. Gave way to an argument about the importance in schwarzenegger vs. Terry of feeling married, feeling in my body that i am married. Now, i call it sex law because i believe that this yearning to feel married is the sight of a certain kind of embodied pleasure. So, im lining up here, im a good bodies and pleasure. So that even though marriage law is in many ways made possible bay kind of desexualizing move, its a sight for a kind of afterlife and has to do with desire and pleasure and bodies at the level of our collective ideological imagination. Right . So, its a fantasy. But the economy, if you will, of marriage law, and the comparative historical and critical account that catherine gives us of the africanamerican and lbgt campaign for Marriage Equality, think would gain a lot by really plumbing and engaming in an extended analysis, some of it might be ethnographic of the expressive and affective dimensions of the 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, on the ways in which the law is not only not always about the instrument for practical business of regulation and institutional design but also about emotion, imagination, and what Raymond Williams has called the structures of feeling that underwrite this body of law and policy. This is particularly important to keep in mind for Cultural Studies approach that looks at law, here the law of marriage, as a cultural form. So, by talking about bodies, pleasures, desire, i think we need to not lose sight of the ways in which theres an erotic at work in this area of the law, and in this marriage contract which im suggesting the state is inviting us to join. Theres a lot more to be said about that but ill leave the subject since marian is looking at me anxiously. Two more panels. I have two more panels. This is a point at which im thinking of the opera lulu, which i saw last night, and the ways in which the composer of the opera does a really brilliant job of focusing on the compulsory character of marriages, moment where lulu says i think its lost or next to last husband he says thats why i married you, and lulu says you didnt marry me, and her husband says, then what did i do . And lulu says, i married you. So, thinking about this to what extent has the state married us . Even as it is inviting to us think that we are acting through an autonomy and an agency, which is about selfordering. I think thats an important area for further investigation. The third panel, very briefly, is going to be panel on marriage and what i like to call the roots of respectability, the ways in which marriage laws are species of more regulation. One can compare usefully here the parallel convergence and divergent histories of racial respectability and homosexual respectability and the investment, alternately, and racial reputation and moral reputation. The ideas of maturity, the civilizing process that marriage represents, but the point i would want to make here is that the reproductive postgay virtually sexual family, since the gay, lesbian family, raises children, and reproduces without procreation, it couldnt be more respectable, right . How to have children without sex. That the story of the new post gay, post sexual family. What are the wages of respectability . Very quickly, one, respectability is a regime of selfsurveillance, the story that katherines tell about how blacks reported other blacks who then got caught up in the machinery of the criminal law once marriage had been conferred and they violated the law of marriage. Is a story about community selfsurveillance. Two. Respectability is a kind of death sentence, i might say. The respectability politic odd Marriage Equality represent a kind of death sentence for 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 that aspect of it is an invitation to see Marriage Equality as a response or as an effort to banish or erase the twin stigmas of aids and the age of aids and criminalization, that was in the Supreme Court struck down in lawrence vs. Texas. And it has, as catherine notes, historical antecedents of good blacks policing bad blacks, as she puts it, and i think were going to see what she called the afterlife of homophobia continue to play itself out in this kind after selfsurveillance and in, for example, the almost utter absence of interest in the gay and Lesbian Community to a whole range of issues that affect the lives of gay men and lesbianssuch as mass incarceration, the Death Penalty and the like. Fourth and finally, i would like too see a panel at the conference on wedlock, on marriage law and sexual democracy or the deferral of sexual democracy about marriage law could be more presis and neoliberal sexual politicsful katherine writes, its a curious thing to pursue a civil rights strategy that nests a fuller form of public citizenship within marriage, distinctly private domain. I think its curious but it is completely point the emerging logic of neoliberal family law to the extent that Marriage Equality law is a species or branch of neoliberal family law. By privatizing sexual politics, and by socializing that private privilege through the stigma that attaches to nonnormative intimate associations in the gay and Lesbian Community, the beneficiaries of Marriage Equality law are going to profit from the extension by the state of a legitimacy to their relationship which effectively shuts down a struggle which i certainly have all my adult life seen myself to be part of, and another way to put it is to say that Marriage Equality dedemocratizes politics for the netsing a freedom struggle which in frederick jameissons terms places the question of pleasure as a political issue, squarely on the public agenda, in a claim for formal legal equality. Of privatized