Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Wedlocked 20160109

Good afternoon. I am the directors. It is a great pleasure and honor to moderate this panel. And really it is a celebration is a wonderful new book. But we are going to do this afternoon is have some presentations and responses to the book and then open up for question and discussion. And we have assembled a stellar panel of the people who are just the right people to undertake this discussion. They will speak in the order that we have determined, but it will begin with a brief presentation of the books and its main issues in history. She is the director of the center for gender and sexuality off which is wonderful institution that we are happy to collaborate with, and she is the author of wedlock the perils of Marriage Equality. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transitional justice, issues of gender and race in law, legal theorist, and academic, and activist, a public intellectual an amazing human being. Ibeing. I am just so happy to be celebrating her this afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order. We are 1st going to have patricia williams, professor of law at columbia. And you know dont no her through her monthly column entitled diary of a man law professor which you can subscribe to at www. Law professor. Our 2nd speaker will be an associate professor of sociology at Bernard College the research and her recently her 1st book is invisible families, gay identities, relationships, and motherhood. Published in 2011 by the university of California Press and with the winner of the 2013 outstanding book award by the american sociological association. She is working on a 2nd book project entitled the shadow of sexuality. Social history in support of my africanamerican lg bt elders. In the 3rd speaker is the professor of law and director for the center for law and culture. Kendall culture. Kendall thomas is the coeditor of crystal race theory. That found in the movement and coeditor of the theory. His most recent writing and research is focused on the law and culture of Death Penalty politics, racial democracy and resume in the law and politics of racial and neoliberalism. Please help me welcome catherine frankie. [applause] thank you so much. I teach in a room like this. Here is the book. Very exciting. Thank you all. [applause] thank you all for coming. It coming. It is wonderful to have you come out and honor this work and honor thinking about marriage in a complicated way. I no so many of you do that in your own work. So i appreciate having company because the perspectives i have are not always the most popular within the Gay Community. You are my committee right now. And thank you for cosponsoring this event along with my own center. When i was in college at Bernard College sodomy was a crime. But i moved here from illinois to a state that criminalize to our was or at least the things i did. And twice while i was a student i was assaulted by police. And they hurled homophobic epitaphs of me. Another time i was beaten up by some guys over here and Riverside Park , and police stood by and watched. So for people in my generation or for me the idea that a lot later we return to state regulations as a way to be more free and equal struck me as a strange move. And it still strikes me as a strange move. That not many years after our lives were criminalized by the state and we were prosecuted for publicly and privately. That we would invite the state into our intimate relationships and asked the states regulate them. That always struck me as an odd political objective. I thought i would write a book about it. That is what wedlock is. I also thought that samesex couples are not alone and that experience of having the state regulate there lives in the form of marriage shortly after or as part of the civil Rights Movement. And so i turn to africanamericans went through the web black people in this country went through during the civil war. And i thought maybe there is Something Interesting to learn from that experience as we have turned in the Gay Community samaras now as a form of liberty and equality. And it turns out there is quite a bit we can learn which is what this book does, it offers parables for todays movement, not to equate homophobic and racism , not to say is the same thing as what gay people suffered, but to create what was described as a juxtaposition between two movements. So that is reformulate our goals, articulated our values and pursue political projects today as we do so mindful of other movements we are juxtaposed with. And who can teach us something about the possibilities and the perils of certain political and legal claims. And so that is what the book aims to do, bring these two movements together, these two moments together to see what lies there. It turns out that Marriage Equality does have a racial history. It also has a racial presence. That is one of the takehome points, not only be careful what you wish for but the distinctions, the differences between homophobia and racism on the difference between Marriage Equality today and Marriage Equality in the 19th century points 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 to take the secular homosexuality. And to redeem gay people who are able to be respectable and scene entitled. Make a plausible claim of entitlement to the blessings of marriage, and in doing so they contrast themselves to those who are deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always those are people of color in the country. The juxtaposition helps us understand how unfortunately some of what we have learned has been a kind of zerosum politics or zerosum right for gay people and some samesex couples haveone a right to marry at the expense of others. Both implicitly and explicitly. So let me just say a little bit about what a couple of the chapters do in terms of be careful what you wish for. It can become a form of discipline, particularly when many sectors of the Society Still is. And that is certainly true for nearly free people, not of the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Racism persisted in familiar forms, being able to inaugurate a new regulatory relationship for black people at the state. And so when black people coming out of enslavement who live together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly and in the relationship broke up which in any population would be the case and people took up with new partners, mostly black men were prosecuted for bakery to the bigamy are dull to me. Which would put them in prison and render them subject to the convict leasing system because there was this body of workers. So marriage rights and particularly the law of marriage and divorce or divorce in the law of monogamys ended up giving the state of new power to discipline, punish, and sometimes kill black men just at this moment when they were freed from the crushing effects of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. As i think we see this today. There is an enormous backlash against africanamericans