Normal and normaller. Beyond gay marriage

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 119-171

  Warner, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0344808337     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-2-119     Document Type: Article

References (155)

1. I am arguing not against theory but against a procedure of decontextualization that for many people defines theory. My own understanding of theory is discussed in Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" PMLA 110 (1995): 343-49;
2. in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
3. in Chicago Cultural Studies Group, "Critical Multiculturalism," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 114-39.
4. The quotation is from Jesse Helms, speech delivered on the Senate floor in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, in Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate, ed. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1997), 22;
5. see also Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Against Gay Marriage" in Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage, 1997), 57-60.
6. Evan Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold: Equal Marriage Rights for Lesbians and Gay Men and the Intra-Community Critique," New York University Review of Law and Social Change 21 (1994): 611.
7. See also Wolfson, "Why We Should Fight for the Freedom to Marry," Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity 1 (1996), 43-72.
8. Paula Ettelbrick, "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?" Out/Look 6 (1989),
9. rpt. in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 118-24;
10. Tom Stoddard, "Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry," Out/Look 6 (1989),
11. rpt. in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook in Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 753-57.
12. Quoted in Donn Teal, The Gay Militants (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 284.
13. See, e.g., the excellent collection of historical documents assembled by Blasius and Phelan, We Are Everywhere, esp. Carl Wittman, "A Gay Manifesto" (1969), 380-88;
14. Martha Shelley, "Gay Is Good" (1970), 391-93;
15. "Statement of the Male Homosexual Workshop" and "Demands of the Lesbian Workshop," both from a conference sponsored by the Black Panthers (1970), 402-4;
16. the interview "Questions for Michel Foucault" (1978), 454-59;
17. Michael Denneny, "Gay Politics: Sixteen Propositions" (1981), 485-97.
18. To this list might be added most of the essays in Karla Jay and Allen Young, eds., Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (1972; rpt. New York: New York University Press, 1992);
19. such classic theoretical works as Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (1984; rpt. London: Pandora, 1992), 267-319.
20. William Eskridge, The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1996), 54.
21. This distinction between formal and substantive justice derives from the critique of liberal jurisprudence most commonly associated with critical legal studies but arguable on pragmatist grounds as well and further developed recently by feminist and critical race theory. The basic concepts are laid out in Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (New York: Free, 1976);
22. Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
23. For more recent examples see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990);
24. Kimberlè Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New, 1995).
25. Baehr treats the ban on same-sex marriage as a question of sex discrimination under Hawaii's equal protection clause (even for male-male marriage). The issue is reduced to the formal or procedural one of whether classification on the basis of sex is admissible. What we would call heteronormativity is explicitly rejected as an issue. "Parties to a same-sex marriage," the court notes, "could theoretically be either homosexuals or heterosexuals." The sexual orientation of the plaintiffs, and all other questions of normativity and power, are deemed irrelevant.
26. Wolfson implies such an argument in "Crossing the Threshold," 591-608.
27. But he attempts to show that a campaign for marriage does not necessarily prevent the pursuit of further goals; he does not argue that it must be seen as a step in a larger struggle. He has consistently claimed that marriage is a right in and of itself and that therefore no program of change is required to justify the demand for it. Wolfson's essay is an extended rebuttal of Nancy Polikoff, "We Will Get What We Ask For: Why Legalizing Gay and Lesbian Marriage Will Not 'Dismantle the Legal Structure of Gender in Every Marriage,'" Virginia Law Review 79 (1993): 1535-50.
28. Other significant works in the debate include Mark Strasser, Legally Wed: Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
29. Anthony C. Infanti, "Baehr v. Lewin: A Step in the Right Direction for Gay Rights?" Law and Sexuality 4 (1994): 1-34;
30. Suzanne Sherman, ed., Lesbian and Gay Marriage: Private Commitments, Public Ceremonies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
31. Baird and Rosenbaum, Same-Sex Marriage, 10-11.
32. Sullivan notes in passing that "academic 'queer theorists' remain deeply suspicious of marriage" (Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 117). In over four hundred pages of debate about marriage, this is the only description of any argument deriving from queer theory or from more general traditions of critical theory, and Sullivan discredits it with quotation marks.
33. Eskridge also discusses Polikoff, "We Will Gel What We Ask For" (Case for Same-Sex Marriage, passim).
34. Works less often discussed include Steven K. Homer, "Against Marriage," Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994), 505-16;
35. Richard Goldstein, "The Great Gay Marriage Debate," Village Voice, 9 January 1996.
36. Important contexts for the rise of the marriage debate in the movement are described by Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Anchor, 1995).