formal legal equality. Thus by nesting the freedom school, for a human right to be different and for a right to sexual pleasure within a movement for marriage rights, Marriage Equality effectively crowds out in catherines image, certain form of democratic invention, 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, really, to take the measure of, but i am pleased and as proud as punch that my colleague, catherine frankies book, has given us a tool kit for thinking through some of the difficult and intractable problems and enormous challenges 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] i think well take time now to discuss these wonderful the book and these responses. I think if anybody everybody are everybodys fantasy to have such different and rich responses to anything that one has just published 0, i think its a tribute to this wonderful book, and to our speakers, catherine, would you like to respond to any of the questions before we open it up . Um, i actually would rather hear questions and then work my responses into what seems like answers to your questions. The floor is open. Yes. Thank you for tv vy work you have done. I coverage Marriage Equality and now im transitioning to become an academic and your work has been very help inflame thinking things through, particularly the work out of ucla. I wanted to ask you, professor thomas briefly brought up one word on my mind and you talk aids, which is a really gig way to think big way to think about what Marriage Equality has taken us away from and after the era of actup, why did Marriage Equality become the issue that now has a lot of gay people saying, we have full equality, at the same time the epidemic has become really in the realm of criminal black sexuality or allowed to be that way. Ive seen that a lot in the state of missouri where i have been doing my research in their strict hiv criminalization laws, ive been following one case, and that gay people i find have really nonno concept is, a few days before mike brown was killed there war an hiv activist that i work with, they were at the department doing something, a microsite of hiv. You dont see hiv come to disability in that way but theyre related elm wonder if you book has offer if you have thought about this and have seen hiv in a role why the movements have become so different. Say a little bit and then defer to my colleagues for their thoughts. I was in hiv discrimination law before an academic, so i spent a lot of time working on hiv relate issues before we had the term aids to describe it. In the 1980s. And so much of that work both on the professional and on the personal level, about thinking about care and who we cared for, and who we should care for, and we thought kinship, very broadly, then, because of the discrimination that people who are hiv positive were experiencing from their families of origin, sometimes their own partners were dying also, and so we saw each other as 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 state sponsored violence against people who are hiv positive. So the goal from that period to go from that period of sex being in gay sex which is really womens sexuality was invisible so it was gay men sex as being toxic, and a threat, not to mention perverse and deviant, and would kill you, to what we see now, where we legally at least the story were told in the Marriage Equality movement, that the fantasy is we only owe legal and other responsibilities to the people we marry, and not to the Larger Community of people that we previously saw as kin, and also that sex is somehow sanitized within the institution of marriage and no longer a threat. I thought what kendall said about the respectability of having children without sex was delightful. Were told a very different story and what i find so remarkable and reflect on in the book quite a bit is how successful that rebranding has been, both as a story we tell the outside world, but also a story we told ourself are yours about who we are and who our families are and who and how we should love one another. And theres something enormously lost, i think, in that new storytelling, and in one of the chapters where i talk about the afterlight of homophobia, i someone eye ran include but not entirely celebrate Anthony Weiner as the new queer majors who loves sex, lots of, and publicly, and they 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 different partners, people you didnt know necessarily, and how to both have sex and take care of yourself and your partners. But we were speechless, really, the face of Anthony Weiner. So i think aids lurks as kendall mentioned as a kind of fatility, both literally and figuratively, of the Marriage Equality movement, that we dont speak it anymore and its at our peril, certainly. Well collect a couple of questions and then but could you please just have a question and not a lengthy comment. Yes. Im looking forward to reading the book. Katherine, thank you so much. I can clearly see what youre talking about in terms of the strategy, the safe strategy taken and then the road not taken. So i guess my question is, in terms of legal strategy and marriage inequality, what does what would 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 . Two quick things to say about that. We worked very hard on domestic partnership, civil unions, laws, forms of recognition so that we had a range of ways to perhaps create some legal or Financial Security for our nonmarital relationships, and what was nice about domestic partnerships and civil unions is that they allowed you some room to innovate, and didnt invite the state into setting the terms 0 of whatot relationship was. And by and large the Gay Community has dropped defending