are black people, and against samesex marriage rights now mostly undertaken in the name of religion, but not only. To the extent we have had smooth sailing today it has been local in many contexts is in in many parts of the country marriage rights are not feel are not something they feel that they can exercise. They know there will be retaliation against them. But they experience will metabolize that fear against the backdrop of this message from both people in and out of the Gay Community who say that being married. Allies you can attain those wild the citys surges of payment who dont know how to sign up for one another and commit and be monogamous. s andmonogamous. She then we had the very same thing about africanamericans at the end of the war, they somehow had savage sexualities. So the civilizing aspects of marriage is, the values it carries have their own portfolio. As in the book tries to answer that as well is. One other place where there is a similarity or compelling lesson to learn is about how our right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marrys. There are some people that have a diagnostica diagnostic problem of over marrying. There is not that kind of compulsion, but the stable compel you to marry. And so in the 19th century we saw him before the end of the civil war in order for slaves were leaving the plantations to the safety of northern troops who set of refugee camps around the military operations that they were conducting its, minister was placed at the gate of many of these contraband camps the refugee camps, and you could not gain entry without marrying which was seen as the most pressing problem is, these folks were coming in and complicated families. People have lost their spouses and children as their owners and pull them away andin the families were reassembling and coming to the safety of refugee camps in the northern soldiers and missionaries overrunning them were saying we cant let un. We are going to marry you with the gate. As the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry command we see that today as well not just generally but here columbia university. As soon as in new york state we gain the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolished this domestic partner benefits. And said you have a year to marry your partner. And partner. And if you doubt there will be kicked off our plan. Shocking. As we get them to reverse the policy. But not for different sex couples. Thecouples. The president promised they would keep domestic partner benefits is because in new york city are Domestic Partnership law recognizes same and different sex couples. But they only reinstated domestic partner benefits for samesex couples. Now the university discriminates against ray people. Gay people are paid more. Samesexsamesex couples are paid more in the sense that you can get benefits for your partners whether or not you marry them. As if you have a different sex partner you have to married. These are some of the difficult questions that have come up in history. This marriage ins marriage ends up overwhelming the politics of Larger Movement that mightve wanted to recognize more complex families. Is that we have lost where families is kind of the subject of gay rights as any of the sewer early this marriage has actually become a problem. It was a sexist institution written legally compromised to preserve property. s property. And creating viable life outside marriage with a political projects and something happened. Something happened, the moving overtaken is one less thing ii want to offer and then i would love to hear from my colleague. Ii feel kind of badly that we are racially segregated appear. I never talked publicly about this. Its when i was in college year i was sort of awakening as many undergraduate students due to being a lesbian. A poet and novelist in the memoirs to is very well known in the 70s and 80s. The journal of solitude. Very moving an important for me and for many of my friends command as i was coming out i thought. A lonely world, to be married. s and. s and i really did not want to be heterosexual. s and she wrote me back. s here is what she wrote me. Oldfashioned typing. Some she said you imply that what you want is love as a sideline and solitude is the main current. I dont see this as possibles. Love with our commitment is pretty cheap. This is remarriage comes in. As i read she was terribly afraid of being caught and people who marry simply because they want marriage is often find themselves caught. And its a simple as that. When you do and i hope you will, there wont be any arguments and then wouldnt you want children . He goes on to discuss how lonely life of the unmarried person will be. Its so let me quote quickly from Justice Kennedy. The decision from the Supreme Court. Marriage response to the universal fear that alone person, only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . That there is no life other than just our calling this . s winning the right to marry, life outside of marriage is whether you choose it will you find yourself there for complicated reasons is a graham, lonely, dark life. That is not a clear value in my mind. Resilience, creativity, and forcing her life outside marriage. It is so wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. Congratulations wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting excavation of the history imaginable. Comparative cities aside. s totally absorbing and quite revelatory of the circumstances. And one of the things that i was most impressed with was the malleable line between intimacy and the untouchable. Untouchable. And the question you raise in the subtitle is one of the perils the Marriage Equality. Theequality. The question of whether it is marriage is that does all the work. The Marriage Equality i think will probably be addressed more thoroughly. So i am going to narrow my reflections too much smaller set of observations. That really is for those of you read anything about my life and i am here because my great great grandmothers was married off. The saving ultimately her own marriage. I think that it is is what i wanti want to note is that marriage is really did set and i mean assets and the effective sense the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes the significant number of slave marriages or overseen by owners, investors. Another dimension is the degree to which much of that permission to marry is not through the owners of property the lives of those owners and slaveholders. And that prompting to some degree operates like any other marriage. It makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. And to some degree to eliminate the dangerousness as well as the perversions of sexualitys. Marriage among africanamericans purify respectability and also understood the dangerous untouchability a black. But those 1st africanamericans marriages were rachel performed against the backdrop of the brain firms the catherine talked and the mysteriously lightskinned how service and unnameable accidents asked. s to say nothing