I think that abolishing marriage would solve many problems. It is, after all, an old religious idea.
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this is a very controversial issue among the queer circles i'm part of, and it's almost completely split down the middle: is the right to marriage for same sex couples something which should be fought for, or is the idea of marriage - having been derived mostly from religion and is seen by many as being an outdated and oppressive institution - something which queer people be attempting to abolish altogether?
i'm fairly torn on the issue as i can see both sides of the argument and i often discuss this with people on both sides who are extremely passionate about it. on one hand, marriage is a construct of a very patriarchal and hetronormative society, and refusing to engage in it is basically a fuck you to both patriarchy and heterosexism. on the other, the reason same sex marriages are banned in many countries (including australia) is because same sex relationships are seen as 'abnormal' and so gay and lesbian couples are restricted from having access to marriage simply on the basis of their sexuality, which is blatantly discriminatory.
also, of course, queer people are by no means a homogenous group and so what feels good for some may be totally reprehensible to others. eg. i know queer people who are very into spirituality and religion and so don't view marriage in the same light as someone who's vehemently anti-religion. this is more to guage what leftists of the revolutionary variety feel about it (which is pretty shit in itself, as i do believe that queer activism should be an autonomous movement so it really doesn't matter what non-queer people think! but this is for interest more than anything else.)
personally, i'm of the opinion that people should be allowed to do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, and i don't see how same sex marriages are hurting anyone (other than the moral sensibilities of reactionary fucks) (sticker: marriage is for stupid people. in pen underneath: but can't queers be stupid too?) however, many of my friends argue that it is hurting others by reinforcing a fucked institution.
so, i'm still unsure. i think that my opinion is skewed by the fact that i don't think that marriage is necessarily flawed, or rather that it has to always be flawed.
thoughts?
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I think that abolishing marriage would solve many problems. It is, after all, an old religious idea.
"El ideal del P.S.O.E. es la completa emancipación de la clase trabajadora; Es decir, la abolición de todas las clases sociales y su declaración y conversión en una sola clase de trabajadores, dueños del fruto de su trabajo, libres, iguales, honrados e inteligentes." -Pablo Iglesias (founder of PSOE and UGT)
"Quienes contraponen liberalismo y socialismo, o no conocen el primero o no saben los verdaderos objetivos del segundo." -Pablo Iglesias
Art. 1.º España es una República democrática de trabajadores de toda clase, que se
organiza en régimen de Libertad y de Justicia.
Legal equality should definately be the norm, anything that is discriminatory and further stigmatises queer people/relationships needs to be abolished ASAP. However, marriage rights is not something that i personally want to, or will be fighting for, i don't want to get married, to a man or a woman - it's a meaningless legal-religious ceremony, i don't care about fitting into social, legal or religious norms, why should i? What does it achieve? I'm a fucking queer anarchist (atheist)!
Being 'married' won't change how i feel about someone, if anything i think it might put more pressure on my relationship, because 'we're married now' - and being married carries a whole lot of social pressures and expectations. Whilst there are also social pressures to get married, i don't feel as if being in open or de facto relationships that i ever actually feel social expectations or pressures in the same way that i envision myself feeling if i were married.
Getting married is also very often to appease other people, to get recognition before a god/gods, before the law, for your family or someone elses rather than creating anything or worthwhile for the two people involved - except i suppose the knowledge that you've pleased a god, the law or your family. It also legitimises social ideas that people NEED to get married, that 'families' in the nuclear sense are natural, good and something to strive for, indeed that if you want or have kids, getting married will legitimise your situation, because having kids 'out' of marriage is somehow immoral or careless. In terms of queers, i think there is also an element by which getting married is viewed as a way to legitimise queer relationships to the mainstream.
But marriage for me seems so redundant, and far too deeply engrained into fucked up religious, hetero-sexist, moral culture, to ever be appealing, and further the fact that getting married itself is to an extent legitimising fucked up heteropatrichal social norms, particulary concepts related to the 'necessity' of building 'nuclear' families of a 'man his wife and 2.7 children' only turns me off more.
From a queer point of view, whilst i will not shit on people who do want to get married, it is never something i will actively support, or refrain from criticising, particulary in terms of the 'gay rights' movement. It's not so much the idea of the 'gay rights' movement that i find perplexing, as it how the movement functions in practice.
In practice the movement is completely liberal in philosophy and in action, and this is inevitable because it has reformist aims, however justifiable. But as a consequence the language of the movement is sooooo assimilationist and uncritical of heterosexism. Beyond, the arguments for liberal equality before the law it offers no real criticism of society, heterosexism as a social norm of how capitalism has commodified human sexuality, and more recently particularly 'gayness', with all this 'pink dollar' consmuer bullshit.
