GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Without question, civil marriage enhances the "welfare of the community." It is a "social institution of the highest importance." . . . Civil marriage anchors an ordered society by encouraging stable relationships over transient ones. It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, ensures that children and adults are cared for and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds, and tracks important epidemiological and demographic data.

—Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003)

From the beginning, same-sex marriage was deemed one of the key "wedge" issues of the 2004 presidential election. One of the questions circulating beneath the issue was, why now? Conservatives, pointing their fingers at gay and lesbian rights activists, claimed that they had forced the issue through legal victories achieved in Massachusetts and Vermont with the assistance of "activist judges," who had had the audacity to suggest that basing marriage rights on the participants' gender was discrimination. Liberals, when they had the courage to point back, argued that conservative and right-wing political organizations had made marriage a wedge issue for over a decade, particularly with their emphasis on "family values," welfare reform, and tax benefits. One could also point toward the proliferation of "gay" cultural productions, from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to The L Word; the world of entertainment has turned, according to a recent MTV news special, "totally gay." But rather than propose that there is something new about the battle over gay rights and belonging in the United States, and that this newness is due to a group's marketing strategy, I ask that we consider same-sex [End Page 171] marriage in the light of current struggles over citizenship in the United States. At a time when terrorism looms within and beyond the U.S. nation-state's borders, maintaining and policing the racial, gender, and sexual configuration of the U.S. citizenry become central. As a site of citizenship production, the institution of marriage is critical to the formation of a properly gendered, properly racialized, properly heterosexual America. Rather than concern ourselves with whether or not gays should have the right to marry, then, we might consider instead how exactly we want GLBT people and queer others to align themselves with citizenship.

M. Jacqui Alexander argues that citizenship is predicated on the demarcation of homosexual bodies as outside the bounds of citizenship.¹ Through legislation that criminalizes sexualities located outside the purview of the heterosexual, monogamous family, the state has constructed heterosexuality as a prerequisite to citizenship and as the unspoken norm of membership and national belonging. As many queer theorists have shown, numerous regimes, practices, and ideologies not only presume heterosexuality but organize society around this presumption, rendering it the norm and implicitly designating all other sexual and familial practices "deviant."² Gays, homosexuals, and queers are certainly not the only "deviants," and gay rights do not take place in a vacuum; they are inextricably linked to negotiations over "terrorism," immigration, welfare reform, and abortion rights, to name a few. A properly angled queer lens, then, analyzes how heteronormativity functions through the production and taxonomy of racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed behaviors and practices.

In this essay I first argue that the same-sex-marriage debate is one of the primary sites on which anxieties over America's citizenry and sexual, gender, and racial boundaries play out. Thus the proper context for this debate is not only gay rights but the history of marriage law and U.S. citizenship. I then ask that we reconsider the campaign for same-sex marriage and related appeals to the state in a way that takes queer-theoretical critiques more seriously. While it is no surprise that mainstream discussions of same-sex marriage often elide queer theorists' critiques both of same-sex marriage and of appeals to the state, I suggest that most scholarship continues to misconstrue queer theory. Most often the struggle between gay rights advocates and queer theorists is described as a disagreement over the uses (and pitfalls) of identity politics, but on closer examination the battle between these...