The 48th review 41th BOOK "WEDLOCKED"

This book is very good, this book has an amazing story that can interest the reader. And I have read this book more than once. You should read this book! By Rifaldi Fauzan


2015 APPEARED TO BE a banner year for the Fourteenth Amendment’s public visibility. Though the Reconstruction-era amendment was originally adopted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, its egalitarian language has demonstrated a much broader reach. Since the 1860s, the amendment’s provisions for equal protections have proved instrumental in securing the rights and equal protection of many citizens and subjects at the margins of the law. And in 2015, the legalization of gay marriage took place on the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection grounds, drawing explicitly the comparison often made between racial and sexual justice. Justice Kennedy seemed to be writing for the history books when he claimed that “new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations,” and portrayed gay marriage as the culmination of Supreme Court decisions protecting the intimacy of couples of any race, gender or creed.
From “Lawrence v. Texas” (which illegalized sodomy bans) to “Loving v. Virginia” (which illegalized anti-miscegenation laws), Kennedy claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment is clear: he famously wrote that the “dignity and respect” of couples, gay and straight, black and brown and white, warrants protections of the privileges and immunities of US subjects on both the due process and equal protection grounds. Gay marriage, in this understanding, is staged as a kind of emancipation — a movement into freedom.
But this is not the story that emerges from Katherine Franke’s rigorous, historical, and polemical Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality — How African Americans and Gays Thought Marriage Would Set Them Free. In one telling distinction between her explanation of gay marriage and Kennedy’s more liberatory version, Franke’s book pays little attention to the Fourteenth Amendment. The absence stems first from the Amendment’s largely ancillary relation to the finer print of US marriage law. But second, and more importantly, it emerges from Franke’s pointed critique of Kennedy’s argument that the “dignity and respect” due to gay couples justifies the legal protection of their right to marry. After all, “dignity and respect” are not mentioned in the very amendment around which this newest civil rights expansion is based.
And, Franke would argue, “dignity and respect,” despite the positive-sound of the words, have a troubling history. As a counterpoint to Kennedy’s logic, her book examines the dark side of respectability; it shows how “dignity,” since the Emancipation Proclamation and the drafting of the Civil Rights Amendments, has been used as a subtext by which to police the very rights that marginalized communities have won. Put differently: “dignity and respect” aren’t the precondition of equal personhood — they are, instead, its dangerous limit.
Franke makes the compelling case that to understand the broader context of civil rights movements, one must look outside of the clauses that ensure their legality — and instead critique the assumptions that surround what it means to have rights. It’s a somewhat daring argument to make, to focus on the indebtedness the marriage equality movement owes to previous civil rights movements, given the pitfalls that Franke herself observes. Yet, as Wedlocked reveals in excruciating detail, the story is not a simple tale of a society’s forward march: where the marriage equality movement has often implied that civil rights have progressed in a stately manner from race to sexuality, Franke paints a more nuanced picture. She shows how the logic of marriage equality — the very “dignity and respect” that Kennedy invokes — carries with it a damaged history of racial and sexual exclusion that the marriage movement ignores at its peril.

