The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage

A Feminist Critique

Bronwyn Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138502673
• eBook ISBN: 9781351383950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Same-sex marriage is now legal in twenty-nine countries and the subject of continued debate around the world. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique considers this debate from a political economy perspective. Rather than engaging directly in the now well-rehearsed social-movement and academic for-and-against debates, this book focuses on processes of institutionalization of same-sex marriage and so-called "rainbow families" within (neo)liberal capitalist democracies. It examines how states and markets appropriate same-sex marriage and family to enhance their own political and symbolic capital, consolidating power and profit within existing systems of gendered and raced socioeconomic stratification.

Taking a radical feminist, heterodox, qualitative and intersectional approach, this book investigates the political economy of same-sex marriage across three axes: same-sex marriage as institution; same-sex marriage and the market; and the political economy of the "rainbow family". The examination of case studies from different countries and regions enables a comparative analysis that foregrounds cultural, political and economic path dependencies while at the same time highlighting a number of striking commonalities. In all the countries discussed in this book and in most respects, same-sex marriage has been integrated almost seamlessly into a mainstream/malestream political economy of marriage and family and its translation into added market and productive value.

The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique will be of use to researchers and students alike, and indeed to all those who are curious about the mainstreaming of homosexuality within twenty-first-century capitalist democracies.

PART I

(Same-sex) marriage as
institution

1

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY AS VALUE IN
LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES

If “family” is the foundational unit of our national economies and polities, it is also the foundational metaphor for the nation and by extension the state apparatus that gives the latter political identity, as well as a primary focus of international rights treaties and related public and private international law. Family-as-value permeates our social, cultural and economic relations to such an extent that it is considered natural rather than ideological (c.f. “gender”). Although political movements for sex equality since the late eighteenth century and more recently for LGBTIQ rights have introduced more egalitarian conceptualisations of marriage and family life, the basic ideological and structural function of family in heteropatriarchal relations of ruling and the justifying ideologies of nations has, in fact, changed very little. In this opening chapter, I will first consider “family”, and its related heterosexual and gendered kinship concepts, as metaphor for the nation. In the second part of the chapter, following second-wave feminist analyses, I will discuss the functioning of marriage and the family in heteropatriarchal patterns of socioeconomic and cultural reproduction, including capitalist notions of welfare and associated socioeconomic stratification.

Nations and states as families

The family as fundamental value underpins the structures and rhetoric of nations, and the symbolic value of citizenship within them. Family is a key metaphor for national belonging (fatherland, motherland) and even communities of nations (family, brotherhood, kin) as well as for any type of relationship or grouping that one wishes to connote as synonymous with the types of affective, moral or cultural virtue that are the ideal-type of social relations. Moreover, just as families have heads, so do nation-states, and the use of “family metaphors to establish the marks of authority” has characterised the symbolism of leadership in Western political history (Jones 1993, 119).

Brian Duff has suggested that “[i]t was an argument over the political significance of parenthood that gave birth to liberal-democratic political theory”, via John Locke’s response to Robert Filmer’s defence of the “omnipotent fatherhood” of the monarch (B. Duff 2010, 1). “Over these centuries” that followed Locke, Duff argues, “theorists, politicians, and citizens have repeatedly returned to parenthood as the central experience informing citizenship” (B. Duff 2010, 1). Although Duff does not decline “parent” in the masculine, the conversation over statehood and citizenship has largely concerned fatherhood, for, until very recently in modern history, women were not considered to possess the faculties permitting the mental development that would make of them full citizens.

Yet this modern conceptualisation of the family and its parenting functions as the bedrock of society, economy, polity and law is rooted in an ancient one. For Aristotle, the family was the fundamental grouping from which the polity grew, and the site of the ethical and intellectual development of citizens. It was a privately owned institution controlled by its male head, to whom wives, slaves and children were all subservient. Even if he noted that “half the free persons in a state are women”, in the same section he stressed, citing a poet, that women were inferior to men and that “silence is a woman’s glory” (Aristotle 350 BCE, Book One, online; and for feminist critiques, see e.g. Millett [1970]1978; and Okin 1979, ch. 4).