37. Ettelbrick, "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?" 123.
38. A fuller reprinting can be found in Blasius and Phelan, We Are Everywhere, 757-61.
39. Eskridge, Case for Same-Sex Marriage, 82.
40. Eskridge, Case for Same-Sex Marriage, Ibid., 57.
41. The main features of AIDS politics summarized in this paragraph are best articulated in Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).
42. See also Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990);
43. Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996);
44. and Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay, 1990).
45. Kerry Lobel, press release announcing the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's support of gay marriage; Stoddard, "Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry," (1995), 756.
46. On the "zone of privacy" in constitutional law after Bowers v. Hardwick see Kendall Thomas, "Beyond the Privacy Principle," Columbia Law Review 92 (1992): 1359-1516.
47. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 582-83.
48. Mary C. Dunlap, "The Lesbian and Gay Marriage Debate: A Microcosm of Our Hopes and Troubles in the Nineties," Law and Sexuality 1 (1991): 90. Dunlap also sees marriage as an essential consequence of the value of privacy, apparently not noticing that being unmarried is the ground on which courts can and will continue to refuse protection of privacy for sexual acts. Likewise, she sees marriage as the expression of the value of autonomy - but not for the unmarried, whose autonomy becomes more and more fictitious as benefits and status accrue to marriage.
49. Jonathan Rauch, "For Better or Worse?" New Republic, 6 May 1996,
50. rpt. in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 180.
51. Gabriel Rotello, "Creating a New Gay Culture: Balancing Fidelity and Freedom," Nation, 21 April 1997, 11-16.
52. See also Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York: Dutton, 1997), 15.
53. Michael Warner, "Media Gays: A New Stone Wall," Nation, 14 July 1997, 15-19,
54. and subsequent letters. There have been many critiques of Rotello's book. See esp. Mark Schoofs, "The Law of Desire," Village Voice, 15 April 1997;
55. Joshua Oppenheimer, review in Gay Community News 23 (1997): 40-45;
56. Oppenheimer, "'Sexual Ecology' = Sexual Apartheid," Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 5 (1998): 15-18;
57. and Jim Eigo, "The Monogamy Code," in Sex Panic! (New York: Sex Panic! 1997), 15-21.
58. Rotello, "Creating a New Gay Culture."
59. See Jonathan Rauch, "A Pro-Gay, Pro-Family Policy," Wall Street Journal, 29 November 1994;
60. Andrew Sullivan, "Here Comes the Groom," New Republic, 28 August 1989;
61. David Mastro, "Gay Marriage: Promoting Family and Values," Daily Iowan, 14 March 1994;
62. and James Pinkerton, "A Conservative Argument for Gay Marriage," Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1993.
63. Rauch, "For Better or Worse?" 180-81.
64. Fenton Johnson, "Wedded to an Illusion: Do Gays and Lesbians Really Want the Right to Marry?" Harper's, November 1996, 47.
65. "The Freedom to Marry," New York Times, 7 April 1996, 10.
66. This aspect of the modern welfare state, and the rational-choice theory that most vigorously supports it, has been the subject of a large literature. For an incisive overview see Jürgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies," in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 48-70.
67. This argument derives, of course, from Tocqueville. One powerful modern statement of it is Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic, 1983), although Walzer's discussion of kinship, love, and marriage shows how little he follows through on the principle.
68. Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Knopf, 1995), 107.
69. John Shelby Spong, "Blessing Gay and Lesbian Commitments," in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 79-80.
70. Johnson, "Wedded to an Illusion," 47.
71. On the idealization of marriage in contemporary nostalgia politics see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic, 1992).
72. See Warner, "Media Gays";
73. Warner, "Zones of Privacy," in What's Left of Theory? ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, forthcoming);
74. and Dangerous Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston: South End, 1996).
75. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 479.
76. Quoted in Richard D. Mohr, "The Case for Gay Marriage," Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy 9 (1995),
77. rpt. in Baird and Rosenbaum, Same-Sex Marriage, 90.
78. See also Mohr, A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights (Boston: Beacon, 1994).
79. Barbara Cox, "A (Personal) Essay on Same-Sex Marriage," in Baird and Rosenbaum, Same-Sex Marriage, 27-29. This essay was originally a long footnote to an article in the Wisconsin Law Review, so the disappearance of the law and the state from Cox's understanding of marriage is especially telling.
80. Indeed, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, marrying is for J. L. Austin the paradigm case of performativity ("Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," GLQ 1 [1993]: 1-16).
