Being stuck in a jar: one of the perils of marriage equality?

Marriage inequality might have been terrible, but marriage equality, it seems, is also dangerous. Staff writer Ross Chapman reports on yesterday’s panel, in which several Columbia and Barnard professors discussed the perils of legal fairness in marriage, that institution held above all others.

After the recent progress of LGBTQ+ marriage equality, has love really won? Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, in association with the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, held a capacity crowd panel discussion on just that question in Roone Arledge Hall yesterday afternoon.

The talk centered around a recently released book by Columbia professor Katherine Franke, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. Mignon Moore (Barnard sociology professor), Kendall Thomas (Columbia law professor), Patricia J. Williams (Columbia law professor), and Marianne Kirsch (Columbia English and IRWGS professor) made up the rest of the expert panel. Wedlocked asks what was gained and lost by the LGBT marriage equality movement, and compares it to the interracial marriage movement that climaxed in the 1960’s and the black marriage laws passed in the 1860’s.

But as anyone who has taken a class at either of these Columbia institutes might know, black and gay identities don’t exist in a vacuum. The speakers took an intersectional approach to marriage, questioning the racial context of marriage and the sexual context of race. Mignon Moore took the most speaking time of the panel, and she looked at marriage as a test. The success or failure of marriage, an institution still technically designed to last forever, can be a public sign of a community’s validity. That is to say, a fight for marriage equality is a fight for a community’s opportunity to prove itself.

The legality of marriage will not necessitate its cultural acceptance as positive, and Moore pointed to black marriage as an example that she believes LGBT thinkers should study. With the prevalence of stereotypes of absentee fathers and promiscuous mothers, African-Americans have yet to completely discard the “marriage inferiority badge” that had been pinned on by a predominately white culture. The future of gay marriage’s ability to take off that badge, Moore argued, has been hindered by its hypernormative decisions in the past.

These decisions to normalize marriage were discussed by Moore and also by the next speaker, Kendall Thomas. He lamented the short 90-minute length of this panel and proposed (only a little hypothetically) a four-panel convention on Wedlocked, the third of which being “Marriage and Roots of Respectability” (really, Thomas sounded serious. Look out for this on a future Bucket List). In attempting to “sell” the country on gay marriage, the movement elevated relationships which seemed the closest to heteronormative ones. While this might have made the LGBT community more palatable, it didn’t do anything to remove the stigma of deviant sex acts and other markers of the community. The result was an increased marginalization, by those inside and out of the gay community, of those on its fringes. The ideal homosexual couple for the media was, in fact, not having sex. This contributed to the re-crafting of homosexuality as an identity rather than something defined by its sexual action. The fight for marriage equality may have helped lead to a post-sexual LGBT world.

While this brief discussion of the perils of marriage equality may seem to bemoan marriage equality, it did not come without its hope. Moore stressed that gay and black marriage is and can continue to be a radicalizing act that moves away from structuring marriage around gender roles and their inequalities. Franke, the author, includes an appendix in her book for gay couples who felt forced into marriage. Her self-proclaimed manifesto describes how a potentially normalizing process can be made empowering and radical.

Marriage’s place so high on the priorities of the LGBT community, as compared to issues of poverty and healthcare, makes homosexuality public and undeniable. Franke and the rest of the speakers on this panel want to continue the move that marriage equality started, towards a society more accepting of all divergent and minority actions and identities.