There doesnt seem to be anything else to it, 'we want marriage rights', w'e want equal tax laws or rights of access to children or partners in relationship to medical decision making' and so forth - but nothing is really said or done that challenges the dominance of homophobia other than, 'it's discriminatory to not let gay people marry' - and in so many cases 'discrimination' rather than homophobia is used, further weakening the message.
And where too from legal equality? Once people have the right to marry and all the little legal differences are cleaned up (which will be in a matter of decades), where to for queers in society? Will these changes satisfy the 'gay rights' movement? I mean, these are after all the goals of the movement, to get 'equal rights', the goal is not to eliminate homophobia (unless of course you think that granting legal equality, and marriage rights will achieve this), it is not to undermine, challenge or smash heteropatriarchal norms of sexuality or 'gender', least of all capitalism or the state.
This the core problem of the movement as i see it, because it is liberal, because it is reformist, because it is so dominated by white middle-class queers (in australia at least) who just want to 'fit-in' at work and 'raise a family', because it is all these things it has a very limited scope, it's fundamentally restricted and thus its potential for creating meaningful social change is marginal.
From this point of view, i do think that marriage as an institution needs to be abolished, and i think that the push for marriage in the queer community is therefore a very complicated issue because we dont even have equal marriage rights yet AND at the same time because of the assimilationist message that it tends to project, but the reform does still need to happen. It is unacceptable for prejudice to exist in society, and that includes LEGALISED prejudice, so from that point of view i VERY CRITICALLY support the movement for 'gay rights'.
I think where i position myself on the issue is more that i think, yeah we need to have legal equality, but that i wish people would point the finger (and i want more people to do this) more at society, at the state, at capitalism, at heteropatrichal norms and assumptions and say why do we even need this 'institution' at all? Why are all these fucked up and outdated ideas still shaping how we view the world and our relationships? Why are we just demanding legal equality, why arent we also attacking structural-social oppression, ideas and prejudice? So even though i give my support, i want people to look more at the bigger picture, but this is so hard given just how liberal and bourgeois the movement is.
Sorry the ranting nature of this post :P
edit: fixed grammar and added in some more stuff, so please read this again if you read it before this edit
I'm for legalizing homosexual marriages in the here and now. However, in a radically different society things would be well, radically different. Banning marriage isn't ideal I think (this is where I digress from Emma Goldman) as that's RESTRICTING people's rights. However, marriage wouldn't be defined as what it is today namely 1) as a financial incentive and 2) as between a man and a woman.
I would prefer it if two consenting adults could have any kind of sexual relationship with one another without the interference of other people telling them what is right or wrong. Two could even be three, four, five ad nauseum if they wanted to.
Agreed.
I LOVE this topic!
For most of my life I have believed that one day I would meet Mr. Wonderful and we would get married and live in a nice house and have lots of children and blah blah blah... but then I stepped out of the Pleasantville I had been living in and realised that the "norm" isn't for me. I would never ridicule someone for wanting to get married, whether they be bi-sexual, straight or gay - but is it really necessary? Yes go ahead and legalize gay marriage - but what is the point in the end? Just be with whoever you want to be with.
I hear that!
Who needs the pressure of "being married" anyways?!
<span style=\'colorurple\'>Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. </span>
Rudimentary Peni is my FAVORITE band so you may hear me quoting them from time to time, anyways they have a great song on marriage that you may be familiar with, a lot of their ideas are reflected in this thread. Anyways, here it is:
It's Escapist shit of a feeble kind
a fucked up institution for fucked up minds
holy Matrimony is a Blissful Myth
Wholly based on tradition, wholly based on bullshit
think you love each other, think youre so in touch
but its the shit institution you love so much
Is your caring so stifled so Perverted and Sick
That you need vows and Duties so that it won't Slip?
You make your love secure but what of Respect?
Does it only exist as another truth to forget?
So your limited caring is the best you can give-
Smeared with lies and traditions behind which you live
Holy matrimony is a Blissful myth
Wholly based on tradition Wholly based on bullshit.
I definately think gay people should fight for the right to get married. For one, there are gay religious people (as silly as they are). Also, destroying the institution is just as good - but it would get religious individuals mad just the same. Taking marriage from the religious nuts is more of a slap in the face type move than anything - as I see. A slap they so justly deserve.
Good points! And is it solely about marriage anyway? The movement probably contains people who really don't even want to get married. It's more about the fact that marriage, as defined now, is exclusionary. :angry:
I think that this analysis is really incorrect.