of progenitor. It was and still is a ritual prompted way of corralling the unregulated brown this black sex. All this is interesting to me, the kind of formal genuflection to the repair. Something to be said. Something of the great thing for slaveholding families. The sexual affirmations that have only recently begun to be publicized are acknowledged from Annette Gordon reeds history of Thomas Jefferson all the waiters from sermons, this is a dramatic history they apply to a Cultural Landscape toward an appended by the unspeakable. And so marriage operating continues to as the pathway salvation but as assumed against the leakage of miscegenation. This again, i think this effect or dementia as a company marked in the words we use and dont use to this day. Its very peculiar when it comes to africanamericans, not so much when they married but when they marry outside the race. Just think of the word biracial, a kind of formal recognition of a certain a dissent, not just the product of being tossed around. A legitimacy according to the lineages of intermarriage, formal marriage between blacks and whites in modern times. To get out of the presence of that one black and one white. It is a kind of recognition alegitimacy according to the lineage of the wider nonblack parent that does not otherwise give margin vocabulary. s i think it was a kind of comfort. A white mother and he loved her so he will be a big edge of the race. s the has been normalized. s just another black man. There was a shift in nomenclature for some. So marriage among all with africanamericans have this extra burden of operating to simultaneously the language by which we assign the benefits uses racial category to narrow or expand our perception of who is more like homes habit of carrying relentlessly promiscuous nature of our duty renders us blind to havent really weird type. Again consider if he may williams washington. s the one hand by his familys black man. Notice how they have no market thurmond and that link the name. She also live your life as a negro, attended an allblack college, but in their 70s and became publicized the suddenly redesignated as biracial. Even with that designation she was always referred to as a child by his made have not been able to find any reference to as his child. I take tiger woods. Rarely as asian americans. So there is something unspoken and indicative about african descent and is dangerous. Very interesting locutions you could address mayor de blasio not empathize as of the hashtag black lives matter. Elizabeth norris go describes the perversion. It uses the speech of the subject but only to mimic nature for which its been extricated. That is why perverse discourse can always space that appears to exclude which it owes and to me it is that effective mention in all cases and catherines wonderful metrics. [applause] hello. I have some laryngitis so just bear with me. As has been stated thus far in different ways, katherines superbly written book wedlocked the perils of Marriage Equality looks at the marriage for enslaved people in samesex couples. She asked what kind of freedom and what kind of quality does the capacity to marry actually mobilize . The book reveals that gaining rights can bring about disadvantage in other ways particularly when a group in question does not have full equality. She states quote a close look at the history of marriage among africanamericans and the newly won right of samesex couples at the price of stigmatizing other groups and ways of life on marriages outside. As a family sociologist who focuses on the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality is particularly interested in thinking about how the ideas in this book play out with peoples lives today. Particularly those who are experiencing the after effects of the Marriage Equality movement to sociologist like to talk about, we like to ask questions and wed like to talk to people and we like to use this data as one base for evaluating information. What if anything do we gain by using marriage as a platform for reducing stigma associated with samesex desire . So id like to consider this question is relates to the population the stands at the juncture of the two seemingly disparate groups catherine uses in her argument people who are black and. Throughout the text the persistent overlap between the categories of white and versus africanamerican suddenly strengthen race and class inequality because each dimension of inequality is met with legitimate legitimacy. I will respond to some of the arguments by considering the analysis that were not present which are the experiences of these africanamerican lgbtq to any interracial relationships among blacks as they relate to Marriage Equality campaign. For the past 12 years or so ive been in focus on the intersections of race and lgbtq sexuality through such concepts as identity motherhood race consciousness racial commitment and various other aspects of life and meaning making among black people crazy Marriage Equality is a public issue and have provided a vehicle through which sexual minorities will also have a membership in a racial or ethnic or cultural category can develop a conversation about their sexuality with family members and others in their community. The use of Marriage Equality as a representation of lgbtq writes has helped move gays sexuality from the private sphere is a behavior that individuals act out in secret and under the cover of shame or secondary status to one that initiates a public openness about the 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 oriented populations that clinton used in this campaign. A lgbt homelessness and foster youth facing challenges as was discussed by bianca williams. We could have used employment discrimination is another relevant topic and access to Quality Health care is an important issue particularly for trends folks in the sexual minority elders. So why marriage . And argues in the minds of Society Marriage has been and largely remains a test that the Africanamerican Community is seen as failing. In my First Reading i was somewhat put off by this and other statements like it feeling like it does a disservice to those couples who have a succeeding at marriage and ignores the bandages that blacks to marry again in society or the special status that married people of any race or ethnicity receiving it removes an agency or self empowerment from africanamericans by only preventing the ways that some group mythologize all blacks regardless of marital status. I know this is not the intention and i know the intention is to call awareness to the Structural Racism that to a vice africanamericans, a vilification that day or we cannot seem to get away from no matter what our actual behavior sorry that you think she does present that argument also in the book. So i find it for africanamerican groups in particular the topic of marriage is particularly relevant has appointed entry into discussions of lgbt identity and that serves as a physical response to this stigma and 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 