Undoing Gender (18 page)

In recent sociology, conceptions of kinship have become disjoined from the marriage assumption, so that for example, Carol Stack’s now classic study of urban African-American kinship,
All Our Kin,
shows how kinship functions well through a network of women, some related through biological ties, and some not.
²
The enduring effect of the history of slavery on African-American kinship relations has become the focus of new studies by Nathaniel Mackey and Fred Moten, showing how the dispossession of kin relations by slavery offers a continuing legacy of “wounded kinship” within African-American life. If, as Saidiya Hartman maintains, “slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship,”
³
it is because African-American kinship has been at once the site of intense state surveillance and pathologization, which has led to the double bind of being subject to normalizing pressures within the context of a continuing social and political delegitimation. As a result, it is not possible to separate questions of kinship from property relations (and conceiving persons as property), and from the fictions of “bloodline” as well as the national and racial interests by which these lines are sustained.

Kath Weston has supplied ethnographic descriptions of lesbian and gay nonmarital kinship relations that emerge outside of heterosexually based family ties and only partially approximate the family form in some instances.
⁴
In 2001, anthropologist Cai Hua offered a dramatic refutation of the Lévi-Straussian view of kinship as a negotiation of a patrilineal line through marriage ties in his study of the Na of China, in which neither husbands nor fathers figure prominently in determinations of kinship.
⁵

Marriage has also been separated from questions of kinship to the extent that gay marriage legislative proposals often exclude rights to adoption or reproductive technologies as one of the assumed entitlements of marriage. These proposals have been offered in Germany and France; in the United States, successful gay marriage proposals do not always have a direct impact on family law, especially when they seek as their primary aim to establish “symbolic recognition” for dyadic relations by the state.
⁶

The petition for marriage rights seeks to solicit state recognition for non-heterosexual unions, and so configures the state as withholding an entitlement that it really should distribute in a nondiscriminatory way, regardless of sexual orientation. That the state’s offer might result in the intensification of normalization is not widely recognized as a problem within the mainstream lesbian and gay movement, typified by the Human Rights Campaign.
⁷
The normalizing powers of the state are made especially clear, however, when we consider how continuing quandaries about kinship both condition and limit the marriage debates. In some contexts, the symbolic allocation of marriage, or marriage-like arrangements, is preferable to altering the requirements for kinship and for individual or plural rights to bear or adopt children or, legally, to co-parent. Variations on kinship that depart from normative, dyadic heterosexually based family forms secured through the marriage vow are figured not only as dangerous for the child but perilous to the putative natural and cultural laws said to sustain human intelligibility.

It is important to know that the debates in France targeted certain U.S. views on the social construction and variability of gender relations as portending a perilous “Americanization” of kinship relations (
filiation
) in France.
⁸
As a result, this essay seeks to offer a response to this critique, outlined in the third section that follows, as an effort not to defend “Americanization” but to suggest instead that the kinship dilemmas of first-world nations often provide allegories for one another of their own worries about the disruptive effects of kinship variability on their own national projects. In turn, I seek here to query the French debate on kinship and marriage to show how the argument in favor of legal alliance can work in tandem with a state normalization of recognizable kinship relations, a condition that extends rights of contract while in no way disrupting the patrilineal assumptions of kinship or the project of the unified nation which it supports.

In what follows I consider at least two dimensions of this contemporary predicament in which the state is sought for the recognition it might confer on same-sex couples and countered for the regulatory control on normative kinship that it continues to exercise. The state is not the same state in each of these bids, for we ask for an intervention by the state in the one domain (marriage) only to suffer excessive regulation in another (kinship). Does the turn to marriage make it thus more difficult to argue in favor of the viability of alternative kinship arrangements, or for the well-being of the “child” in any number of social forms? Moreover, what happens to the radical project to articulate and support the proliferation of sexual practices outside of marriage and the obligations of kinship? Does the turn to the state signal the end of a radical sexual culture? Does such a prospect become eclipsed as we become increasingly preoccupied with landing the state’s desire?

Gay Marriage: Desiring the State’s Desire and the Eclipse of Sexuality

Gay marriage obviously draws upon profound and abiding investments not only in the heterosexual couple per se but also in the question of what forms of relationship ought to be legitimated by the state.
⁹

This crisis of legitimation can be considered from a number of perspectives, but let us consider for the moment the ambivalent gift that legitimation can become. To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation. It follows that the delimitation of legitimation will take place only through an exclusion of a certain sort, though not a patently dialectical one. The sphere of legitimate intimate alliance is established through the producing and intensifying regions of illegitimacy. There is, however, a more fundamental occlusion at work here. We misunderstand the sexual field if we consider that the legitimate and the illegitimate appear to exhaust its immanent possibilities. There is outside the struggle between the legitimate and the illegitimate—which has as its goal the conversion of the illegitimate into the legitimate—a field that is less thinkable, one not figured in light of its ultimate convertibility into legitimacy. This is a field outside the disjunction of illegitimate and legitimate; it is not yet thought as a domain, a sphere, a field; it is not yet either legitimate or illegitimate, has not yet been thought through in the explicit discourse of legitimacy.

Indeed, this would be a sexual field that does not have legitimacy as its point of reference, its ultimate desire. The debate over gay marriage takes place through such a logic, for we see the debate break down almost immediately into the question of whether marriage ought to be extended legitimately to homosexuals. This means that the sexual field is circumscribed in such a way that sexuality is already thought of in terms of marriage and marriage is already thought of as the purchase on legitimacy.