Aristotle’s view was seized upon with gusto by many, indeed most, Enlightenment philosophers, who more generally drew inspiration from classical philosophy, and who saw in the “natural” sexual division of labour the proper foundations for a moral society. Even Rousseau, who was of a more Platonically Republican leaning in his distaste for private property (Plato 360 BCE), took a more Aristotelian turn in his desire to keep women firmly in their familial nurturing place. Thus, the same philosopher who famously and ironically stated in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes that “the first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say: This is mine, and found people who were simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (Rousseau 1755, online, my translation), also famously stated, in Book V of Émile, that “If woman is made in order to please and be subjugated, then she ought to make herself pleasing to man rather than provoke him” (1782, online, my translation). He went on to argue at length that, being made different from men—having the primary purpose of producing and rearing the children of their husband, to whom they owe obedience and fidelity, and for whom they should be entertaining—women should also have a different education. The cultivation of Émile’s female counterpart Sophie must be with the aim of developing this art of pleasing (music, languages, dance), rather than the art of governing and public life, which, according to Rousseau, would simply force women into being men, and in doing so “lead to the most intolerable abuses”, subverting “the most tender sentiments of nature” (1782, online, my translation). Rousseauldian morality necessitates that Sophie devote her energies to the petite patrie (little fatherland/nation) that is productive of the “good” (male) citizens of the grande patrie (greater fatherland/nation).

Rousseau’s imagined founder of civil society was thus also the founder of familia: that fundamental grouping within the enclosed “plot of land”, where the business of production and reproduction went on. As French materialist feminist Christine Delphy reminds us in her foundational essay “L’ennemi principal” (the main enemy), first published in 1970, in a special issue of the French journal Partisans devoted to the theme of “Women’s liberation”:

historically and etymologically the family is a unit of production … Familia in Latin designates the collection of land, slaves, women/wives and children subjected to the power (then synonym of property) of the father of the family. (Delphy 1998a, 37, my translation)

Rousseau and his Enlightenment contemporaries got round the problem of equality within the modern polity by retaining the ancient definition of family and excluding women from citizenship, through a strict separation of the public and private spheres and relegation of women to the latter. His framing of the petite patrie and grande patrie, and of Émile’s and Sophie’s respective roles within them, makes explicit the relationship between family as social kinship unit and nation as extension of that unit, with the father as the head of both in a process of material and ideological reproduction.

Benedict Anderson’s famous “imagined communities” in the modern political framing of the nation (1983) remain at their base “imagined extended families”. Even if, in its foundational French and United Statian modern conceptualisations (1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, 1776 Declaration of Independence), the nation is formed out of the collective political will of “the people”, it remains founded on the ambitions of its founding fathers: the very term “Founding Fathers” is part of the national mythology of the United States. Moreover, “the people” has always been declined in the masculine. Even if women are now admitted fully fledged to the category, for “the people” to be “the people”, its significant component remains men. Men-without-women can still arguably be discursively synonymous with “the people”—groups of men are certainly considered synonymous with groups of ordinary “people” (minus the “the”), but women-without-men almost never are.

In our modern polities, the state then becomes the Father of the national familia (or “people”), and the citizens’ love of the Fatherland remains a positive value, often explicitly promoted by states. For example, “patriots” (a term derived from the same Latin root as patrie) are, in United Statian political discourse, those “good” citizens who love their country and all that is good about it, and will defend it in speech and action. Gary Johnson has argued that the language of kinship is a core feature of patriotic discourse, in that it cues “altruistic dispositions” among citizens, a metaphorical bond to a human grouping symbolically configured as family, and that it appeals to a “reciprocity-based duty that is created by the benefits one enjoys as a citizen of one’s country” (Johnson 1987, 169). Although I disagree with Johnson’s evolutionary-biologising, conservative and patriarchal view of social and political organisation, the configuration of nation-as-father to which the national family pledges loyalty and obedience continues to run through even our modern egalitarian capitalist democracies. In contrast, “nationalists” (a term derived from the Latin natio, meaning “birth”), are those “bad” citizens who exhibit a feeling of ethno-political superiority and a negative and exclusionary attitude to those who are considered not to be members of the national community.

