Melanie Heath

State of our Unions Marriage Promotion and the Contested Power of Heterosexuality

Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage promotion as a reaction of the gendered and sexualized state to crisis tendencies of institutionalized heterosexuality. Drawing on the first in-depth study of marriage promotion politics, the author examines polycentric state practices that seek to stabilize the norm of the white, middle-class, heterosexual family. While explicit policy concerns focus on race and class, state-sponsored marriage workshops teach about gender hierarchy to rehearse an implicit ideology of marital heterosexuality. In contrast to feminist state theories that present a monolithic, top-down model of state control, the author offers a more nuanced examination of the relationship between macro and micro levels of power and their uneven consequences for social change.

Sexual Misgivings: Producing Un/Marked Knowledge in Neoliberal Marriage Promotion Policies

This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriages significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same-sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self-reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriages significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same-sex marriage as in need of special consideration.

Editor’s Pick: Do Same-sex and Straight Weddings Aspire to the Fairytale? Women’s Conformity and Resistance to Traditional Weddings

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, m...Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that challenge these same social norms.

Judging Women’s Sexual Agency: Contemporary Sex Wars in the Legal Terrain of Prostitution and Polygamy

The legal arena has been a major site for battles over questions of sexuality. Feminists have often looked to the law to decide contests over women’s sexual agency, pitting feminists against each other over issues such as prostitution. This article compares two legal cases in Canada, one on prostitution and one on polygamy, to shed light on the relationship between state legal apparatuses and the feminist actors who engage them. The discursive strategies of the actors in the prostitution case coalesce along the familiar lines of the feminist sex wars. The “danger stance” views prostitution as an injustice forced upon women who have no other alternatives; the “choice stance” contends that prostitution is not inherently grounded in the exploitation of women. Likewise, the discursive strategies of actors in the polygamy case—a very different context for thinking about women’s agency—reflect a similar divide. Through an analysis of legal documents, this article considers the strange bedfellows in the prostitution and polygamy cases to provide insight into the current political terrain of the sex wars. Our analysis sheds light on the mechanisms within legal structures that regulate conceptions of women’s sexual agency.

Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America:

In Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America, Jennifer Randles delves into the world of marriage education policy that has been the cornerstone of the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI). Created in 2002 as part of the Administration for Marriage and Families, it has awarded grants for programs across the nation that promote and support healthy marriages. Whereas in mid-twentieth-century America individuals were as likely to marry whether rich or poor, in contemporary America scholars have identified a trend they call the marriage gap. Today, individuals of all classes, races, and sexualities still aspire to marry, but marriage has become symbolically associated with class privilege, understood as an institution one enters into after completion of university, obtaining secure employment, and/or homeownership. Poor and low-income individuals who have children together tend to delay marriage, waiting to attain the markers of middle-class success before tying the knot. The idea that the institution of marriage provides the best environment for raising children has spurred marriage-promotion policies. Advocates believe that supporting healthy marriages can combat poverty, since two incomes are better than one. Randles provides an incisive analysis of healthy marriage policies by taking the reader on a journey inside the healthy marriage classroom. Her important ethnography offers the first in-depth, sociological study of healthy marriage programs that specifically target poor and low-income couples. A community-based healthy marriage organization in California received a five-year

Do Same-Sex and Straight Weddings Aspire To the Fairytale? Women’s Conformity and Resistance to Traditional Weddings

2.5 million federal HMI grant to create what Randles calls the ‘‘Thriving Families’’ program for poor, unmarried couples who were either expecting a baby or had a child younger than three months old. Based on 150 hours of participant observation, three focus groups with fourteen couples, and 45 in-depth interviews, Randles offers a nuanced perspective on one of the fundamental paradoxes inherent in marriagepromotion policies: low-income parents who take the classes believe that marriage should come after achieving financial security. In contrast, the logic of the policies and the marriage curricula she studied views marriage as an important milestone to help couples achieve economic security. Ultimately, this basic contradiction means that healthy marriage policies miss the mark in their goal to help couples marry and become financially secure. The story is complex, and Randles does an excellent job of uncovering the logic that leads to the ‘‘telling contradiction between the lived experiences of lowincome, unmarried families and the legislative intent of healthy marriage policy’’ (p. 85). A major strength of the book is its illumination of the paradoxical ways that marriage education policies fail to grasp the structural conditions that make it difficult for poor couples to choose marriage. Instead, the main reasoning of healthy marriage education is to promote an understanding of love that requires rational personal choices to ensure that individuals make the right decisions in their love life. Low-income couples are taught that ‘‘skilled love’’ is something they can learn, placing the responsibility for making the right love and marital decisions squarely on the individual’s shoulders, while disregarding the structural constraints that make marrying difficult. Through her interviews, Randles offers insight into why this neoliberal strategy does not work: it offers individual solutions to complex structural problems that make marriage difficult for those who struggle to make ends meet. Poor individuals predominantly choose partners from a limited pool of other low-income individuals, and they face overwhelming stress in these relationships due to financial instability. When they are unable to live up to middle-class ideals, the response tends to be what Randles calls ‘‘curtailed commitment’’—couples view themselves as unprepared for marriage. 356 Reviews

Editor’s Pick

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, m...Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that challenge these same social norms.

God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday TheologiesGod, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies, by MoonDawne. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 292 pp.

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, m...Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that challenge these same social norms.

64.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-53511-8.

“coming out.” Sloop examines the media coverage and speculation concerning Janet Reno, and the much publicized case of Barry Winchell, a U.S. Army private murdered while stationed at Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tennessee. The analysis of each case strongly supports Sloop’s overall thesis and provides an excellent critical frame for further analysis of supposed sites of “gender trouble.” The most pressing question coming from Sloop’s work is the question of what constitutes an effective and progressive politics of gender and sexuality, and for whom? Sloop has navigated some tricky terrain in conducting this study, particularly in using massmedia representations of transgendered people as the object of his analysis. Sloop is very attentive to the fact that these representations contribute to the erasure of transgendered people from their own perspective. Critical scholars cannot avoid the question of whose interests their work serves. Such a question does, in many ways, get at the heart of all political questions. To his credit, Sloop does not avoid this question. The critic is always located, and Sloop is located as a nontransgendered U.S. American studying U.S. mass media. In such a position, Sloop’s critical work makes a great contribution. The question remains as to how far and wide beyond Sloop’s location as critic his critical work can be carried. This question needs to be answered by scholars taking up this effort from other locations and in other contexts.