Friday, October 24, 2008

State of the Union
Marriage in the Shadow of Electoral Politics

8:30 am to 5 pm
314 Royce

INFO for PARTICIPANTS

To recognize and engage some of the issues key to the historic presidential election that will be held this fall, UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women is hosting a conference titled “State of the Union: Marriage in the Shadow of Electoral Politics” on Friday, October 24th.  

The “State of the Union” conference will explore challenges to the enduring depiction of marriage as a quintessentially private matter by foregrounding the distinctive ways in which marriage has been politicized in recent U.S. electoral politics. Just as the issue of same-sex marriage has been propelled to the top of the political agenda, marriage politics have proven central as well in a wide array of political controversies including those sparked by political sex scandals, immigration policy reform, and welfare policy. The “State of the Union” conference is scheduled to take place just prior to the 2008 presidential election, and the participants’ talks will engage marriage politics in the context of current events. The conference will also highlight the obscure and often neglected connections between recent debates and longstanding discourses and historical practices surrounding the regulation of sex, sexuality, and intimacy in the United States.  This event provides a rare opportunity to move beyond the familiar presentation of current events offered by the mainstream media, and to think deeply and imaginatively about the underlying causes and deeper implications of issues at the top of the political agenda today.

The conference will consist of three panels to be held throughout the day.  The presenters on the first panel, “Laws of Love,” will consider the socio-legal history and cultural politics of the regulation of intimacy in the United States.  Panelists will engage questions such as:

• What are some of the overlooked legacies of the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which declared state anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional?
• What do sex scandals reveal about the cultural meaning of marriage as a foundational social institution, and “husband” and “wife” as key social roles?

The second panel, “Thinking Through Same-Sex Marriage” offers fresh and surprising perspectives on one of the most heated public policy debates of our time.  Among the questions panelists will consider are:

• Is equality better served by promoting equal marriage rights, or by dissolving marriage as a legal institution altogether?
• Does same-sex marriage reinforce heteronormativity, or does same-sex marriage pose a fundamental challenge to the existing social order?

The third panel, “Intimacy and Intersectionality,” will engage issues too often hidden or marginalized in public debates about marriage, in particular the racial politics of public debates about sex, intimacy, and the family.  Panelists will explore such questions as:

• How has the institution of marriage been racialized in U.S. law and political discourse?
• In what way do poverty policies constitute a form of sexual regulation?

Co-sponsored by Department of Anthropology, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Department of Women’s Studies, Williams Institute, and UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM

GETTING TO UCLA/PARKING

Schedule

8:30 - 9 am         Welcome/Opening Remarks

Speakers/Descriptions

Welcome by Kathleen McHugh        
Opening Remarks by Juliet Williams

9 - 10:30 am      Panel 1

Laws of Love

Discussant: Shu-mei Shih, UCLA

Sex Scandals, Immigration, Biopolitics
PAUL APOSTOLIDIS
Whitman College

Identity Politics in Queer Times: The 2008 Presidential Race
SUSAN KOSHY
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences
RACHEL MORAN
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine

Discussant:
SHU-MEI SHIH
Comparative Literature & Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, and the co-director of the "Cultures in Transnational Perspective" Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Humanities at UCLA.  She most recently coordinated a special issue of PMLA entitled "Comparative Racialization" (October 2008).

Sex Scandals, Immigration, Biopolitics

PAUL APOSTOLIDIS
Politics, Whitman College

Professor Apostolidis teaches courses in United States politics and political and social theory. He is the author of Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press, 2000), among other publications.

Major Interests: United States Politics (politics of the welfare state; electoral politics; religion and politics); and Political Theory (critical theory; cultural studies; theology and political philosophy)

Identity Politics in Queer Times: The 2008 Presidential Race

The difficulty of gauging racial, gender, and sexual progress at this moment is deeply entangled with historical transformations in the identity categories we inherited from civil rights struggles. The changes of the last four decades have internally stratified these categories and economic restructuring, new immigration, and the war on terror have broken up old class and racial alliances. Further complicating matters in this presidential race has been the aggressive drive in conservative and liberal camps to cherry-pick each other’s strategies and symbols. I will argue that this presidential election has laid open the danger of single-axis identities for organizing progressive politics and it has brought into play emergent multi-racial constituencies with conservative and radical agendas that require new ways of analyzing the profound interpenetration and realignment of identity categories.

Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

In 1967, the United States Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. The decision was designed to dismantle the legacy of Jim Crow segregation, which enforced the color line even in the intimate domains of sex and marriage. Rightly considered a civil rights victory, Loving also has had consequences that the justices probably never anticipated. In my talk, I will discuss this unexpected legacy with respect to both racial equality and marital freedom.