those alternative institutions, and in fact part of their legal strategy was to vilify them as secondclass status in order to win marriage rights, and i dont think we needed to say nat order to say the state refusing to recognize samesex couples as entitled to marriage is a constitutional problem. We could have both. So, walking and chewing gum was thing something that we didnt do and 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 led the argument, the claim, with something that looked more like equality on the level of excluding samesex couples from marriage is a form of state sponsored homophobia or heterosexism or hatred towards gay people, u. S. Loving verse virginia the Supreme Court said that laws that dont criminalize white people who marry people of a different sex is a form of white supremacy. A powerful claim, a powerful argument from the Supreme Court we have never heard again. But we could have borrowed the power of what the law does and what motivates the law in the Marriage Equality fight but we didnt in instead we made a claim that some samesex couples should be messed blessed by the institution of marriage and that was an appeal to Justice Kennedy whose middle name is dignity. I saw something online today that said maybe his take on dignity will also help the abortion cases before the court this term. I think absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think theres something undying any identified about getting pregnant and wanting to terminate that pregnancy, or to have the power yourself to make that decision that very different from the kind of claims that were made or the arguments made in the Marriage Equality cases. But here i am answering the questions and you wanted to accumulate a few. Thats okay. Nobody had their hand up. We have time for maybe well collect three questions and then do some final remarks. Thanks much so far we have limit ordinary commentary to domestic politics and the Marriage Equality movement in the west or the u. S. , but know that Marriage Equality has been globalized and traps nationallallized due to the specter of samesex marriage and the prohibition bill in nigeria, which relates to respectability politics. The u. S. State Department Said Asylum Seekers in the u. S. Can aplow to have their partner toms could the u. S. Only if they had not been able to get married anywhere native countries, only if they had been together and not been able to get married. Im curious if you can comment how the Marriage Equality Movement Affects respectability and disposability of bodies. Thats a quit question. I think if you accept the proposition, which i hope you will, that the gains of major equal, not just the United States but globally, have been taking place within the shadow of neoliberal capitalism, and the privatization of dependency that the repudiation of the social welfare state, not that we ever had one here but that 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 that as a strategy, as a regulatory strategy, its about the distribution of these now privatized dependent sees dep den sis so if yaw cant get married in the cup from which your partner comes well allow you get married here. Its a question really of about the adaptation of this now totally privatized right to be dependent through the institution of marriage, and this relates to the question of professor russell. I was involved in 2006, i believe, with a group of activists from a variety of different parts of civil society, who produced a document over the course of a weekend called, beyond gay marriage. And the goal there was to try to defend not only the plural forms of kinship and intimate associationed that gay men and lesbians and queers developed in the absence of a right to civil marriage and tools be true to the larger vision of the gay lesbian struggle as a struggle for sexual liberation. I would headed in any formal remarks for all people. Thats why the question about sexual democracy at large, and so i think the challenge at the level of its broad 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 benefits should be contingent on and hinge on whether or not youre married. That relationship of dependency ought to be governed by what our former colleague, Martha Fineman called the sexual family. That is the root of the problem, but its perfectly consistent with the logic of neoliberal capital and the contract into which those persons who get married whatever their sexual ore yep attention, belong. Alongside that, though, were also seeing what i think might be called as the emergence of a new Sexual Orientation. You have homonorm different and heterosexual normativity. And normal with marital status of whether youre gay or lesbian or heterosexual. I think 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 its a difficult but important question that you ask, but we have to see the connections between the national, the transnational, and Global Capital under neoliberal jim. If i can add one thing. One chapter in the book, in the historical section, talks about why northern soldiers or missionaries or others were forcing fairly newly freed people to marry and it was explicitly in order to privatize dependency. They explicitly said we dont want to pay for these poor women and children. Wed 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. Its just Martha Fineman all the way down in the work she has done, and thinking dependency and the privatization of it into the family. We dont say it as explicitly today but they said it honestly then, and i think theres a lesson in that comparison. One other thing i want to mention about that dependency is that one of the last chapter in the book looks at the gendering of samesex couples through the process of divorce, and what judges are doing in divorce court, nor family court, when samesex couples come to them to divorce, are turning lesbians into husbands and gay men into wives, in many contexts, because all those judges know are heterosexual relationships, by law theyve never had samesex couples before them. And the rules of divorce assume gender inequality, to echo something that was said earlier, and the courts dont know how to see families that think responsibility and dependency differently than a deeply gendered form. 