promiscuous and choosing single motherhood over a union of marriage. They defy these negative stereotypes and they can create the stable families. Marriage offers a conventional and some might say conformist presentation and antithesis to the image of the counterculture but because the racialized context in which samesex marriage among africanamericans are taking place for that Community Becomes a radical and transformative act. I have spoken with couples who say having a wedding and removing the ability of their parents to engage in dont ask dont tell with themselves and their partner by drawing a line in the sand. Theyre risking rejection and disappointment from adults or favorite uncle. A pastor in a church they grow up and know affirmatively as they have taken on this quote unquote lifestyle and they plan to and many who have a religious Wedding Service actually have the audacity to want their guy to recognize and bless their union. Anyone who has any knowledge of black religious community can see the radical nature of the supposedly conformist behavior. Im not trying to take away from the beautiful and persuasive argument that katherine makes regarding his critical view of marriage thats a force and a social movement that is about liberation. I dont disagree with that im saying its precisely because marriage hold such an important ideological position in the mines and experiences of so many 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 and capacity to marry might actually mobilize. Wedlocked critiques the lgbt movement and characterizes much of the campaign particularly among the 2008 political debate but between the 2008 election and 2013 i witnessed a shift in the way a lgbt organizations tried to sell the country on Marriage Equality. My wife and i elaine were married in 2012 shortly after new york recognize samesex unions and labor one of those crazy couples got married a lot. We got married three times that year. We have been married for three years 10 year so we decided to go all out and commit to. One term wedding pictures were published we were approached by the campaign into that experience i saw genuine effort to expand the representation of samesex couples in the public eye with images of older couples, folks in the south in the mountain regions of the country latino women africanamerican men and some conservative religious couples. As a result of that work several Different Things happened. We were on the cover of lack enterprise magazine the business magazine for black business minded people. So id say this as an aside to recognize to rectify some of its prior mistakes in the way those images used not just in a lgbt organization but other groups as a Supreme Court case move forward. Wedlocked argues that marriage of samesex couples will reflect and reproduce a new form of respectability so for in many sectors of the Gay Community. Removing the marriage ban 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 see important class differences in the expense to which blacks or disadvantage so in some ways the book ross is an imaginary line when it only depicts marriage that is quote aside the failure dysfunction for many africanamericans. I see where middle and upper middle class africanamericans are able to benefit from the advantages and a the legitimacy that marriage brings. The class status granting privileges and even in a religious community. I recently interviewed rahim and africanamerican gay man. He lives with his husband and two adopted children and he was raised in a holy pentecostal church. He is a grad is a graduate degree. They live in a grand house and together they bring in six figure income and i would like to save a sixfigure income that does not start with a one or a two. So when i asked that he and his family were faring in this conservative state in the south he told me he still makes. Sing in a more enormous amount of love and support even from those who might not support the Lgbt Community. He said when he walks around with his daughter in a baby carrier people thought he was a husband in the south and black people have said to me rarely have they seen black they seen black man so actively involved in raising their young children. They said this is not the norm in their community with men so here the Comparison Group of the community is not a heterosexual couple but absent black father. Look at these men involved in their childrens lives and that is a good thing and they appear very well off and is not great for the children as well . So this is one area where racial context experienced in black man and families sets up a dynamic that may not have been considered in recent discussions about gay man with children. He was able to buy his family out of the negative experiences that other support although what franke argues while africanamerican men have not been able to use marriage in a way that sanitizes racist stereotypes this black couple can silence or protect themselves from harm affiliated by the stereotypes and i can think of other heterosexual black couples similarly situated that use the status of income and education to shield themselves. But i will say again institutional racism rears its head from time to time and injects itself into their lives. They cannot escape that and money cannot escape that racism and i expect this is at the heart of katherines argument that it appears theyre still the drag of coordinated statuses based on race and orientation do not affect their lives on a daily basis. So what Lgbt Community sewer africanamericans think about this as a vehicle for liberation . I see two primary dispositive. This past spring columbia had a panel in harlem about the meaning of Marriage Equality for after the americans and Darnell Moore was on the panel. For those of you dont know theyre now hes a Brilliant Writer and activist to does many things including advocating for lgbts in newark. He said he came from a lowincome family where people did not marry and women raised children with the help of durham mothers and sisters and the relationships they have with men were fleeting harsher term. They were mainly worried about how to survive so marriage was not a priority and it was only a lukewarm feeling for marriage. They said there were other pressing needs of the population like having a safe place to live in those kinds of things. So for his remarks i say this focus on Marriage Equality may not be equal particularly to those who are such you economically disadvantaged. Catherines argument is right even for the informational case in that Marriage Equality cannot be the only story that the movement brings to the community. They have also show they care about and realize the importance of other issues, the breadandbutter issues poverty of employment racial profiling and adequate services but other black lgbt leaders have looked past specific examples of Marriage Equality and use it as a tool to promote greater understanding and acceptance within the group. So they try to think of how to maintain and build relationships and