The institution of the patriarchal family is not something based on a marriage license or exchanging rings and vows or any other essentially symbolic acts and acknowlegements, it is, like all social oppression, rooted in power dynamics based on economic inequality, and when these power dynamics do not exist, neither does the oppressive institution.
The patriarchal family has been in decline ever since women have been in the workforce in large numbers. A marriage between two men or two women, or a working man and a working woman with roughly even incomes, is not patriarchal in nature. The core patriarchy family, that religious conservatives like so much, must be between a working man and a non-working/stay-at-home woman, creating a depedent relationship of the wife on the husband therefore giving him an unequal position of power over her. This is the only way that marriage can be used to enforce patriarchial control, otherwise its simply a public recognition of equal individual's relationship.
THe social conservatives hate gay marriage percisely because its a non-patriarchal form of marriage, because far from "reinforcing" the institution of patriarchal families and marriage, it *undermines* it by giving formal recongition to a non-patriarchy form of marriage, which reduces, as they say, the 'sanctity' of their oppressive verison of marriage by making it simply one among many socially recognized long term relationships.
The religious right that supports patriarchial systems of social organization aren't stupid, they know that gay marriage hurts them, thats why they're fighting it.
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I'd disagree with this on the basis that gender roles are really deeply engrained in society, so even when patriarchy isn't sirectly enforced by the male half of a marriage, it still persists- even when there is no economic disparity.
In Australian marriages, even where the woman works, she still does the vast majority of unpaid work at home- ie housework and caring work. There's this expectation that this is how things are. read something recently that stated that men make more large household decisions independently, and women tend to only make small decisions alone.
Even on the economic side of this, womens labour is seen as more disposable; probably because their identity is tied up more in their relationships than their work (as it is for men).
Basically I think that gender inequality can persist even after the economic disparity decreases or disappears. On gay marriage, I think it could either challenge or strengthen marriage. I know that the right here is split on working women (the US seems to be a lot more backward on the issue...) with some MP's favouring the baby-factory option and others realising that women are needed in the workforce. So conceptions of the "ideal" marriage can change; but overall the same fucked up norms are reinforced by it, and certain types of people/relationships are excluded.
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So I sing, sing, sing,
Ding-a-ling-a-ling.
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The notion that unequal gender roles are deeply engrained in society, which i agree with, is no basis for disagreeing with the assertion that those unequal gender roles are themselves the result of economic disparity.
You cannot simply restate the exist of a social phenomenon to dispute the structural foundations of that phenomenon, which is what you're attempting to do here.
When you do housework on a house that you, not your husband exclusively, owns, you're simply protecting your own investment.
But this is besides the point, because simply working doesn't mean that both partners work as members of the same socio-economic class which is whats required to have a relationship free of economic depedence and the unequal power dynamics that depedence creates.
My guess is that you wouldn't find women doing more housework in marriages were they worked for the same number of hours with the same income as their husbands, and that would be the only meaningful test for this. I doubt whatever study you're thinking of adjusted for these two factors, and if so, please post a link to it as i'd be very surprized.
And that expectation is neither universial nor is there any reason to think that it the result of economic relations. Cultural phenomenon can almost always be shown to have a material basis.
That does nothing to help prove your point, because if some heterosexual marriages had economic equality and some had economic inequality favoring the husband, than the materialist model of gender relations would predict that on that basis, more men would make large purchases without consultation than women if both groups were included, on account of the couples in the unequal, patriarchal marriages accounting for the discrepancy on their own.
In otherwords, both the materialist model that i'm arguing for and the non-materialist claim you're making would predict the same results in this particular measure, so it demonstrates nothing about the validity of either. You would have to show that this existed even in relationships where both partners had the same indepedent income.
"seen as more disposable" by whom? You can't claim the existance of a subjective interpretation without defining the perspective you're speaking for...otherwise you imply that ideas like what something "is seen as" have some sort of universial objective truth, which clearly they catagorically cannot.
On the economic side of this, the forces that drive the economy are concerned with money not identity.
So, you basically reject the marxist/materialist class based theory of social relations then? Where do you think power relations come from if not from class and economic relations?
To believe that any kindof effective, real inequality can persist in the face of class/economic/material equality, or for that matter inequality in the reverse direction (a poor man more powerful than his rich wife perhaps?), is to suggest that power from a non-materialist source can supercede the power that money, capital, and class buys.
Where else other than material resources do you think power in society could possibly come from?
If you don't have a reasonable answer for that question, i think you'd have to admit that you're wrong on this issue.