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 a divorce is shocking to some samesex couples who thought they had a different deal than what marriage law entails. And so the one partner becomes the husband, and the other partner becomes the wife because thats all that those courts know how those judges know how to render legible to them exthen you get in slots and divorce law does it work. Its a neoliberal idea of the family that is, i think well see whether were able to blow that institution up. I dont know. I hope youre right. Were out of time. Can we take a few more minutes or lets people willing to we have a reception, book sales. One more question. One more question. Yes. You mentioned at the beginning of the talk [inaudible] i think keep going. Just back away from the mic. You mentioned discipline and punishment with regard to the way that marriage is operated as what night be seen as a normalizing judgment, and normalizes a legitimate subject into the realm of cultural and legal eligibility, so then the state wield power more effectively and also provide bodies that operate more efficiently and with more aptitude than what in your formulation of marriage does Marriage Equality or marriage itself the structure seek to amplify in terms of the capacity of the subject. Thats such a sophisticated question. I dont want to dominate too much anymore i already have. Anybody else . Well, would agree with some of the comments of professor thomas that we have a neoliberal economic project at stake, that many of the advocate of samesex marriage are completely signed up for. They want access to the kinds of privileges and benefits that get distributed, rightly or wrongly but distributed through the institution of marriage. I we had universal or sing are Payer Health Care wouldnt matter that you were married to someone with a good job and had health insurance. If we had real pension reports real retirement is wouldnt matter whether you could inherit your partners social security, et cetera, et cetera. So, i do think that there is a larger project at stake here that surrendering to the discipline of marriage rather unthinkingly collaborates with. That said, you have given me the opportunity to tell you about the appendix to the book, which is a program a progressive call of action for married qeers. Those, and those who are married because youre kind of holding your nose because your lawyer or your account or others said youre an idiot not to do it. You can still be a good person in my view, and i give you eightpoint agenda for how to remain faithful to a critique of neoliberalism, how not to collaborate in the otherring of unmarried people, and how to think responsibilities to one another more broadly than the neoliberal model certainly anticipates and requires. So, turn to page 233. Turn this into fliers you will put around your workplaces and dorms, but i have a manifesto for how you can marry and still be a progressive person and you will not go to hell necessarily. Have your cake and eat it, too. Not feel like a hypocrite. I dont know if we have cake but we have wine and cheese, and in anticipation of the conference, id like to thank you all ask thank you all for coming. [applause] please stay, buy the book, katherine will sign it for you. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2. This weekend were visiting anna home, california to talk with local authors and two of the cities literary site with the help of our local cable partner, time warner. Next we speak with Author Jennifer keene, who looks at how world war i changed the way veterans are treated. The First World War really established how america went to wash in the 20th century, so all these components that we sort of naturally assume are part of serving in the military, mass military, melting pot experience, something controlled by the government, something that takes american soldiers overseas, all of those things, that starts in the First World War. So, what the United States army does well and what it does wrong, it carries the lessons forward. Dough buoys is a knickname given to american soldiers in the First World War. Were think neglect citizen soldiers, men who were conscripted to fight for their duration of the bar and were distinguishing them from regular Army Soldiers for whom this was a profession. In the First World War of dough buoys came from all parts of the United States, because to the First World War is the first time that we conscript a mass army from the very beginning of a conflict. So wed also had drafts before in the past but they had come in the middle of a conflict, and the civil war when voluntary lenment dropped off. The First World War, we enact the draft right from the very beginning, a short window of opportunity to volunteer, and the army, and that closes off, and so what that means is 72 of the armis going to be conscripted and they have to spread the period out equally throughout the United States. Every state has a quota, and the idea this really is a mens army that represents the american population. So there were a few reasons america decided to race the army different any in the First World War. The fi r