how to stand proud and openly expressing the identity as simultaneous with the racial identity. One expressed for the work is to challenge and conquer their own. In addition to working with the Interracial Group they want to build the group self acceptance of their own Sexual Orientation by d. Stigmatizing and transforming the media for gay sexuality and my last comment, i want to say the potential, the potential that i see for samesex couples to radicalize marriage because of the lack of differences between partners and degraded quality that comes from it. There are differences that can exist in gender presentation but those do not translate to gender inequality. Gender inequality of literature in heterosexual relationships through mens advantages in the labor force and other social institutions. Simply put some women may dress in a boyish fashion but they black mans institutional power and cannot through hegemonic masculinity. Based on other factors besides that and the distribution of race and gender and not based on who has the greater economic power. So i see the potential for these relationships within the state of marriage and even while agreeing with wedlock wedlocked assertion the execution of marriage was and still is structured around gender roles and equality. My time is up to stuff there but id love to say it just like my interpretation i really really enjoyed this book and i enjoyed the arguments that ive had with folks but i also enjoyed the very premise of the pitfalls to using the law in this way. I do 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 caught what danielle has bought and will give it a go. I have always thought that the best scholarly work that is scholarly work whose lines of inquiry of analysis and argument give rise to more questions than can be undertaken are just her answers. Theres a lot to say about this book. I do hope we have a chance for a more extended conversation then our 90 minutes or so that we have set aside the fact and will allow great so in that spirit i want to use my allotted time to say this about for panels that i think would make a wonderful conversation on this extraordinary book by my Dear Colleague katherine franke. The first panel would be a panel on method and it suggested to me by this formulation a formulation which we see in a number of places in the book but i will quote it here. The books central conceit associates to areas 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. Wedlock brings together the preoccupations and procedures of two critical perspectives. One a Critical Race Theory and second clear legal theory. Any kind of higher thought style whose modes of angry and analysis challenge the assumptive structure of approaches that take race, sex and sexuality and gender and might add a separate identities in the silo of experiences. Ive always liked ray charles image of the categorical miscegenation of sex and gender and race and ethnicity as a way of trying to understand this analytic methodological so gender race and ethnicity are determinants and enmeshed in ways that an optic rooted and sexuality the idea that two or more separate identities of experience meet in a particular place i think only helps us partially. Catherine is calling instead for a connection analysis. She calls it associate. Its an analysis which is alert to similarities and two convergent and divergent. The continuities and discontinuity as catherine suggests. 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 are what they are in part precisely to prove their difference. The old identity and difference. The gives us a very concrete on the ground extended collaboration of the importance of holding on to both at once. Put another way race, sexuality and gender are different but they move and live and have their paid in and through and around one another. Someone reminds us that this tension to identities as they are shaped and as they take shape is a crucial resource for making sense of what marriage means and the work it does in the current juncture for gay and people as well as for people of color whatever their sexuality. It means they think tracking the movements and the manifestations of race as sexuality and the sexuality as race. Sexuality is race you might say. I have said that in race is sexualized but its a technology of racial power embraces the technology of sexual power yes we know for example from the work and the idea of sexual racism, so katherine frankes account of gay and lesbian story that is not only closely connected to the story about race i think represents an enormous valuable contribution to the work of those who are situated at the intersection of Critical Race Theory on one side and the gay people on the other picture doesnt do this idea of aggregation calling for an aggregation of race and sexuality which recalls in a reverse mirror image and argument and her earlier work against the disaggregation of sex and gender. So this delight in the thought experiment that is possible when one engages in a preassociation historically heard before but a Free Association of sex and gender offers us a rich analytic tool for tracking the fluid movement of marriage law across multiple dimensional axis. The book allows us to think in fractional terms of the combinations and dynamics of the fluid character makes mobile character of marriage law. Feature marriage law that is essential to the story she tells both about africanamericans in the postbellum. Matt period and gay manned and lesbian. It allows us to see the normative white character of the Marriage Equality Movement Even when the argument werent explicit and they had a road normative activity a fancy word that i would use with a shoutout to empire. My Central Point here is that wedlocked is an encounter of 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 to something else. What might race help us think about that race does not but to which is nonetheless connect it . In my work i would suggest the things raises about his sexuality. Catherine shows us in the wedlocked thinking about gay and lesbian sexuality and race. And effusion that i think represents an important insight about how to understand the history of Marriage Equality and the second panel would be a panel of outlaw and the structure of feeling pretty would focus on those aspects of Marriage Equality which are about emotional and physical and psychic. Katherine at one moment in the book talked about going through these archives in the south and finding locks of hair and finding things that people found along with their petitions for widows benefits and seeing the smudges of fingerprints on the papers of people who couldnt sign their names are wrote x left when they were writing to the government seeking war widows benefits. This attention to structures of feeling to use Raymond Williams phrase or as they put it here, to the body i think offers us an insight into what Marriage Equality law is doing that dares directly on a second that katherine makes what it thinks is absolute crucial. She asked more than once