When marriage falls: Queer coincidences in straight time

GLQ

Volumn 13, Issue 2-3, 2007, Pages 227-248

  Boellstorff, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34248548627     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2006-032     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. See Martine Spensky, "Producers of Legitimacy: Homes for Unmarried Mothers in the 1950s," in Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood, and Sexuality, ed. Carol Smart (London: Routledge, 1992), 100-118.
2. Geeta Patel, "Ghostly Appearances: Time Tales Tallied Up," special issue, Social Text, no. 64 (2000): 47.
3. Gay Shame collective, "End Marriage" statement, www.gayshamesf.org/endmarriage.html (accessed June 20, 2006).
4. See, for instance, Evan Wolfson, Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 6;
5. and Dan Savage, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (New York: Dutton, 2005), 23.
6. See Carol Smart, The Ties That Bind: Law, Marriage, and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Smart's call for emphasizing notions of "household" over "family" can be read as a kind of coincidental analysis that refrarnes the domestic: in a nonlinear manner.
7. See Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal (New York: Knopf, 1995);
8. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999);
9. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003);
10. Duggan, "Holy Matrimony!" Nation, March 15, 2004, www.thenation.com/doc/20040315/duggan;
11. and Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim, "Beyond Gay Marriage," Nation, July 18, 2005, www.thenation.com/doc/20050718/kim.
12. James Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
13. With the use of terms like apocalypse and meantime, I draw on arguments presented by Robyn Wiegman in "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," New Literary History 31 (2000): 805-25.
14. See my The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
15. See my "The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia," GLQ 5 (1999): 475-510.
16. Some excellent historical analyses of these notions of marriage include Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
17. George Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2004);
18. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005).
19. See, for instance, Ruth Vanita, Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). There are, of course, persons in the United States - queer and otherwise - who share this view of same-sex marriage.
20. My phrasing glosses over the fact that the "United States" is in many ways a transnational entity. See, e.g., Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). However, despite the fact that there are many non-U.S. queer scholars read and cited within the United States, and despite the global economic and cultural reach of the United States, national boundaries obviously remain consequential in the United States as they do elsewhere, not only in spite of but precisely because of contemporary dynamics of globalization.
21. See Boellstorff, Gay Archipelago. The prominence of these debates can be seen directly in works like Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
22. and Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
23. It can also be seen indirectly in works like Warner's Trouble with Normal and Duggan's Twilight of Equality? as well as Judith Butler's "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14-44,
24. and many contributions to "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" ed. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, special issue, Social Text, no. 23, nos. 3-4 (2005).
25. See also my A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
26. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 5.
27. Edelman, No Future, 3;
28. Elizabeth Freeman, "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations," New Literary History 31 (2000): 727-44;
29. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, "Introduction: What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" special issue, Social Text, no. 23 (2005): 1-17. For further discussion,
30. see Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires.
31. See note 8.
32. Robyn Wiegman, "On Being in Time with Feminism," Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 164.
33. Wiegman, "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," 807.
34. See Jacques Derrida, "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11-48;
35. and Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977). There are cases in which progressives take conservative stances; for instance, there is a call for a return to the radicalism of the 1960s in the United States.
36. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 160-61.
37. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 130.
38. Faubion, Shadows and Lights of Waco, 104-5.
39. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 83.
40. See, for instance, Warner, Trouble with Normal, 88.
41. Butler, "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" 17.
42. Wiegman, "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," 807.
43. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 96.
44. See Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii-xxxi.
45. See, for instance, Vanita, Love's Rite, 18.
46. Glenn T. Stanton and Bill Maier, Marriage on Trial: The Case against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 90-92.
47. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 136.
48. William N. Eskridge Jr., The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1996), 9.
49. Duggan, "Holy Matrimony!"; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 153.
50. See Jane F. Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views," in The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Michaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 71-81.
51. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 252.
52. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), 3-4.
53. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 105.
54. See Katherine M. Franke, "Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 11 (1999): 251-310;
55. and Siobhan B. Somerville, "Queer Loving," GLQ 11 (2005): 335-70.
56. Foucault, An Introduction, 101.
57. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 210.
58. Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, "'Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well': Memory and Queer Culture in Will and Grace," Cultural Critique 56 (2004): 174. Similarly, Weston notes that "as a term of art, 'historical memory' encompasses the devices people use to conceptualize the past . . . the processes through which they come to believe that they have a past: a past which they claim and which they imagine in turn exerts its claims upon them. In the United States, gender is constituted - partially, but significantly - from such time claims" (Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age [New York: Routledge. 2002]. 92).
59. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 253-64;
60. Edmund Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London: Althone, 1961), 124-36.
61. Matti Bunzl, foreword to Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 2nd ed., by Johannes Fabian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), ix-xxxiv.
62. See also Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
63. I consciously place "traditional anthropology" in the past, using the same temporal devices that anthropology used to construct the category of the primitive. As John Borneman has argued, this temporal structure predominant in anthropology shaped views of marriage as well, so that it is assumed that "birth, marriage, and death constitute a serial trinity at the center of the human life course" ("Until Death Do Us Part: Marriage/Death in Anthropological Discourse," American Ethnologist 23 [1996]: 215-34). Linkages among heteronormativity, marriage, and temporality were solidified by, for instance, anthropological diagrams of kinship that used circles, triangles, and lines to represent families over time. As a result, in Borneman's view, cultural analysis creates a temporal framework in which marriage "signals the security of a death to all possibilities for an unexpected history, an end to all histories outside the marriage, as if history thereafter were containable within the consanguinal and affinal relations of the kinship chart" (228). Borneman adds, however, that "occasions where marriage is symbolized need not always be reiterations of exclusionary practices" (228).
64. Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50.
65. Jeff Dreyfuss, "A Coincidence of Metaphors: Notes on Two Modes of Text Building in the Indonesian Novel 'Surabaya,'" Journal of Asian Studies 44 (1985): 755-63.
66. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 392-93.
67. For instance, the Easter holiday is not within coincidental time even though it is linked to the lunar calendar; it is no longer seen as marking the vernal equinox but the Resurrection, a single event in a historical time understood as linear.
68. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 32.
69. Dreyfuss, "Coincidence of Metaphors," 762.
70. James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 540.
71. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 180.
72. The notion of Friday the thirteenth as a day of bad luck probably originates in medieval times and has a Christian origin; see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th (accessed February 27, 2006).
73. For further anthropological discussions of cultural conceptions of time, see, among others, Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (Oxford: Berg, 1992);
74. Carol J. Greenhouse, A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
75. See Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. An Introduction," differences 3, no. 2 (1991): iii-xviii.
76. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 130-31.
77. Wiegman, "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," 820-22.
78. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 90.
79. Butler, "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" 18.
80. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991).
81. See Bunzl, foreword, xi.
82. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 137.
83. See Boellstorff, "Perfect Path."