81. Cox, "A (Personal) Essay," 29.
82. Lauren Berlant treats this subject in "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 73-98;
83. in Transformations: On Feminism and Its Futures, ed. Jackie Stacey, Celia Lury, and Sarah Ferguson (forthcoming);
84. and in Political Theory and Cultural Studies, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). Berlant argues that the rhetoric of pain and trauma "confirms the centrality of interpersonal identification and empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life. This gives citizens something to do in response to overwhelming structural violence. Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called 'national culture,' these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies all too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field. . . . Its two scenes of citizenship can be spatialized: one takes place in a traumatized public and the other in a pain-free intimate zone. These zones mirror each other perfectly, and so betray the fetish form of sentimental citizenship, the wish it expresses to signify a political world beyond contradiction. . . . It claims a hardwired truth, a core of common sense. It is beyond ideology, beyond mediation, beyond contestation. It seems to dissolve contradiction and dissent into pools of basic and also higher truth. It seems strong and clear, as opposed to confused or ambivalent (thus: the unconscious has left the ball-park). It seems the inevitable or desperately only core material of community." But "the reparation of pain," she notes, "does not bring into being a just life," and even the traumatic pain of subordinated populations should be analyzed as ideology. The same can be said of love.
85. Berlant has made that argument as well in "Desire/Love," in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Catharine Stimpson and Gil Herdt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
86. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in Novels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 286.
87. For a brilliant discussion of Hawthorne's romance in relation to law see Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
88. But not quite. See the discussion of queer kiss-ins in Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality," in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, 193-229.
89. Quoted in Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (London: Penguin, 1997), 201-3.
90. For a powerful interpretation of this phenomenon see Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
91. Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist (New York: Gay Press of New York, 1985), 3.
92. This way of talking about marriage and state sanctioning well illustrates the sublimity of the state fetish, as Michael Taussig calls it in his provocative essay "Maleficium: State Fetishism," in The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 111-40.
93. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 585.
94. The claim that gay marriage imitates straight models makes a fairly weak critique of marriage. See the response to the 1971 wedding described in Teal, Gay Militants,
95. as well as the passages that Wolfson cites from Polikoff, "We Will Get What We Ask For"
96. ("Crossing the Threshold," 582).
97. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 602.
98. Richard A. Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992),
99. extract in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 185-89.
100. Claudia Card, "Against Marriage and Motherhood," Hypatia 11, no. 3 (1996): 7.
101. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 580. Wolfson is so eager to avoid the question of sexual normativity in the context of marriage that he congratulates the Baehr court for "brilliantly sidestepping the legal thicket of sexual orientation politics" (581). But what the court did was to refuse to consider the reality of domination.
102. Eskridge, Case for Same-Sex Marriage, 76;
103. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 589.
104. For a concise expression of this point see David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 51-52.
105. Wolfson, "Crossing the Threshold," 591.
106. Wolfson, "Crossing the ThresholdIbid., 591-610. On page 611 Wolfson says the opposite: "Bringing the wrong suit in the wrong way, even for the right objective, could do serious injury not only to our right to marry, but also to the broader range of lesbian and gay rights. The wrong case, wrong judge, or wrong forum could literally set us all back years, if not decades." Here strategy matters, and the ultimate goal is a "broader range" of rights, though still only "lesbian and gay" rights.
107. See Janet E. Halley, Don't: A Reader's Guide to the Military's New Anti-Gay Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
108. On the assessment of the present see Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, "Introduction to 'Critical Multiculturalism,'" in Goldberg, Multiculturalism, 107-13. On regressive tendencies the contemporary literature, especially the work of the Frankfurt School, is large.
109. See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.
110. See, e.g., Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).
111. Alice Echols provides a useful history in Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
112. The classic work is Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
113. See also Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
114. The standard reference is Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1969).
115. It is discussed critically in Rubin, "The Traffic in Women." For a survey of the anthropological literature on marriage from a queer point of view see John Borneman, "Until Death Do Us Part: Marriage/Death in Anthropological Discourse," American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 215-35.
116. Quoted in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 209.
117. See Eskridge's list of the practical benefits of marriage in the District of Columbia (Case for Same-Sex Marriage, 66-67).
118. Nancy Fraser proposes these terms to distinguish among varieties of contemporary politics; she classes lesbian and gay politics only as a politics of recognition and thereby blocks from view the aspects of a problem such as marriage that have to do with its state and civil benefits, as well as with the regulation of sexuality ("From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Postsocialist' Age," New Left Review, no. 212 [1995],
119. rpt. in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition [New York: Routledge, 1997]), 56-81. In fact, the marriage issue perfectly illustrates the failure of the redistribution-recognition distinction to comprehend actual politics, and it falsely reduces queer politics to secondary importance.