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Wedlocked provides a vital corrective to the common logic that links marriage equality to such notable court cases as Loving on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. For evidence, Franke describes historical moments when the apparent extension of rights in fact limited personal agency and expression. For instance, she examines whether recently freed slaves benefited from the institutionalization of their relationships under US marriage laws. Franke’s answer, in short, is no: the opposite occurred, as love and family were constrained to the relationships that the new law endorsed. So, patriarchal ideas of marriage that mandated what we would now call the “nuclear family” were used by Northern Reconstructionists and Southern courts to persecute black people for intimate arrangements outside of monogamous marriage. And these stories, Franke claims, show how “gaining rights can also, in some cases, even contribute to an intensification of societal hatred and resentment toward previously disenfranchised minorities.” With an intensification of societal hatred, authorities often turned to the tools still available to delegitimize people’s rights, with marriage laws figuring prominently among them.
To show how the law itself became a tool for restricting rights otherwise protected by the highest courts and legislative institutions, Franke’s book progresses in six parts: four historical assessments of the how marriage was used to damage and regulate black communities, and two chapters that ruminate more about contemporary fault lines between marriage, homophobia, and racism. First, Franke examines in the historical record how “freedom by marriage” was a form of coercion: during the Civil War and prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, black men who won freedom by joining the Union Army were encouraging to marry to protect loved ones. But, as Franke shows, more often than not the benefits of marriage proved fungible in practice — wives and children were often left unprotected by the Army forces purportedly fighting on their behalf, with their freedom as spouses and children up for debate by their legal owners. The following three chapters trace various archives and first-person legal accounts. They show how slave marriages haunted the intimate lives of freed people; how public officials intruded in the private lives of black citizens to enforce monogamous intimacy.
Marriage, to the surprise of many, became compulsory — and, to enforce the strict boundaries of marriage, freed men and women were accused of and prosecuted for various intimate and sexual crimes; with accusations ranging from bigamy, to adultery, to fornication for having sex out of wedlock, freed men and women found that they had lost control of their own intimacy. They found themselves bound to sham weddings that had been enforced upon them as slaves, marriages they no longer wanted. Due to the often unclear strictures of divorce law, they were prosecuted for believing that marriages were as simple to exit as to enter. From the archives of these experiences, Franke writes:
Newly freed men and women quickly found that the importance of the marital relation was often “impressed” upon them through arrest and prosecution for violating the state’s criminal laws prohibiting fornication, adultery, and bigamy. […] When their relationships ended and they separated from one another, they did so without going through formal divorce proceedings, unaware that they needed to do so. This often landed them in the county jail when they took up with another partner. Freed people learned the hard way that their marriage rights were a mixed blessing insofar as marriage had strict rules and those rules could be — and were — used by unsympathetic whites to undermine the full emancipation of black people.
Though state laws regulating sexual expression were not written in such a way as to target black people explicitly (indeed, many predated Emancipation), in practice, cases were often prosecuted on a racially exclusive basis, as Franke shows through her in-depth exploration of cases adjudicated in court during and after Reconstruction. Rather than liberating people to form intimate attachments on their own terms, marriage enforced the norming of intimate relationships in order for those relationships to be protected by the law. Rather than binding a persecuted community together, marriage was used to fragment and dismantle the forms of community and kinship that had been formed in the forges of slavery.
At base, then, the apparatus of marriage emerged in its full force as a way for white people to proclaim that black people were not ready to claim the status of equal citizens. The very logic of marriage was stacked against these communities from the beginning on the basis of the “respectability” of people’s intimate lives — based on white assumptions of what “respectability” looked like to begin with. And this process of normalization produced lasting damage in the communities for whom it was thought to promise social and civil inclusion.
From this assembled evidence, Franke shows the durability of marriage as a form of social policing over the century. Moreover, she explores how the legal threats and coercions faced by black people under the marriage regime are already being used to complicate the intimate lives of gay people. In fact, gay couples are already being forced into marriage — by having their domestic partnerships converted into marriages that then fall under far stricter regulation, as happened in California, or by having their marriages “backdated” to the earliest point of cohabitation in the days before marriage equality, to cite a few examples. The compulsory move to marriage shows that the regulations of the state can be used in manifold, and perhaps unexpected ways, to make the lives of gay people now, as for newly freed slaves before, in and out of monogamous relationships more difficult.
When Franke writes that “rights-bearing subjects are almost inevitably shaped by the very rights they bear,” she cuts to the chase of the questions often left unasked by the celebrants of marriage equality: what kind of inclusion are gay couples asking for? What does predicating such inclusion on the “respect” of the straight world mean for the queer communities now faced with only marriage as a recognized rubric for their relationships? It is exactly the equation of “dignity and respect” as a logic for advancing LGBT rights that Wedlock finds immensely questionable. What happens, then, when marriage is established as “the standard by which all other forms of kinship, family, friendship, temporary alliance, and love are both made legible and assigned value”? Franke’s answer: “loving and/or sexual associations that lie outside the formal paling of marriage are evaluated and understood by virtue of their likeness to, or dissimilarity from, marriage.” This is not merely a loss of what Leo Bersani called “lawless homosexuality” — the loss of the bathhouses, cruising sites, and bars that existed as forms of community and kinship ex juris — it is a loss of the forms of support, engagement, affiliation that extralegal queerness had built for itself.