While I am wary of overtly stating that gay marriage is not a feminist issue (by this I mean not aligned with feminist intentions or political aspirations), the following arguments may appear to favor that conclusion. However, the rampant homophobic sentiments opposing gay marriage, in addition to circulating fears concerning the holy innocents (those "unagentic black slates" (Martin, 457) commonly referred to as children) - under the threat of pestilent queers - are surely issues warranting feminist attention. First, to any position postulating that gay marriage is a subversive or revolutionary act combating exclusionary heterosexist and homophobic mandates prohibiting "same-sex" partners from participating in a thoroughly sexist and capitalistic social institution, I have a simple reply: absolutely not. To any position intent on romanticizing institutionalized kinship, claiming that the marital contract is the state's recognition of love: please note that "love" is never recognized by the state - legally binding contracts are. The gay marriage campaign is merely a misguided reinscription of heteronormativity. Once the "good gays" are successfully normalized, the rest of us queers will be left to our now increasing stigmatization upon the emergence of new hierarchies rendering various queer sexual practices and relationships utterly untenable. However much I adamantly resent the viciously homophobic discourses surrounding this debate (which both sides have generated), I also resent the denial -- and refusal -- of sexual alliances not seeking expurgation, nor adhering to formulated delimitations that constitute normative, or naturalized, legitimacy. By proscribing the legibility of sexuality, possibilities become impossible.
Do abject sexualities have claim to ontology?
In "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" Judith Butler writes
... 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. (106)
What do we understand as legitimate kinship? autonomy? personhood? Does gay marriage seek to displace homophobic paradigms or merely relocate them? The logic circumscribing the anxiety over legitimacy that Butler outlines serves not to abolish an oppressive construct, but to re-articulate that construct - which only serves to reinscribe its terms. Sexuality is not simply always already conceived of as a potential social contract, though, but also dyadic, static, and nuclear-ly/reproductively oriented. Furthermore, this emphasis on marriage, whether it be homo- or hetero-, upholds binary characterizations - one is legitimate only if occupying a political either/or: gay/straight; male/female; black/white; liberal/conservative; et cetera. This aligns very well with Martin's discussion of gender neutrality in "William Wants a Doll," and also the general discussion concerning family values. How are "traditional" or conservatively rigid family values that produce and delimit gender roles subverted or dismantled by gay marriage? If anything, the voice as projected by mainstream media sources loudly declares that gay kinship is the same as marital kinship. Those "straight" gay folks advocating for their supposed "natural human right" to state-sanctioned legitimacy adhere to oppressive frameworks that expel queer bodies and queer sexual proclivities from intelligible legitimacy. The argument proposed is not different though equal (or equally valuable), but equal because the same - valuable because the same. Yet, the very existence of difference serves to delineate the standard for sameness. Conceiving of individuals and societies in relation to a model of legitimate humanity does not, as gay marriage advocates want to imply, create a possibility for equality through sameness, but rather expel that which is read as "different" from the borders of acceptability: what is understood as legitimate depends upon a confounding demarcation in order to be recognized as such, which necessarily separates legible sexuality or sexual alliance from the illegible - creating tensions and anxieties over the sustainability of juridically conceived sexuality. "In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit."*
*J.B. in Gender Trouble, 182
You raise a lot of interesting points, M.; however, I think there is one point of contention overlooked by such an analysis. There are certainly gay rights activists who advocate for marriage in the name of equality, yet I think the underlying issue is the benefits that are conferred by the ‘legitimacy’ of marriage. The monetary benefits, family benefits, government benefits, death benefits, and all other benefits conferred by the government as a result of these “legally binding contracts” are certainly no small thing.
On the other hand, I think there are definitely problems within the gay marriage movement, and I agree with the majority of your points raised here, yet I would not go so far as to say that gay marriage is not a feminist issue. In order to effectively address the issues raised by your post, it would seem that nothing short of a restructuring of society’s understanding of marriage would be necessary. Delimiting such a rigid idea of legitimacy would certainly have its value, yet placing full faith in such a means, I think, would be foolhardy.
I think that gay marriage and promoting a new valuation of legitimacy do not need to be—and are not—mutually exclusive. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I think that by pushing these two advocacies simultaneously, better and more significant results would be achieved. Granted, the latter will probably meet a lot of structural resistance. Nonetheless, beginning to shift the discourse, in and of itself, will serve to right some of the problems within the gay marriage movement, at least to an extent.
Thus, I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that gay marriage is not a feminist issue. It is, indeed, a feminist issue; however, a reevaluation is certainly needed, and this is something, moreover, that can definitely be provided by a feminist perspective.
I think one of the major points in M.'s critique of gay marriage is that this discourse is still in the business of sorting out the "bad" fags from the "good" fags, and that simply normalizing abjected identities actually does everyone a great disservice. And while M. did not say that gay marriage was not a feminist issue, I believe she is suggesting that the drive to inculcate only the most heteronormatively acceptable into the capitalist institution of marriage is actually more oppressive than liberating. With regard to the fiscal and legal benefits of marriage, the laws and legislation surrounding this issue have changed greatly over the past several decades. In the seventies and eighties, it was not nearly as big a drawback to unmarried partners to remain so, and legislation that more and more seeks to disadvantage the unmarried has pushed its way congress in the last couple decades. Perhaps we should be lobbying against the flood of laws that privilege married couples, instead of requiring people to be married. I believe that questioning the goals and effects of the main stream gay rights movement is very warranted, and that it is not at all unproductive to do so. The seemingly daunting and far fetched notion of questioning the institution of marriage in and of itself and the greater structures of which it is a part is not so daunting and far fetched if we at least begin to consider it as a possibility, and begin exploration of this political path. Perhaps by pursuing a politics that has at its center an embrace of abject realities we can change the main stream tradition of only directing political gains towards the already privileged and acceptable.