how it is right sparing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the rights of a very fishy of this afternoon in her own remarks as the moral lesson to be careful what you wish for. How is it that right sparing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the rates the rights of a bear shaped in ways that show how rights and freedom are all make intentionally related . That is how the benefits of rights may calm at the price of certain kinds of freedom. For katherine this is paradox pretty think its important as i said to identify and describe is 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. The question would be what drove the marriage Rights Movement so willingly into the arms of the law . What was the consideration that led gay man and lesbians enter into a marriage contract with the state collects katherine suggests is marked a kind of emancipation from the burdens of social abjection for gays and lesbians first in the marriage license marks a kind of social belonging and recognition of equivalence and second because it serves as a kind of credential that pouches for the legitimacy and quality of the couples relationship. Over and above these utilitarian features of marriage that make it something gays man and lesbians want you to can only be rendered visible if we understand the freedom to marry as they not only about the right of gays men and lesbians to marry one another but to marry the law, to marry this day. What Marriage Equality law has done princess is to radically rethink your the meaning of homosexuality by recrafting around us data source table identity rather than sexual acts that we have seen opposition between identity, Sexual Identity and sexual acts. I would ask though to what extent we still need to see Marriage Equality law as a body of sex law . What do i mean by that . I mean simply that Marriage Equality law, certainly this is true if you look at the line of cases that ends Marriage Equality law i think is now recognized and will be talked about as a branch of family law. But i want to suggest that Marriage Equality law can also be seen as a branch of what might be called postgays and lesbian law. When we married the state the law as men of my generation used to say, the law becomes a kind of talk. We want to be covered by the law younger people say well my generation set top to bottom and younger people stayed dominant inside. This is going to play wonderfully on cspan. [laughter] but i think what animates this is his imagine desired to be taught by the law which has lived in the bodies of gay man and lesbians which exceeds the instrumental account of the material benefits of marriage. Im struck for example by have quickly the argument that marriage confers 1100 or so benefits that gay man and lesbians are not getting gave weight to the argument about the importance and schwarzenegger versus. The california case of feeling married, feeling in my bones, feeling in my body that i am married. I call it sex love because i believe that this is in many ways made possible by a desexualized move. The ways in which is still the site for afterlife which has to do with desires and pleasures and bodies. At the level of our collective ideological imagination. So its a fantasy. But the libidinal economy if you will of marriage law and the comparative historical and critical account that catherine gives us of the africanamerican and lgbt him pains for Marriage Equality i think would gain a lot by really plumbing and engaging an extended analysis. Some of it may be at rafay could be expressed as an of these two struggles to win a civil marriage and put us in conversation with scholars who are working on law and the emotions when we are generally in the ways in which the law is not only our eyes about the instrumental practical business of regulation and institutional design but its also about emotion, imagination and the structures of feeling that underwrite this body of law and policy. This is important to keep in mind for Cultural Studies approach that looks at law, here the love more marriage is a cultural form. By talking about why these, pleasures, desire i think we need to not lose sight in the ways of which bears a raw digs at work in this marriage contract which im suggesting the state is inviting us to join. There is a lot more to be said about that but i will leave the subject since marianas looking at me anxiously. I have two more panels. [laughter] this is the point at which im thinking here of the opera lulu which i saw last night and the ways in which the composer of this opera just is a really brilliant job of focusing on the compulsory marriage in a moment where lulu says thats why he married you and lulu says that you didnt marry me and her husband says, ask them what today do . Lulu says i married you. So thinking about this, to what extent has the state married us even as it is inviting us to think we are acting through an autonomy and an agency which is about self order. I think thats an important area for further investigation. The third panel very briefly is going to be a panel on marriage and what id like to call the roots of respectability the ways in which marriage laws and species of poor regulation. One cant compare here the parallel convergence but also divergent histories of racial respectability and respectability and the investments alternately and racial reputation and moreover printed representation. Katherine is like these ideas of maturity the civilizing process that marriage represents but the point i would want to make here is that the reproductive post gay virtually sexual family since the gay lesbian family roots raises children and produces about procreation couldnt be more respectable. How to have fam children about sex. Thats the story of the new postgay posts lesbian family. Respectability as a regime of self surveillance. The story that katherine tells him a book 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 laws of marriage. Writ large. Its a story about Community Self surveillance. Two, respectability is a kind of death sentence i might say. The respectability politics of Marriage Equality represent a kind of death sentence is mentioned in lulu for what the South African judge calls the right to be different. The ask for formal legal equality has nothing to do with the right to be different. I believe that aspect of it is an invitation to see Marriage Equality as a response or the effort to banish the twin stigmas of aids in the age of aids and criminalization that was in the Supreme Court struck down in lawrence versus texas. It has as katherine notes historical antecedent in the story of good blacks policing bad blacks as she puts it and i do think we are going to see what she calls the afterlife of continue to play itself out in the south surveillance and for example beyond most other absence of interest and this gay and lesbian such as mass incarceration and the Death Penalty. Fourth and finally i would like to see a panel at the conference on wedlock on marriage law and sexual democracy or that deferral