by Elizabeth Freeman
Marriage
Marriage seems to be an ordinary fact of life, not a contested concept. In US culture, however, the term “marriage” has pointed to two simultaneous but incompatible functions. As a component of US kinship law, marriage sanctions particular sexual alliances from which property relations are determined. It thereby defines a sphere of protected sexual and economic interests whose exterior is marked by sexual “deviants.” Yet as an aspect of modern emotional life in the United States, marriage is also the ideological linchpin of intimacy—the most elevated form of chosen interpersonal relationship. At the core of political debate and much critical debate in American studies and cultural studies is the question of whether marriage is a matter of love or law, a means of securing social stability or of realizing individual freedom and emotional satisfaction (Graff 1999). These have become national questions; marriage seems so tied to collective national identity and democratic practices that many US Americans view it as an expression of patriotism, as indeed has been the case from the eighteenth century onward. This linkage is more than rhetorical. As well as structuring sexuality and gender, marriage law undergirds US citizenship because it is implicated in the property relations, racial hierarchy, immigration policy, and colonialist projects that have determined national membership (Cott 2000).
Temporality
In July 2017, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) repeated the phrase “reclaiming my time” in the face of attempts to run down the clock on her questions as chair of the House Financial Services Committee. A procedural move, this statement nevertheless captured the nation’s attention, for it succinctly invoked the time stolen from people of color and women of all races, foregrounding time as a vector of control. Though we are conditioned to see time as a neutral substance through which we simply move in a forward direction, in academic discourse, the term temporality registers the collective patterning of stasis and change according to various regimes of power: the politics of our experience of time. Disciplinary tools as various as the whip in slavery, total quality management in capitalism, and domestic violence in the household have ensured that vulnerable bodies wait or move according to the dictates of others. Even within seemingly benign settings like homes and schools, bodies are trained to sleep, to wake up, to eat, to work, to have sex (or not), and to follow myriad activities keyed to maximum productivity in a process I have called “chrononormativity” (E. Freeman 2010). Moreover, the state organizes lives according to a deeply cisgendered and heteronormative time line: it registers the dates of birth, marriage, and death; pays many benefits according to a generational logic; and so on (Halberstam 2005). And national culture organizes the rhythms and life narratives of human populations through gender and sexuality in a process Dana Luciano (2007) calls “chronobiopolitics.” Finally, entire academic fields, most notably anthropology and history, have been predicated on the idea that some cultures exist outside of modern time (Fabian 1983), and imperial and colonial ventures have depended on this social-evolutionary model of uneven development (Fanon [1952] 2008). In response to these dominant temporal paradigms, overlapping feminist, queer, and transgender theories—explicitly and implicitly anticolonial—have insisted on reimagining possible relations between past, present, and future.