As much as Wesleyan houses some of the greatest scholars in the country, sometimes a student needs to ask a question that, well, isn’t so academically oriented. In this weekly column, professors will answer any non-academic question posed by a member of the Wesleyan student body, from sex to drugs to rock ’n’ roll. This week, we asked Associate Professor of History Claire Potter.
Question: Given past and current sentiments surrounding gay marriage, do you think it will ever be legalized in this country? Why or why not?
Answer: I do think gay marriage will be legalized in the United States, but not because it delivers equality to gay and lesbian people, although that is one way of understanding marriage as a matter of one’s legal status. Marriage itself does not necessarily make one set of people equal to another in a society characterized by class, racial, gender, age, physical and national inequalities.
For example, although marriage conveys rights to a spouse that are often material (health care, rights of survivorship, citizenship, community property, and legal relationships to children adopted during the marriage are good examples), these are “rights” that only people who already have property, full citizenship or high-status employment can convey at all. Marriage will do nothing to improve the status of homeless, unskilled, migrant or under- or unemployed LGBTQ people: the majority of us in other words. For example, marriage will not help queer people in relationships where neither partner has access to health insurance acquire that access.
But gay marriage will be legalized eventually because marriage itself is an extraordinarily conservative institution, and a method by which the state has limited the distribution of civil rights and economic privileges over time to those citizens who agree explicitly or implicitly to derive partial economic and social support from a nuclear family structure. That marriage is also perceived by many people, straights and queers, as a more “moral” status is in fact a way of restating the previous sentence, in which morality is constituted by independence, or the appearance of not being dependent, on public welfare structures. Neoliberalism, as well as conservatism, works on this principle, and has reshaped our society—and the world—to respond to an economic vision that valorizes independence, rather than interdependence.
And gay marriage will not be legalized because it is a particularly successful institution, because it offers principles for living a life that are easy to adhere to, or because it is comprised of principles that most people truly understand or agree to. As my colleague Lisa Duggan once said in conversation, after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, “If they love gay marriage now, they’ll love gay divorce.” Rather, marriage is a symbolic realm that stands in for equal rights, so that those rights need not, in the end, be addressed through state redistribution of resources. Marriage, in other words, is not just a romance between two people, as many gay and lesbian advocates portray it: it is a social romance about what constitutes a well-ordered, and orderly, society.
Need to ask a professor? Send submissions to argus@wesleyan.edu.
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