120. See Nancy Polikoff, "This Child Does Have Two Mothers: Redefining Parenthood to Meet the Needs of Children in Lesbian-Mother and Other Nontraditional Families," Georgia Law Review 78 (1990), 459-85.
121. Eskridge devotes some space to the legal benefits, but Chambers points out that it amounts to 6 out of his 261 pages ("What If? The Legal Consequences of Marriage and the Legal Needs of Lesbian and Gay Male Couples," Michigan Law Review 95 [1996]: 450).
122. Michigan Law Review Ibid., 459.
123. See Borneman, "Until Death Do Us Part."
124. Greg Urban provides a fascinating reading of the moiety system and its anthropological analysis in Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 99-133.
125. Nothing better illustrates Foucault's claim about the profound shift in modern governmentality or in what he called biopower, the constitutive relationship between the modern state and the regulation of the life of a population. See Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), esp. the final chapter;
126. and Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
127. Mohr, "Case for Gay Marriage," 94.
128. Mohr, "Case for Gay MarriageIbid., 91.
129. Even Card missteps here. She makes an analogy between the lax requirements for a marriage license and the stringent ones for a driving license, arguing that "in our society there is greater concern for victims of bad driving than for those of bad marriages" ("Against Marriage and Motherhood," 14). But it is a bad analogy, partly because even good marriages result in disadvantages for the unmarried but also because the last thing we should encourage is more active state regulation of intimacy and sexuality. The state should confer derivative recognition, not stipulative licensing. It should approach its common-law role rather than assert statutory or administrative control.
130. Nan D. Hunter, "Marriage, Law, and Gender: A Feminist Legal Inquiry," Law and Sexuality 1 (1991): 9-30.
131. See also Hunter, "Sexual Dissent and the Family," in Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 101-6.
132. Mohr, "Case for Gay Marriage," 96;
133. David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 252-59;
134. Card, "Against Marriage and Motherhood," 8.
135. Morris B. Kaplan, Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1997), 225.
136. The national ground of the same-sex marriage debate is again evidence of the constitutive role of the nation-state in modern imaginings of the institution of marriage. This role is seldom rendered visible, as it is for the issues of immigration and citizenship. The relation between nationalism and marriage would be a fruitful topic for another essay, and the narrativity of social change would have to occupy a central place in it. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 235-45.
137. In this connection one might also note the appeal of a fantasy common to pious talk about marriage, as in one editorial (and cover story) in the Economist: "For society, the real choice is between homosexual marriage and homosexual alienation. No social interest is served by choosing the latter" ("Let Them Wed," Economist, 6 January 1996,
138. rpt. in Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con, 204). The image of a society choosing, and choosing in the service of its own interests, and struggling to prevent the alienation of its members is a constant theme in the gay marriage debate. Again, the relation between policy and population illustrates well the phenomena of biopower and normalization described by Foucault: the effort to achieve normalization here is not the imposition of a fixed or a necessarily heterosexual norm but is a kind of adaptation. The unasked question, then, is not whether marriage is intrinsically heterosexual but whether the alienation of unmarried homosexuals might otherwise find expression in needs and norms that are not those of the society as a whole.
139. On the indispensability of progress to the modern imagination see Theodor W. Adorno, "Progress," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 143-60.
140. Andrew Sullivan, "The Marriage Moment," Advocate, 20 January 1998, 61-63.
141. Sullivan's dismissive joke about the queer theorist who "hilariously" remarks that "there is no orgasm without ideology" - not a bad line at all, in my view - refers to David M. Halperin, "Historicizing the Sexual Body: Sexual Preferences and Erotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic Erôtes," in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 261;
142. and in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 34. The sentence reads: "If the sexual body is indeed historical - if there is, in short, no orgasm without ideology - perhaps ongoing inquiry into the politics of pleasure will serve to deepen the pleasures, as well as to widen the possibilities, of politics."
143. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 242.
144. Sullivan, "The Marriage Moment," 62.
145. "Richly depersonalizing intimacies" is a borrowing from Candace Voglers excellent essay "Sex and Talk," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 328-65.
146. Sullivan, "The Marriage Moment," 63.
147. Kaplan, Sexual Justice, 226.
148. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 19.
