Notes on Against Equality

There is vaguely anarchic category of "queer" that has been annihilated by the compartmentalization of different sexual preferences and gender identities. It has assisted in the consolidation of "gay" etc as simply another category in the hegemony, allowing for inclusion but keeping intact a constrictive structure. Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion edited by Ryan Conrad attempts to reclaim this older conception of queerness, it collects a number of now dated but anthropologically interesting arguments against gay marriage, against any marriage at all, at least as a state-recognized function.

"Marriage is essentially a financial and legal contract that allocates the movement of property, power, and privilege from one person to another. Historically it has been a way of consolidating family power amongst men..."
Feminist socialist writing, perhaps by Charlotte Perkins Gilman although I could be wrong, identified marriage as state control over the means of reproductive labor, a way of regulating the unrecorded and underappreciated duties of housework, childrearing, etc. Borrowing from Foucault, as a society bases itself around its means of production-- the factory-- so too does its microcosms become factory-like, including marriage. As we move from the societies of punishment to societies of control marriages look a little different too, but their purpose remains the same.

To the radicals in this book gay activists who strive toward marriage as the end goal of their liberty have a truncated view of liberty, a bourgeois view. They believe liberty to consist of property relations and categories, they simply wish to be another lever on a machine that should be dismantled. 

The argument reminds me of Jewish respectability politics that, almost a century ago, liberal reform Jews won out over radicals and the ultra orthodox. We are simply other members of society, except of a Jewish faith. All fine and good but it erases a long dead tradition of Jewish radicalism, but worse it has in a half century morphed into toxicity: colonialism, nationalism, chauvinism. This is what happens when you forget your radical past. Will this happen to LGBTQ? We have Pete Buttigeig after all. On the other hand it seems more likely that the Ls and Gs and Bs will try to cast off the Ts, as we are seeing in the UK.