By: Joshua R. Weaver
Love and commitment are the cornerstones of marriage and family. We build families and entwine ourselves in matrimony to uphold societal doctrines of fidelity, monogamy and stability.
The other week, the Supreme Court poured another layer of foundation into the gay-marriage wishing well – building the underpinning for Constitutional arguments in favor of same-sex marriage.
That Wednesday, I trekked down to the West Village to witness the throngs of New Yorkers gathering to claim a victory in front of the Stonewall Inn. A fitting place to celebrate the latest gay rights win, for sure. But, as marriage continues to grow as the gay and lesbian community’s preeminent battle, is the LGBT world actually losing the war?
Jeffrey Toobin in an April-1 comment piece for The New Yorker wrote of Edith Windsor’s case against DOMA: “And, in addition to these practical considerations [social security benefits, joint federal-tax filing, green card sponsoring, etc.], there is the matter of the Supreme Court’s acknowledging the capacity of gay people for commitment and love.”
But, let’s play devil’s advocate – maybe commitment, love, compassion, and devotion counterbalance many notions of queerness that helped fashion today’s LGBT movement.
In grad school, I had the privilege of sifting through Lee Edelman’s No Future, a vitriol-laden read that’s as dense as a 5-lb. brick. Its arguments, while not easily digested, are particularly telling as gays and lesbians march towards the altar.
For Edelman, this modern-day fight for inclusion does little more than accommodate a sort of heterosexual imperative – love and marriage being tools for child-rearing. There’s no argument that LGBT parents are just as competent as their straight counterparts. But, for Edelman and others, you can’t have your queer cake and eat it too.
[Queerness] “Finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good,” Edelman argues. Queerness’ evasiveness is what powers up its stamina – its ability to conceal and deceive the senses of dominance and normalcy. For queers, sameness is a sin, the very same sameness that marriage propagates.
It’s gay rights, though, not queer rights. Gays have children, joint incomes and shared homes in Great Neck. Marriage seems like the most instinctive next step, no? The queer movement has clearly moved towards the political and ideological center as the fight for tolerance and acceptance has strengthened. But, at what cost?
The transgressive and subversive aspects of queerness are what make it so perfectly powerful. Queerness is being able to say ‘fuck you’ to the patriarchal, hetero-centric, hypermasculine world. Queer expression and queer performance gives us self-creation and self-definition, two things that have invariably helped the LGBT world define itself outside the terms and conditions of dominant culture and society.
Recently, I looked into how gender-bending rapper Mykki Blanco undermined masculinity and hetero-centricity by using queer performance to waver between society’s genders to invalidate the essence of both.
And, while Blanco may represent a performative, outlying example of how queerness is a beneficial defense against dominant culture, there’s a liberating power in being queer, and it’s up to the LGBT world to figure out what to do with it.
In the case of marriage, there’s little liberation in latching on to heteronormative concepts like reproductive futurism, monogamy, even capitalism.
Maybe not all equality is built the same after all.
“Equality is nowadays used to challenge difference,” said London-based writer and lawyer Jon Holbrook in a recent article for a website called Spiked. “Distinctions drawn on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, race and age, to name but a few, are now ripe for challenge in the name of equality.”
Holbrook’s argument gets a bit shaky; to say LGBT people are no longer ‘oppressed’ is a pretty heavy-handed statement. Then again, what some people see as inclusion, liberation and/or equality may be an oppression of its own terms.
Queer theory’s fun to play around with, and its arguments against marriage inclusion are aplenty. But, if you can’t conquer the system, why not join it? Besides, with all of marriage’s legal and ideological covenants, there’s much merit in its support. And, anyway, when is love not oppressive?