149. Butler herself asserts that this statement is an exaggeration: "This failure to approximate the norm . . . is not the same as the subversion of the norm. There is no promise that subversion will follow from the reiteration of constitutive norms; there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion" ("Critically Queer," GLQ 1 [1993]: 22). This caveat points to a gap in the analysis - let us say, between virtually queer and critically queer - that cannot be closed in the terms in which the argument is posed.
150. Foucault derives the problem from Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1943), trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone, 1989). Canguilhem argues that the desire to be normal - the idea, that is, that statistical or distributional norms express a normative value, like a natural law - presupposes the informational culture of statistics and demographics, as well as the rich modern imagination of population-based styles of thinking (such as the concept of race, which is in turn born of the demographic imagination). Foucault suggests that the statistical-demographic imagination has become a key dimension of the modern body: "[One] consequence of [the] development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. . . . Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice lend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.
151. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life" (An Introduction, 144).
152. Consciousness of the normal presupposes countable data and the fungibility of persons in a population. The concept would make no sense in a status-rich society. You would not speak of a normal person if doing so required the peasant, the abbess, and the lord of the manor to weigh equally in the calculation of the norm. Thus Foucault dates normalization with modernity: "Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age. For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced - or at least supplemented - by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences" (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [New York: Vintage, 1979], 184). The conditions of mass culture are likely to preserve this confusion of statistical and medical norms, continually implanting the image of the mass - an implicit comparison with the mass of countable but indefinite other bodies - in the media by which people apprehend their bodies. Ordinariness by itself should be neither desirable nor undesirable. Yet as an image of health, it has a subtle normativity, capable of eclipsing what Canguilhem calls the normative capacity, which is manifest in variation.
153. When he reissued his study in 1966 as The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem added a lengthy section explaining that, like medicine, modern culture produces norms from its immanent regularities: "The normalization of the technical means of education, health, transportation for people and goods, expresses collective demands which, taken as a whole, even in the absence of an act of awareness [prise de conscience] on the part of individuals, in a given historical society, defines [sic] its way of referring its structure, or perhaps its structures, to what it considers its own good" (238). In Discipline and Punish Foucault summarized Canguilhem's argument: "The Normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education and the establishment of the écoles normales; it is established in the effort to organize a national medical profession and a hospital system capable of operating general norms of health; it is established in the standardization of industrial processes and products" (184). Foucault's language of coercion and standardization may have misled some readers, since self-regulation is not so much the imposition of a mechanical model from without as the mutual adjustment of immanent norms in search of and guided by the general regularity of the population or "society." Canguilhem even writes that the "mechanization of life" may be said to express "the need, obscurely felt by society, to become the organic subject of needs recognized as such" (248). The organicism of modern normalization, however, always leaves a residue. As Canguilhem concludes: "It is enough that one individual in any society question the needs and norms of this society and challenge them - a sign that these needs and norms are not those of the whole society - in order for us to understand to what extent social need is not immanent, to what extent the social norm is not internal, and finally, to what extent the society, seal of restrained dissent or latent antagonisms, is far from setting itself up as a whole" (256). The contemporary understanding of queerness opposes the normal in each of the three senses that can be drawn from Canguilhem's argument: (1) the notion of a physiological norm defined by pathological anomalies; (2) the legitimation of that norm as the standard deviation in a population; and (3) the regularization of a society, conceived as a whole, through a constant adjustment of needs and functions. Foucault's later works attempt to incorporate this vital straying from the norm as an aspect of ethics, with a stress on égarement [self-straying or estrangement] in relation to oneself. Queer culture has a lot to teach on this subject, not least on the needs and norms that might be elicited in relations of intimacy. But this aspect of queer culture does not find expression in the gay marriage debate. This Foucauldian line of speculation about modernity and social knowledge has lain underdeveloped in queer theory. Mary Poovey's recent work on statistics and on Sex in America is one important exception. But Foucault's analysis of normalization, while it describes the normativity of the discussion of gay marriage, may not address the policy issues attending this discussion. As Poovey points out, the statistical sense of the normal conveys a normative force, in American culture, on the topic of sex: "According to the authors of Sex in America, normal Americans are driven by the desire to be normal - and to know that they, and especially their sexual behaviors, are already normal. . . . The form that information must take to convince normal readers that they are normal is statistical - for, by the authors' own account, numbers metamorphose almost inevitably into the kind of evaluative thinking that makes people who belong to the statistical majority feel superior to those who do not" ("Sex in America," Critical Inquiry 24 [1998]: 374).
154. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 93-94.
155. Quoted in David Groff, ed., Out Facts: Just about Everything You Need to Know about Gay and Lesbian Life (New York: Universe, 1997), 103.