In Latin America, the term patria takes on a broader meaning of cultural and political unity in the face of hegemonic Western powers: the expression Patria grande refers to a continental unity that has, historically and today, generally been deployed by the left. It has been associated in particular with revolutionary and anticolonial figures such as Simón Bolivar and José de San Martín.

Outside these particular political framings of patriotism which ostensibly cross political divides and unite “the people”, often in the face of threats to that same “people”, notions of fatherland and the hierarchical relation between men and women that such notions encapsulate are usually assumed to linger only within conservative or even far-right worldviews. The idea of fatherland (Vaterland) is no doubt most closely associated with Nazi ideology in the Anglo-world imaginary, but its origins as a celebration of the German nation and its associated state apparatus go back much further. (Likewise the German phrase Kinder Küche Kirche [children, kitchen and church], now enduringly associated with Nazi ideology, is believed to have first been pronounced by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last King of Prussia, in the late nineteenth century.) The term Vaterland notably features in the German national anthem, which today is the third verse of the Lied der Deutschen (Song of the Germans), composed by Joseph Hadyn and first performed in 1797, with lyrics by the poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben added in 1841. Fallersleben was a proponent of German unification, which occurred following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871. Thus, again, the idea of patria is associated with national unity and solidarity. The lyrics celebrated this nationalist zeal, but with the advent of Nazism the beginning of the first verse, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles/ Über alles in der Welt” (Germany, Germany above all / Above all in the world), became indelibly associated with Nazism, which resulted in post-World War II German leader Konrad Adenauer officially dropping all but the third verse. Unfortunately, the retention of the idea of fatherland remained unproblematic for him. The verse goes as follows:

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity and right and freedom)

Für das deutsche Vaterland! (For the German Fatherland)

Danach lasst uns alle streben (Towards these let us all strive)

Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand! (Brotherly with heart and hand)

In 2018, this third verse of the anthem also came to pose a problem in a now-egalitarian Germany, with Kristin Rose-Möhring, the equal opportunity commissioner for Germany’s Family Ministry, proposing that Vaterland be changed to Heimatland (homeland) and “brotherly” be replaced with “courageously”. In doing so, she followed a trend set in both Austria and Canada, which had already replaced masculinist language in their own anthems with gender-neutral terms—although the question is begged as to whether such a change will truly reflect a fundamental reconfiguration of the ideological apparatus of the nation-state, in Germany, Austria or Canada. The original language remains in the German anthem at the time of writing.

Even following their emancipation as citizens in formal terms, women have continued to be mobilised primarily as mothers or spouses of (future) citizens rather than autonomous agents. Some of the great male emancipators of women, such as Jules Ferry in early Third Republic France in the late nineteenth century, who opened up public secular schooling to girls and encouraged training of women as primary school teachers, or Kemal Atatürk in post-World War I Turkey, who granted Turkish women full citizenship, did so in the interests of the nation and its governing state far more than in the interests of the women themselves. The emancipated woman in these modern scenarios was as much mother and wife of the nation as the traditional Kinder-Küche-Kirche wife-and-mother of German imperial imaginings—or indeed Rousseau’s subservient and designed-to-please wife of the modern citizen. Although the specific symbolism and role of the nation’s mothers served a different political agenda for these more emancipationist figures of Ferry and Atatürk, it nonetheless remained a heavily masculinist one.

Ernest Renan, author of the famous Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (what is a nation?), first delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, characterised the nation as formed out of the collective “moral consciousness” of a people who had together made sacrifices for that nation and thus developed a sense of solidarity (Renan 1882): in short, the patriots. For Renan, it is the memory of those sacrifices by our ancestors—those heroic “great men”—that are the bedrock of the nation: “the cult of the ancestors is the most legitimate of all; our ancestors [those “great men”] have made us what we are” (Renan 1882, part III, my translation). The father is the heroic ideal-type of the nation, whether it be the modernist democratic French or United Statian versions, or their authoritarian alter-ego of the Nazi Vaterland.

