1st Edition
Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality
After years of intense debate, same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in many countries around the globe. As same-sex marriage laws spread, Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality asks: What will queer families and relationships look like on the ground?
Building on a major conference held in 2016 entitled "After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship," this collection draws from critical and intersectional perspectives to explore this question. Comprising academic papers, edited transcripts of conference panels, and interviews with activists working on the ground, this collection presents some of the first works of empirical scholarship and first-hand observation to assess the realities of queer families and relationships after same-sex marriage. Including a number of chapters focused on married same-sex couples as well as several on other queer family types, the volume considers the following key questions: What are the material impacts of marriage for same-sex couples? Is the spread of same-sex marriage pushing LGBTQ people toward more "normalized" types of relationships that resemble heterosexual marriage? And finally, how is the spread of same-sex marriage shaping other queer relationships that do not fit the marriage model?
By presenting scholarly research and activist observations on these questions, this volume helps translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage debates into a framework for ongoing critical research in the after-marriage period.
Preface
Introduction: For Better or for Worse? Relational Landscapes in the Time of Same-Sex Marriage
Michael W. Yarbrough
Part I: The Material Impacts of Same-Sex Marriage
Chapter 1: Living Lesbian Relationships in Madrid: Queering Life and Families in Times of Straight Living Fossils
Luciana Moreira
Chapter 2: For the Richer, not the Poorer: Marriage Equality, Financial Security, and the Promise of Queer Economic Justice
Liz Montegary
Chapter 3: “What Makes Our Conflicts Queer?” An Interview with Rachel Epstein
Rachel Epstein and Michael W. Yarbrough
Part II: Is Marriage Normalizing LGBTQ Relationships?
Chapter 4: From Public Debate to Private Decision: The Normalization of Marriage among Critical LGBQ People
Abigail Ocobock
Chapter 5: Reflections on Marriage Equality as a Vehicle for LGBTQ Political Transformation
Mignon Moore
Chapter 6: Simultaneous Assimilation and Innovation in the Construction of Queer Families:
Married Same-Sex Couples in Cape Town, South Africa
Lwando Scott
Chapter 7: From Homonormativity to Polynormativity: Representing Consensual Non-Monogamy
Lital Pascar
Part III: The Present and Future of Relational Diversity
Chapter 8: The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage Statement Ten Years Later
featuring Terry Boggis, Debanuj DasGupta, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Lisa Duggan, Amber L. Hollibaugh, Nancy Polikoff, and Ignacio Rivera
Chapter 9: Making Connections: An Interview with Ignacio G. Rivera
Ignacio Rivera and Michael W. Yarbrough
Chapter 10: Beyond the Sex-Love-Marriage Alignment: Xinghun among Queer People in Mainland China
Shuzhen Huang
Chapter 11: "Zoning is a Way of Sorting People": An Interview with the Scarborough Family
The Scarborough Family and Michael W. Yarbrough
Chapter 12: Queer Street Families: Place-Making and Community Among LGBT Youth of Color in Iconic Gay Neighborhoods
Theodore Greene
Chapter 13: Future Fronts in the Fight for Family Diversity: A Panel Discussion
featuring Martha M. Ertman, Andy Izenson, Ricci Levy, James Lopata, Hugh Ryan, and Sarah Wright
Biography
Michael W. Yarbrough is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work explores the intersection of law, culture, and family. He is Assistant Professor of Law and Society in the Political Science Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Angela Jones is Associate Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College, SUNY. Her research interests include African American political thought and protest, gender, and sexuality. Jones is the author of four books and numerous scholarly articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis is the founder and former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice, and worked as an activist for over two decades. He is currently Assistant Professor of Social Work at Seattle University, USA, and has written about queer social movements, poverty, and marriage politics.
"Probing a landscape of emergent social relations in the wake of same-sex marriage, this indispensable collection brims with critical insight. If marriage continues to exert disproportionate authority over our social imaginations, then queer family and kinship after marriage equality raise urgent questions regarding new configurations of inequality within diversity. Expanding definitions of queer family and kinship do not automatically translate into parables of progress and reason."
David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, Graduate Chair, University of Pennsylvania, USA
"Wide-ranging, international, intersectional, and critically queer, Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality brings together diverse perspectives on the normalizations, intimacies, and material changes generated by the spread of same-sex marriage. A useful contribution to the study of sexual politics, relationships, and kinship."
Joshua Gamson, author of Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship, Professor of Sociology, University of San Francisco, USA