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I do not like marriage and do not fight for "marriage rights" for queers. What we should fight for is equal rights. Same as what is currently provided to de facto different sex couples.
Depends on what you mean by marriage. Nobody on the left should be saying that a person cannot stay with another person for as long as they want. But we should be objecting to have to "legitimise" it either religiously or legally. The state has no right to dictate our relationships, neither does any church. Marriage can mean so many different things, two people, three people more, but so long as there is any easy way to separate, I do not care what you call yours or anyone else's relationship.
I agree. In fact I would refuse to get married, if a person does not want to stay with me because of it, well they obviously do not want to stay with me, and it is a good thing they are leaving.
(And I agree with most of what else Black Dagger said as well.)
What is marriage? Is it simply the right of two (or more) people to live together and perhaps raise a family? Or is it some legal/religious ceremony that entitles some sort of rights to the married (generally) couple? Nobody I know in the leftist movement has any problem with x number of people living, sleeping, etc. together. What we have a problem with is the formalising process.
Yup. In Australia at least, women do most of the housework, even when the house is jointly owned or owned by the man.
I would be surprised if it were otherwise. Even if the two people in the couple both work the same job (say teaching) anecdotal evidence (i.e. people I know or have talked to) says that women do the majority of the housework. It does not matter what the economic relationship is. Women also do the majority of the cooking.
I think power can also come from the fact that men are bigger and stronger (generally) then women. Society has also cultured women into accepting that they do the majority of the housework.
And not on this direct topic but also an answer to your question, why does the state have power? Because it has control over the means of power, the police, army and court system. I am sure you could draw some conclusion about material resources from this, but another reason that people obey the state is because it is the state, culture.
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Even when? How about *especially* when? When a man owns the house, he controls the most basic material requirements for his partners basic standard of living, anyone with a materialist, marxist analysis of the situation would assume that he would weild vastly more power, inevitably leading to a division of labor that favors him.
Oh, a few people you talked to? Do you know what kindof evidence that is? None-At-All!
Anecdotal evidence means nothing because variations in personalities between couples will create greater variation in individual examples than any other factor...you would need to see a consistent statistically significant trend over a substantial population to get any kindof meaningful data.
I mean, anecdotally, i can think of plenty of counter examples where the opposite is true, including in my parents marriages to both each other and to other people, but that doesn't amount to evidence either, its simply an example of why you can't rely on your own anecdotes for evidence, the sample size is too small to see anything meaningful.
Moreover, working in the same type of job, like both beaing teachers, does not imply an equality of status and income. Especially in teaching, where advancement is very much based on seniority, you can have significant inequality between partners in the same career, especially if the man is older than the woman as is often the case. Someone with a named chair at university or a tenured university professor is going to make several times as much money as a junior lecturer or in the American system a visiting assitent professor, although they'll all have the 'same job.'
Yes it does, how about reading some Marx!
Size and strength are essentially irrelevant in terms of how much power and status people have in industrial society because the industrial mode of production does not rely on physical strength, the way that pre-industrial agriculture and hunter/gathering modes of production did. The only time size and strength matter for status are in populations living outside of the normal economy, such as prison populations and unemployed inner city lumpen proletariat (who have inferior status to anyone in the normal economy anyways).
A 4'11 chairwoman of a board of directors for a publically traded corporation is incompatibly more powerful than a 6'5 construction worker...the laters size means nothing compared the formers *money!*
That idea used to hold a lot of currency, but it doesn't anymore. Not for people growing up today...except those from the type of traditionalist patriarchal households where the husband/father is a primary or sole provider.
Because the ruling class gives the state money to buy and pay for those things, so they can then be used to protect the ruling classes investment, so they can make more money. Power dynamics are all based on economic relationships.
Thats not another reason, thats part of the same reason. The culture is a product of the material conditions of a society as well.
An agricultural society that doesn't know how to clean bottom feeding shellfish to the point that they'll be able to kill all of the bacteria that they have, will incorporate it into its culture and make things up like "Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you." If sanitation with meat is a problem, then a culture trying to figure out how to say, eat cows without getting sick will say that only animals killed by arterial bleeding to death are "Halal." The material conditions create the cultural practices, culture isn't arbitrary, its useful, either to society as a whole or to the people powerful enough to dictate culture.
And if one group has much more money than another, than you see all sorts of cultural explainations for why that group is smarter, more capable, better suited for public life and leadership, more responsible, and should be treated better.
Culture itself is the result of material conditions, not some sort of exception to it.
I would suggest reading the cultural materialist (marxist) anthropologist Marvin Harris's writings on the economic origins of cultural practices.
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