In the case of gay marriage or of affiliative legal alliances, we see how various sexual practices and relationships that fall outside the purview of the sanctifying law become illegible or, worse, untenable, and new hierarchies emerge in public discourse. These hierarchies not only enforce the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate queer lives, but they also produce tacit distinctions among forms of illegitimacy. The stable pair who would marry if only they could are cast as illegitimate but eligible for a future legitimacy, whereas the sexual agents who function outside the purview of the marriage bond and its recognized, if illegitimate, alternative form now constitute sexual possibilities that will never be eligible for a translation into legitimacy. These are possibilities that become increasingly disregarded in the sphere of politics as a consequence of the priority that the marriage debate has assumed. This is an illegitimacy whose temporal condition is to be foreclosed from any possible future transformation. It is not only
not yet
legitimate, but it is we might say the irrecoverable and irreversible past of legitimacy:
the never will be,
the never was.

Here a certain normative crisis ensues. On the one hand, it is important to mark how the field of intelligible and speakable sexuality is circumscribed, so that we can see how options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as the unthinkable, and how the terms of thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over who and what will be included in the norm. On the other hand, there is always the possibility of savoring the status of unthinkability, if it is a status, as the most critical, the most radical, the most valuable. As the sexually unrepresentable, such sexual possibilities can figure the sublime within the contemporary field of sexuality, a site of pure resistance, a site unco-opted by normativity. But how does one think politics from such a site of unrepresentability? And lest I am misunderstood here, let me state an equally pressing question: How can one think politics without considering these sites of unrepresentability?

One may wish for another lexicon altogether. The history of sexual progressivism surely recurs time and again to the possibility of a new language and the promise of a new mode of being. And in the light of this quandary, one might find oneself wanting to opt out of this whole story, to operate somewhere that is neither legitimate nor illegitimate. But here is where the critical perspective, the one that operates at the limit of the intelligible, also risks being regarded as apolitical. For politics, as it is constituted through this discourse of intelligibility, demands that we take a stand, for or against gay marriage; but critical reflection, which is surely part of any seriously normative political philosophy and practice, demands that we ask why and how this has become the question, the question that defines what will and will not qualify as meaningful political discourse here. Why, under present conditions, does the very prospect of “becoming political” depend on our ability to operate within that discursively instituted binary and not to ask, and endeavor not to know, that the sexual field is forcibly constricted through accepting those terms? This dynamic of force is rendered all the more forceful because it grounds the contemporary field of the political, grounds it through the forcible exclusion of that sexual field from the political. And yet, the operation of this force of exclusion is set outside of the domain of contest, as if it were not part of power, as if it were not an item for political reflection. Thus, to become political, to act and speak in ways that are recognizably political, is to rely on a foreclosure of the very political field that is not subject to political scrutiny. Without the critical perspective, politics relies fundamentally on an unknowingness—and depoliticization—of the very relations of force by which its own field of operation is instituted.

Criticality is thus not a position per se, not a site or a place that might be located within an already delimitable field, although one must, in an obligatory catachresis, speak of sites, of fields, of domains.

One critical function is to scrutinize the action of delimitation itself.

By recommending that we become critical, that we risk criticality, in thinking about how the sexual field is constituted, I do not mean to suggest that we could or should occupy an atopical elsewhere, undelimited, radically free. The questioning of taken-for-granted conditions becomes possible on occasion; but one cannot get there through a thought experiment, an
epoché,
an act of will. One gets there, as it were, through suffering the dehiscence, the breakup, of the ground itself.

Even within the field of intelligible sexuality, one finds that the binaries that anchor its operations permit for middle zones and hybrid formations, suggesting that the binary relation does not exhaust the field in question. Indeed, there are middle regions, hybrid regions of legitimacy and illegitimacy that have no clear names, and where nomination itself falls into a crisis produced by the variable, sometimes violent boundaries of legitimating practices that come into uneasy and sometimes conflictual contact with one another. These are not precisely places where one can choose to hang out, subject positions one might opt to occupy. These are nonplaces in which one finds oneself in spite of oneself; indeed, these are nonplaces where recognition, including self-recognition, proves precarious if not elusive, in spite of one’s best efforts to be a subject in some recognizable sense. They are not sites of enunciation, but shifts in the topography from which a questionably audible claim emerges: the claim of the not-yet-subject and the nearly recognizable.

That there are such regions, and they are not precisely options, suggests that what troubles the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy are social practices, specifically sexual practices, that do not appear immediately as coherent in the available lexicon of legitimation. These are sites of uncertain ontology, difficult nomination. If it seems that I am now going to argue that we should all be pursuing and celebrating sites of uncertain ontology and difficult nomination, I actually want to pursue a slightly different point, which is to attend to the foreclosure of the possible that takes place when, from the urgency to stake a political claim, one naturalizes the options that figure most legibly within the sexual field. Attending to this foreclosure, as an act of politics that we unwittingly perform, unwittingly perform time and again, offers the possibility for a different conception of politics, one that attends to its own foreclosures as an effect of its own conscious activism. Yet, one must maintain a double-edge in relation to this difficult terrain, for neither the violence of foreclosure that stabilizes the field of activism nor the path of critical paralysis that is entrenched at the level of fundamental reflection will suffice. On the topic of gay marriage, it becomes increasingly important to keep the tension alive between maintaining a critical perspective and making a politically legible claim.