When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time

I proffer this essay to a specific audience — those, like myself, with a commitment to both “queer theory” in some sense of the term and a critique of marriage that draws on concerns with its politics of recognition (and disrecognition of the unmarried), the place of marriage in capitalist production, and the inequalities and violences so often found within marriage and so often linked to hierarchies of gender, race, and class.1 I pitch this essay in an exploratory register, resisting a framework that would equate “offering solutions” with the horizon of relevance and political efficacy. Proscription is not the same thing as critique. While I do suggest an alternative mode of conceptualizing time, this suggestion is an invitation to conversation and debate. I am interested in questions like the one posed by Geeta Patel: “How can we think subjectivity through other possible times, given that subjectivities in the ‘modern’ are inseparable from particular ways of narrating time?”2 This essay considers the possibility of a queer theory not necessarily opposed to marriage. This is a tricky proposition, because some prominent arguments in favor of “same-sex marriage” claim it will “civilize” gay and lesbian persons into upholding “traditional” norms of monogamy and propriety. As the Gay Shame collective has noted in their “End Marriage” statement: “If you look at the rhetoric of the freedom to marry movement and the Republican Party their similarities are frighteningly apparent. In their ideal world we would all be monogamously coupled, instead of rethinking the practice of ‘coupling.’ ”3 Granted, some working for what they term “marriage equality” are careful to note that marriage may not work for everyone.4 But the Gay Shame statement is accurate in that “same-sex marriage” rhetoric commonly celebrates that possibility as a means to normalize queer sexuality and elides the relationship between marriage and “the reproduction of patriarchal relations,” a relationship long demonstrated by