Actually, gay marriage is a contradiction in terms.
The whole idea of marriage has to do with a union of two (complex and unique) human beings who decide to make their ties socially/politically relevant.
The whole idea of being "gay" has to do with an abstract and general preference for a certain type of interaction with a certain type of human genitalia (an identity I tend to see as unnecessary and molar, but that's not crucial here).
Now predicating something like "gayness" on marriage clearly leads to a paradox - your choice for one person to "love officially" is orthogonal to what you generally like to do/see/have/enter. What's more, as the history of love has tought us, it is possible (and it is even enormously fluffy) to love someone in spite of their attributes, against our general preference, to go for the who in spite of the what.
It that sense, I am against gay marriage as a goal on the social agenda. Of course, I am for opening the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans, regardless of gender or anything else. But ranting about gay marriage has nothing to do with opening, it has to do with closing, entrenching and pigeonholing. And if this ranting goes on long enough, the society will eventually get a mojoritarian and molar formation ("community") which will code and prescribe what gay marriage is - a coding which will necessarily be more detailed than that for the "other", "heterosexual" marriage. This molar formation exists in the Netherlands already (Rosi Braidotti) and I can imagine other European societies with emancipatory programmes for homosexuals will develop their own very soon.
What is to be done then? I think it's all about reframing. You could say I'm asking you to use an unnecessary complicated formulation, because if you are fighting for/supporting "opening of the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans" in the world we live in, you are basically talking about "gays" and "lesbians", ergo you are fighting for/supporting "gay marriage".
Well, I would like to claim that there is a crucial difference: if you are for "gay marriage", you are supporting a "gays'" cause, you are doing something for the "the gays", you are hoping "the gays" will get there and then you will be happy for "them". In other words, in case you don't read my quotation marks, I think you then participate in building another molar formation.
On the other hand, if you are fighting for/supporting "the opening of the institution of marriage", you are fighting for/supporting a cause which belongs to all of us who think that the gender of their spouses should not be of interest to the state, you are fighting for a society in which there is a public and political recognition of the simple fact that we have no right to constrain consenting adults of inhabiting the institute of marriage. To be sure, I am not pleading for a genderless society here and I am not asking people to pretend that the gender of their spouses is irrelevant to them. I am just asking for it to be irrelevant in front of the authorities. It is like being a teacher or a checkout person - of course I have noticed that my first class teacher was a man and that the checkout girl today was a girl, but I am glad it could have been the other way around as well. The state should be blind/indifferent when it comes to marriage just as it (hopefully) was when that teacher and that checkout girl were being hired.
The whole idea of marriage has to do with a union of two (complex and unique) human beings who decide to make their ties socially/politically relevant.
The whole idea of being "gay" has to do with an abstract and general preference for a certain type of interaction with a certain type of human genitalia (an identity I tend to see as unnecessary and molar, but that's not crucial here).
Now predicating something like "gayness" on marriage clearly leads to a paradox - your choice for one person to "love officially" is orthogonal to what you generally like to do/see/have/enter. What's more, as the history of love has tought us, it is possible (and it is even enormously fluffy) to love someone in spite of their attributes, against our general preference, to go for the who in spite of the what.
It that sense, I am against gay marriage as a goal on the social agenda. Of course, I am for opening the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans, regardless of gender or anything else. But ranting about gay marriage has nothing to do with opening, it has to do with closing, entrenching and pigeonholing. And if this ranting goes on long enough, the society will eventually get a mojoritarian and molar formation ("community") which will code and prescribe what gay marriage is - a coding which will necessarily be more detailed than that for the "other", "heterosexual" marriage. This molar formation exists in the Netherlands already (Rosi Braidotti) and I can imagine other European societies with emancipatory programmes for homosexuals will develop their own very soon.
What is to be done then? I think it's all about reframing. You could say I'm asking you to use an unnecessary complicated formulation, because if you are fighting for/supporting "opening of the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans" in the world we live in, you are basically talking about "gays" and "lesbians", ergo you are fighting for/supporting "gay marriage".
Well, I would like to claim that there is a crucial difference: if you are for "gay marriage", you are supporting a "gays'" cause, you are doing something for the "the gays", you are hoping "the gays" will get there and then you will be happy for "them". In other words, in case you don't read my quotation marks, I think you then participate in building another molar formation.
On the other hand, if you are fighting for/supporting "the opening of the institution of marriage", you are fighting for/supporting a cause which belongs to all of us who think that the gender of their spouses should not be of interest to the state, you are fighting for a society in which there is a public and political recognition of the simple fact that we have no right to constrain consenting adults of inhabiting the institute of marriage. To be sure, I am not pleading for a genderless society here and I am not asking people to pretend that the gender of their spouses is irrelevant to them. I am just asking for it to be irrelevant in front of the authorities. It is like being a teacher or a checkout person - of course I have noticed that my first class teacher was a man and that the checkout girl today was a girl, but I am glad it could have been the other way around as well. The state should be blind/indifferent when it comes to marriage just as it (hopefully) was when that teacher and that checkout girl were being hired.
since you 'sort of' wanted to know:
ReplyDeletehttp://militantlyambivalent.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-militant-ambivalence.html
obviously dormant for a while now but I will get back to it sooner or later