of sexual democracy about marriage like to be more precise. And writes at one point in the book its a curious thing to pursue a civil right strategy that nests a fuller form of citizenship within marriage a distinctly private domain. I think its curious but its completely consistent with the emerging logix of neoliberal family law to the extent that Marriage Equality law is a species or branch of neoliberal family love. By privatizing sexual politics and by socializing that private privilege through the stigma that attaches to nonnormative the intimate associations and 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 a part of. Another way to put it is to say that Marriage Equality d. Democratizes sexual politics by nesting a freedom struggle for the right to sexual pleasure by nesting your freedom struggle which in frederick jamisons terms places the question of pleasure as a political issue squarely on the public agenda in a claim for formal legal equality, of privatized informal equality. By nesting this freedom struggle for human rights to be different and for the right to sexual pleasure within the movement for marriage rights Marriage Equality effectively crowds out certain forms of Democratic Convention 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. I am pleased and as proud as punch that my colleague katherine frankes book is given as a toolkit to think to some of the intractable problems and the enormous challenges that 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] since the conference is not yet scheduled i think we will take some time now to discuss the wonderful book in these responses. I think its everybodys fantasy to have such different and rich responses to anything that one has just published so i think its a tribute to this wonderful book into our speakers. Sub or would you like to respond to any of these questions before we open it up katherine would you like to respond to any these questions before we open it up . I actually would rather hear questions i will work my responses into answers to your questions but hopefully also answer your questions. So, the floor is open. Thank you to all of you for the work you have done. Ive been a reporter for many years and im transitioning to becoming an academic in a lot of your book is not very helpful in thinking things through particular your work with professor moore and the institute. I want to ask you professor thomas briefly brought up one point it was on my mind and talk about aids which i think is a really big way to think about what Marriage Equality has taken us away from and after the era of act up why did Marriage Equality become the issue that has a lot of gay people saying we have full equality. At the same time the epidemic has become in the realm of criminal black sexuality are thought to be that way and ive certainly seen that a lot in the state of missouri where do my research very strict hiv criminalization was but also that gay be played behind have no concept of. When mike brown was killed a few days before he was killed there was an hiv activist that i work with. They were doing testing testingv but you dont see hiv but, disability and outweigh. So i wondered if your book has a offered, if youve thought about this as her role and why this movement has become so i was a little bit and then defer to my colleagues for their thoughts. I was a discrimination in the 1980s, so much of that work both on the professional and personal level was about thinking about care and duly cared for and it we should care for and we thought kinship very broadly than because of the discrimination that people who are hivpositive are 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 each other because there are no other resources. This was during the period of reagan and statesponsored violence against people who are hivpositive. To go from that period of sex being gay sex which is womens sexuality with sort of invisible so was gay mens sex has been toxic and the threat not to mention perverse and deviant and would kill you to what we see now where we legally at least the story we are told in the Marriage Equality movement that fantasy is that 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 can. Also that sex is somehow sanitize within the institution of marriage and no longer a threat and a solid candle set about the respectability of having children without sex was just delightful. We are told a very different story and what i find so remarkable remarkable and reflect on it in the book would have that is how successful that rebranding its been both as a story we tell the outside world but also the story we told ourselves about who we are and who are families are into and how we should love one another. Theres something enormously lost i think in that new storytelling and in one of the chapters where i talk about the afterlife of i somewhat ironically but not entirely celebrate Anthony Weiner as the new subject a man who just loves sex, lots of it, lots of it publicly on the Gay Community had nothing to say about sex for sexs sake. Not that long ago we had a lot to say about promiscuity sex with different partners you didnt know necessarily and how to have sex and take care of you and your partners but we were speechless in the face of Anthony Weiner. Aids lurks as kendall mentioned as a kind of fatality both literally and figuratively of the Marriage Equality movement that we dont speak it anymore and its at our peril certainly. We can collect a couple of questions that really could you please just have a question not a lengthy comment . Yes. Im looking forward to reading the book and thank you so much. I can say thats clearly see what you are talking about in terms of the strategy comes a safe strategy taken and then the road not taken so i guess my question is in terms of legal strategy and marriage and equality, 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 and the plastic partnerships Civil Union Laws forms of recognition so we had a range of ways to perhaps create legal or Financial Security for nonmero relationships and what was nice about Domestic Partnerships and civil unions as they allowed you some room to innovate and didnt invite the state into setting the terms of what your relationship was. By and large the Gay Community is dropped defending those alternative institutions and attacks part of their legal strategy was to vilify them to secondclass status in order to win marriage rights. I dont think we need to say that in order to say that the state refusing to recognize samesex couples as entitled to marriage is a constitutional problem. We could have both so walking and chewing gum is something we didnt do and we could have. The other road not taken is that we could have won the right to marry in a different way without leaving with dignity. We could have led to claim a something looked more like a quality on the level of excluding samesex couples from marriage is a form of statesponsored homophobia or hated towards gay people just as in loving versus virginia the Supreme Court said