New from New York University Press:
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (November 2015), by
Katherine Franke (Columbia University). A description from the Press:
The staggering string of victories by the gay
rights movement’s campaign for marriage equality raises questions not
only about how gay people have been able to successfully deploy marriage
to elevate their social and legal reputation, but also what kind of
freedom and equality the ability to marry can mobilize.
Wedlocked
turns to history to compare today’s same-sex marriage movement to the
experiences of newly emancipated black people in the mid-nineteenth
century, when they were able to legally marry for the first time.
Maintaining that the transition to greater freedom was both wondrous
and perilous for newly emancipated people, Katherine Franke relates
stories of former slaves’ involvements with marriage and draws lessons
that serve as cautionary tales for today’s marriage rights movements.
While “be careful what you wish for” is a prominent theme, they also
teach us how the rights-bearing subject is inevitably shaped by the very
rights they bear, often in ways that reinforce racialized gender norms
and stereotypes. Franke further illuminates how the racialization of
same-sex marriage has redounded to the benefit of the gay rights
movement while contributing to the ongoing subordination of people of
color and the diminishing reproductive rights of women.
Like
same-sex couples today, freed African-American men and women
experienced a shift in status from outlaws to in-laws, from living
outside the law to finding their private lives organized by law and
state licensure. Their experiences teach us the potential and the perils
of being subject to legal regulation: rights—and specifically the right
to marriage—can both burden and set you free.
A few blurbs:
"Wedlocked is a brilliantly conceived
cautionary tale of the risks of securing a ‘freedom to marry.’ Drawing
upon original research into the complications that marriage rights
carried for slaves freed in the 1860s, Katherine Franke warns that
marriage rights are not the unalloyed triumph for gay people and
same-sex couples that the Supreme Court and virtually all commentators
have claimed. Anyone interested in gay marriage should read this
book—but so should anyone concerned about the stubborn perseverance of
racism in America. For those who appreciate irony, compare this
fascinating book with Justice Thomas’s skeptical dissent in the recent
marriage equality cases.”—William N. Eskridge Jr.
“A provocative intervention into legal and cultural
debates concerning same-sex marriage. Plumbing the well-known analogy
between race and sexual orientation in new ways, Wedlocked offers
a clear-eyed meditation on the traps and tripwires that marriage, as a
highly regulative and deeply gendered legal construct, imposes on
non-normative communities. With compelling stories, the book takes on
the tenets and truisms of same-sex marriage proponents in startling
ways. A real conversation-starter.”
—Martha Umphrey
More information is available
here.