As concerns mothers and mother-symbolism, the idea of “motherland” has rarely, if ever, been deployed as a direct metaphor for the nation-state, national unity or citizens’ presumed pride in their national belonging, but rather as a metaphor for the nurturing home-and-hearth of one’s childhood. If men build nations and national consciousness through their real or imagined heroic acts, women’s role is to reproduce them, both biologically and symbolically. In their introduction to one of the iconic feminist anthologies on women, nation and state, a work titled, as it happens, Woman-Nation-State, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis noted that women “are a special focus of state concerns as a social category with a specific role (particularly human reproduction)” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, 6). As the “biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities” women become, by extension, “reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups” and guardians and transmitters of the collectivity’s culture (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, 7). Women’s dress, behaviour and wifely and—especially—mothering activities become intensely important to the men in their communities and to ruling institutions (or revolutionary movements) at times of national (identity) crisis, whether real or perceived (Enloe 1990; Moghadam 1994; Yuval-Davis 2006). Women reproduce the nation, both biologically and symbolically, and transmit its values within the political economy of the family—but the nation does not “belong” to them (Meyer 2000).

The mothering of the nation thus has an inward, nurturing focus: mothering the nation is about consolidating its values and ensuring its cohesion and ongoing protection. Fathering the nation is about being tough and strong to the outside world. The “Mommy” versus “Daddy” framing in politics has been developed notably in relation to the Democrat-Republican divide in the US, and has been famously theorised by George Lakoff as “moral politics” (1996, 2002). Lakoff contrasts the conservative worldview—the Strict Father model—with the liberal (progressive) worldview—the Nurturant Parent model. In using this nomenclature, Lakoff gender-neutralises the Nurturant model, implying that the conservative worldview is strictly gendered while the liberal/progressive worldview is not. Lakoff’s sleight-of-vocabulary is worrying in that it creates the impression that the left of politics is not gender-demarcated in its functioning and that the qualities of empathy, strong social ties and good communication, which he associates with the Nurturant Parent model, are not also typically associated with women and mothers. Moreover, Lakoff’s half-gendered framing is not reproduced in US political commentary more broadly; the latter explicitly associates “Daddy” with the Republican Party and “Mommy” with the Democrats. What Lakoff does recognise, however, is that these are “two different forms of family-based morality” and that “what links them to politics is a common understanding of the nation as family, with the government as parent” (Lakoff 2002, 35).

Duff has suggested, however, that “when parenthood is imagined to summon a confidence in our political virtues, it often reveals profound insecurities” and that “when parenthood is thought to instill the openness to contingency and change appropriate to democratic political contest, it often produces unexpected fundamentalisms and stagnation” (B. Duff 2010, 3). Lee Edelman has further argued that US political discourse is framed around what he calls “reproductive futurism”, in which “our children” not only inherit the social order we construct, but provide the ideological authorisation for its imposition. “[T]he [idealised fictional] Child”, he writes, “has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman 2004, 11). He further notes that some gay men, lesbians and transgender people are “psychically invested” in this reproductive futurism, which he nonetheless sees as associated with “heteronormative mandates” (Edelman 2004, 17). The citizen-as-parent is to the imaginary child within its imaginary family what the government-as-parent is to the “imagined community” (family) (Benedict Anderson 1983) of the nation’s citizens. It is a framing upon which is built the rhetoric of order, harmony, certainty, refuge—and investment in projecting one’s ideas thereof into an imagined future—whether the rhetoric follows “Strict Father” or “Nurturing Parent/ Mother” lines, or any one of a number of hybrid variants thereof, including gay and lesbian ones. Further, we will see in Chapter 7 that “working families” has entered political discourse within discussions of wage justice and so-called “work-life balance” (as if working sat somewhere outside living, which makes it, symbolically speaking, a kind of repeated temporary death).

In fact, the logics and metaphors of family are so deeply ingrained, and extended so readily to national, subnational or political communities, that second-wave feminists have not hesitated to pick up the terminology, positing a “sisterhood” of flesh-and-blood women as a counter-metaphor to the “brotherhood” of abstracted-universalist “Man”. Laudable, even revolutionary, as the gesture may seem—and certainly seemed in 1970, when the famous early-second-wave anthology Sisterhood is Powerful was published in the US (Morgan 1970; see also Morgan 1984, 2003)—the term is nonetheless problem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I (Same-sex) marriage as institution
• Part II Selling same-sex marriage
• Part III The political economy of “rainbow families”
• Conclusion
• References
• Index