that laws that dont allow why people that marry a different sex is a form of white supremacy. Thats a powerful claim in a powerful argument from the Supreme Court did we have never heard again but we could have borrowed the power of what the law does and what motivates the law and the Marriage Equality fight but we didnt make a claim that some samesex couples should be blessed by the institution of marriage in order to dignify her recognize their dignity and in part it was an appeal to Justice Kennedy whose middle name is dignity. I saw something on line today that said maybe taking on dignity will help the abortion cases before the court this term. I think absolutely not. Theres something undignified about getting pregnant and wanting to terminate a pregnancy or to have the power yourself to make that decision is very different from the kinds of claims that were made are the arguments made in Marriage Equality cases. Here i am answering the questions and you wanted to ask a few. We have time for, we will collect three questions and then some final remarks. Thanks so much much. Spin amazing. So far we have limited our commentary to domestic politics in the Marriage Equality movement as it happened the west but we know Marriage Equality is an old list and transnational lies not only through the specter of samesex marriage and things like that samesex marriage promotion bill a measure which relates not only to respectability politics but also negroponte. The sun last couple of weeks the u. S. State department described a lgbt Asylum Seekers could apply to other partners come to the u. S. Only if they have not been able to get married in their native countries and only if they had been together not been able to get married. Im curious if you could comment on how the Marriage Equality limits affects not only respectability but disposability thats a great question. If you accept the proposition which i hope you will back the gains of Marriage Equality not just the United States but globally have been taking place within the shadow of neoliberal capitalism and privatization of dependency that the repudiation of the social welfare state not that he ever had one here but the repudiation of the social welfare state in other parts of the world is going on has represented. Then i think what we can say about that specific policy is that as strategy as regulatory strategy its about the distribution of these now privatized dependencies. If you cant get married in the country from which your partner comes than we will allow you to get married here so its a question really about the allocation of this now totally privatized right to be dependent through the institute for marriage and this relates to the question that professor russell race. I was involved in 2006 i believe that the group of activists from a variety of different parts of Civil Society who produced a document over the course of the weekend calling beyond gay marriage and the goal there was to try to defend not only the plural forms of kinship and intimate associations that gay man, lesbians had developed in the right to civil marriage but also to be true to the larger vision of the gay lesbian struggle. I would have added to my former marks for all people. Sexual democracy that large 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 you marry. That relationships of dependency out to be governed by what our former colleague Martha Fineman calls the sexual family. Its perfectly consistent with the logic of neoliberal capital and the contract in which those persons to get married whatever their Sexual Orientation will allow. Alongside that though we are also seeing what i think might be called the emergence of a new Sexual Orientation. You have normal activity and sexual normatively. The alignment of the normative im i say the normal with marital status whether you are gay, lesbian or heterosexual is i think the moment of sexual realignment which corresponds to racial realignment we have seen in the age of neoliberalism. So its a difficult but important question that you ask but you have to see the connections between the national but transnational and Global Capital on neoliberalism. One of the chapters in the book in the historical section talks about why northern soldiers or missionaries or benevolent others were forcing 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. We would like to have the men served in the military and or be sharecroppers but we want the men to be responsible for the dependent needs of their kids. Martha fineman all the way down to the work that she has done in thinking dependency in the privatization into the family. They dont say this was explicitly today but they said it very honestly then. Theres a lesson in that comparison. The one other thing i want to mention about that dependency is that one of the last chapters in the book looks at the gendering of samesex couples through the process of divorce. What judges are doing and Divorce Court or family court when samesex couples come to them to divorce her turning and a husband and gay man into wives in many contexts because all those judges in our heterosexual relationships. By law they have never had samesex couples before them and the rules of the worst assume gender inequality to echo something that was said earlier in the courts dont know how to see families at think responsibility and dependency differently than a deeply gendered form. The moves 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 divorce is shocking to some samesex couples who thought they had a different deal than what marriage law and tails. So the one partner becomes the husband and the other partner becomes the wife because thats all that those courts or those judges know how to render legible to them and then you get put into slots in it does its work. Its about the neoliberal i get the family. We will see whether we are able to blow that institution up, i dont know, hope you are right. We are out of time. Can we take 10 more minutes . We have a reception and we had oak sales. Lets take one more question. Yes. You mentioned at the beginning of your talk discipline. Just back away from the mic. You mentioned discipline and punishment as what might be a normalizing judgment which interprets a legitimate subject into the realm of cultural and certainly legal intelligibility seven if discipline aims to not only let the state will power more effectively to produce docile bodies that operate more efficiently and with more aptitude than what in your formulation of marriage does Marriage Equality or marriage itself as a structure to seek to amplify in terms of the capacity of the subjects . That such a sophisticated question. I dont want to dominate too much our day been the ira have rated. You wrote the book. You have earned the floor. I would agree with some of the comments of mr. Thomas that we have a neoliberal economic project at stake. You can still we a good person in my view and i will give you the eightpoint agenda ed to read been faithful and how not to collaborate of the tenderin