Undoing Gender (19 page)

My point here is not to suggest that one must, in relation to gay marriage and kinship debates, remain critical rather than political, as if such a distinction were finally possible or desirable, but only that a politics that incorporates a critical understanding is the only one that can maintain a claim to being self-reflective and nondogmatic. To be political does not merely mean to take a single and enduring “stand.”

For instance, to say that one is for or against gay marriage is not always easy to do, since it may be that one wants to secure the right for those who wish to make use of it even as one does not want it for oneself, or it may be that one wants to counter the homophobic discourses that have been marshaled against gay marriage, but one does not want to be, therefore, in favor of it. Or it may be that one believes very strongly that marriage is the best way for lesbian and gay people to go and would like to install it as a new norm, a norm for the future. Or it may be that one not only opposes it for oneself but for everybody, and that the task at end is to rework and revise the social organization of friendship, sexual contacts, and community to produce non-state-centered forms of support and alliance, because marriage, given its historical weight, becomes an “option” only by extending itself as a norm (and thus foreclosing options), one that also extends property relations and renders the social forms for sexuality more conservative. For a progressive sexual movement, even one that may want to produce marriage as an option for non-heterosexuals, the proposition that marriage should become the only way to sanction or legitimate sexuality is unacceptably conservative. Even if the question is not one of marriage but of legal contracts, augmenting domestic partnership arrangements as legal contracts, certain questions still follow: Why should it be that marriage or legal contracts become the basis on which health care benefits, for instance, are allocated?

Why shouldn’t there be ways of organizing health care entitlements such that everyone, regardless of marital status, has access to them? If one argues for marriage as a way of securing those entitlements, then does one not also affirm that entitlements as important as health care ought to remain allocated on the basis of marital status? What does this do to the community of the nonmarried, the single, the divorced, the uninterested, the non-monogamous, and how does the sexual field become reduced, in its very legibility, once we extend marriage as a norm?
¹⁰

Regardless of one’s view on gay marriage, there is clearly a demand upon those who work in sexuality studies to respond to many of the most homophobic arguments that have been marshaled against gay marriage proposals. Many of these arguments are not only fueled by homophobic sentiment but often focus on fears about reproductive relations, whether they are natural or “artificial.” What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism? Indeed, the debates on gay marriage and gay kinship, two issues that are often conflated, have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears, fears about technology, about new demographics, and also about the very unity and transmissability of the nation, and fears that feminism, in the insistence on childcare, has effectively opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers. In the French debates on the PACS (the “pacts of civil solidarity” that constitute an alternative to marriage for any two individuals unrelated by blood, regardless of sexual orientation), the passage of the bill finally depended on proscribing the rights of non-heterosexual couples from adopting children and accessing reproductive technology. The same provision was recently proposed and adopted in Germany as well.
¹¹
In both cases, one can see that the child figures in the debate as a dense site for the transfer and reproduction of culture, where “culture” carries with it implicit norms of racial purity and domination.
¹²
Indeed, one can see a conversion between the arguments in France that rail against the threat to “culture” posed by the prospect of legally allied gay people having children—and I will suspend for the purposes of this discussion the question of what it means to “have” in this instance—and those arguments concerning issues of immigration, of what Europe is. This last concern raises the question, implicitly and explicitly, of what is truly French, the basis of its culture, which becomes, through an imperial logic, the basis of culture itself, its universal and invariable conditions. The debates center not only on the questions of what culture is and who should be admitted but also on how the subjects of culture should be reproduced.

They also concern the status of the state, and in particular its power to confer or withdraw recognition for forms of sexual alliance. Indeed, the argument against gay marriage is always, implicitly or explicitly, an argument about what the state should do, and what it should provide, as well as what kinds of intimate relations ought to be eligible for state legitimation. What is this desire to keep the state from offering recognition to non-heterosexual partners, and what is the desire to compel the state to offer such recognition? For both sides of the debate, the question is not only which relations of desire ought to be legitimated by the state but also who may desire the state,
who may
desire the state’s desire
.

Indeed, the questions are even more complicated: Whose desire might qualify as a desire for state legitimation? Whose desire might qualify as the desire of the state? Who may desire the state? And whom may the state desire? Whose desire will be the state’s desire? Conversely, and this is just speculation—but perhaps academic work might be regarded as a social site for such speculation—it seems that what one is wanting when one wants “state recognition” for marriage, and what one is not wanting when one wants to limit the scope of that recognition for others, are complex wants. The state becomes the means by which a fantasy becomes literalized: desire and sexuality are ratified, justified, known, publicly instated, imagined as permanent, durable. And, at that very moment, desire and sexuality are dispossessed and displaced, so that what one “is,” and what one’s relationship “is,” are no longer private matters. Indeed, ironically, one might say that through marriage, personal desire acquires a certain anonymity and interchangeability, becomes, as it were, publicly mediated and, in that sense, a kind of legitimated public sex. But more than that, marriage compels, at least logically, universal recognition: everyone must let you into the door of the hospital; everyone must honor your claim to grief; everyone will assume your natural rights to a child; everyone will regard your relationship as elevated into eternity. In this way, the desire for universal recognition is a desire to become universal, to become interchangeable in one’s universality, to vacate the lonely particularity of the non-ratified relation, and, perhaps above all, to gain both place and sanctification in that imagined relation to the state. Place and sanctification: these are surely powerful fantasies, and they take on particular phantasmatic form when we consider the bid for gay marriage.

The state can become the site for the recirculation of religious desires, for redemption, for belonging, for eternity. And we might well ask what happens to sexuality when it runs through this particular circuit of fantasy: Is it alleviated of its guilt, its deviance, its discontinuity, its asociality, its spectrality? And if it is alleviated of all that, where precisely do these negativities go? Do they not tend to be projected onto those who have not or will not enter this hallowed domain? And does the projection take the form of judging others morally, of enacting a social abjection, and, hence, of becoming the occasion to institute a new hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate sexual arrangement?

The Poor Child and the Fate of the Nation

The proposal in France to institute civil unions (pacts of social solidarity) as an alternative to marriage sought at once to sidestep marriage and secure legal ties. It ran up against a limit, however, when questions of reproduction and adoption surfaced. Indeed, in France, concerns over reproduction work in tandem with concerns over the reproduction of an identifiably French culture. As suggested above, one can see a certain implicit identification of French culture with universalism, and this has its own consequences for the fantasy of the nation at stake. For understanding this debate, it is important to recognize how, in particular, the figure of the child of non-heterosexual parents becomes a cathected site for anxieties about cultural purity and cultural transmission. In the recent fracas over the PACS, the only way that the proposal could pass was by denying rights of joint adoption to individuals in such relations. Indeed, as Eric Fassin and others have argued, it is the alteration of rights of filiation that is most scandalous in the French context, not marriage per se.
¹³
The life of the contract can be, within a range, extended, but the rights of filiation cannot.

In some of the cultural commentary that accompanied this decision to deny adoptive rights to openly gay people, we heard from Sylviane Agacinski, a well-known French philosopher, that it goes against the “symbolic order” to let homosexuals form families.
¹⁴
Whatever social forms these are, they are not marriages, and they are not families; indeed, in her view, they are not properly “social” at all but private.

The struggle is in part over words, over where and how they apply as well as about their plasticity and their equivocity. But it is more specifically a struggle over whether certain practices of nomination keep in place the presuppositions about the limits of what is humanly recognizable. The argument rests on a certain paradox, however, that would be hard to deny. Because if one does
not
want to recognize certain human relations as part of the humanly recognizable, then one has
already
recognized them, and one seeks to deny what it is one has already, in one way or another, understood. “Recognition” becomes an effort to deny what exists and, hence, becomes the instrument for the refusal of recognition. In this way, it becomes a way of shoring up a normative fantasy of the human over and against dissonant versions of itself. To defend the limits of what is recognizable against that which challenges it is to understand that the norms that govern recognizability have already been challenged. In the United States, we are used to hearing conservative and reactionary polemics against homosexuality as unnatural, but that is not precisely the discourse through which the French polemic proceeds. Agacinski, for instance, does not assume that the family takes a natural form. Rather, the state is constrained in recognizing marriage as heterosexual, in her view, not by nature or natural law, but by something called “the symbolic order” (which corresponds to and ratifies a natural law). It is according to the dictates of this order that the state is obligated to refuse to recognize such relations.

I will lay out Agacinski’s view in a moment, not because she is the most vocal opponent to the transformations in kinship that gay marriage might imply, but because some time ago a colleague sent me an editorial Agacinski had written in
Le Monde,
a missive that in some way demanded a response.
¹⁵
In her editorial, she identifies a certain American strain of queer and gender theory as the monstrous future for France were these transformations to occur. So let us say, without going into details, that a certain interpellation occurred on the front page of
Le Monde
in which my name figured as a sign of the coming monstrosity. And consider that I am in a quandary here because my own views are used to caution against a monstrous future that will come to pass if lesbian and gay people are permitted to form state-ratified kinship arrangements. So on the one hand there is a demand to respond and to rebut these allegations; on the other hand, it seems crucial not to accept the terms in which one’s opponent has framed the debate, a debate which, I fear, is no debate at all, but a highly publicized polemic and fear-mongering. My own quandary is not mine alone. Will I, in opposing her, occupy a position in which I argue for state legitimation?

Is this what I desire?

On the one hand, it would be easy enough to argue that she is wrong, that the family forms in question are viable social forms, and that the current episteme of intelligibility might be usefully challenged and rearticulated in light of these social forms.
¹⁶
After all, her view matches and fortifies those that maintain that legitimate sexual relations take a heterosexual and state-sanctioned form, and who work to derealize viable and significant sexual alliances that fail to conform to that model. Of course, there are consequences to this kind of derealization that go beyond hurting someone’s feelings or causing offense to a group of people. It means that when you arrive at the hospital to see your lover, you may not. It means that when your lover falls into a coma, you may not assume certain executorial rights. It means that when your lover dies, you may not be permitted to receive the body.

It means that when your child is left with you, the nonbiological parent, you may not be able to counter the claims of biological relatives in court and may lose custody, and even access. It means you may not be able to provide health care benefits for one another. These are all very significant forms of disenfranchisement, which are made all the worse by the personal effacements that occur in daily life and invariably take a toll on a relationship. The sense of delegitimation can make it harder to sustain a bond, a bond that is not real anyway, a bond that does not “exist,” that never had a chance to exist, that was never meant to exist. If you’re not real, it can be hard to sustain yourselves over time. Here is where the absence of state legitimation can emerge within the psyche as a pervasive, if not fatal, sense of self-doubt. And if you’ve actually lost the lover who was never recognized to be your lover, did you really lose that person? Is this a loss, and can it be publicly grieved? Surely this is something that has become a pervasive problem in the queer community, given the losses from AIDS, the losses of lives and loves who are always in struggle to be recognized as such.