10:45 am - 12:15 pm     Panel 2

Thinking Through Same-Sex Marriage

Discussant: Doug NeJaime, UCLA

Queer Normativity and New Orders of Same-Sex Marriage
TOM BOELLSTORFF
University of California, Irvine

Gay Marriage and the Search for Respectability Among People of Color
MIGNON MOORE
University of California, Los Angeles

Beyond Straight and Gay Marriage
NANCY POLIKOFF
American University Washington College of Law

Discussant:
Doug NeJaime
Williams Institute, UCLA

Doug NeJaime is the Sears Law Teaching Fellow at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses on law and sexuality.  Doug’s research focuses on antidiscrimination law and social movement lawyering, and his work has appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law &  Gender and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.  He is a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School.

Queer Normativity and New Orders of Same-Sex Marriage

In this talk I set out some lines of inquiry regarding queernormative critiques of same-sex marriage. I do so in light of two current events:
the legalization of same-sex marriage in California, and the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. The legalization of same-sex marriage in California, and the pending initiative to eliminate that legalization, raise complex questions about the politics of queer theory. Drawing upon an analysis of what I term “straight time,” I suggest that while concerns regarding legitimation and exclusion are important, queernormative claims that same-sex marriage is inherently consonant with contemporary neoliberalism fail to address dynamics of counterhegemony (rather than liberation) and insufficiently theorize their own consonance with the views of those who oppose same-sex marriage. Suggesting that the U.S.-centric character of these debates has helped shape this queernormative discourse—in which the political valence of same-sex marriage is known in advance of politics itself—I turn briefly to Indonesia for a comparative perspective. Central to Barack Obama’s personal narrative is his childhood experience of growing up in Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country. Less commented upon is that Obama lived in Indonesia from 1967–77, the formative years of Soeharto’s “New Order” government, which took power following massive political violence from 1965–67. I briefly explore how discourses of the heteronormative nuclear family were central to the New Order’s success and remain powerful in contemporary Indonesia, ten years following Soeharto’s fall from power. Juxtaposing these Indonesian debates with contemporary U.S. debates presents interesting opportunities for rethinking temporality, recognition, and sexual politics.

Gay Marriage and the Search for Respectability Among People of Color

Although the debate over gay marriage has permeated the lives of various racial and ethnic group members across the country, we have heard very little from nonwhite lesbians and gay men who are not part of liberal LGBT political circles. My paper draws from a three year study of black gay women who are forming families to examine their perspectives on this issue. It reveals important class differences in their interest in marriage and in the types of benefits they would receive from marriage. It also shows how a larger historical and on-going struggle within African-American communities for respectability and legitimacy plays an unexpected yet critical role in the race to the marriage altar for black gay people.

Beyond Straight and Gay Marriage

Marriage as a family form is not more important or valuable than other forms of family, so the law should not give it more value. In this talk, I criticize the conservative "marriage movement" for blaming all social problems on the decline of life-long heterosexual marriage. I also take issue with the gay rights "marriage-equality movement" for attributing the legal problems facing same-sex couples to the inability to marry, rather than to the "special rights" inappropriately granted married couples. When marriage serves as the bright dividing line between those relationships that legally matter and those that do not, countless families suffer. My valuing-all-families solution is true to the roots of the gay rights movement and consistent with decades-old legal changes that have made marriage matter less.

2 - 3:30 pm         Panel 3

Intimacy and Intersectionality

Discussant:
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, UC Irvine

Obama’s ‘Responsible Fatherhood’ Discourse and the Unacknowledged Promotion of ‘Simulacra Marriages’ in Poverty Law
ANNA MARIE SMITH
Cornell University

The Race to Marriage
JUDITH STACEY
New York University

Discussant:
TIFFANY WILLOUGHBY-HERARD
African American Studies, UC Irvine

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine. She completed her Ph.D at UC Santa Barbara in Political Science in 2003. Her current research examines the role of the US-based Carnegie Corporation Poor White Study in South Africa, 1927-1932, to evaluate how international processes and institutions and ideas about race and poverty shape domestic policies about race relations. Her research areas include race in foreign policy, South African politics, whiteness and scientific racism, decolonizing theory, black political thought, and economic justice.

Obama’s ‘Responsible Fatherhood’ Discourse and the Unacknowledged Promotion of ‘Simulacra Marriages’ in Poverty Law

During the 2008 election campaign, Sen. Obama established a distinct position on social justice by combining his calls for cross-racial understanding and enhanced governmental anti-poverty initiatives with stern reprimands addressed to the nation’s fathers. In several prominent speeches, Obama decried the rise of single mothering and claimed that irresponsible fathers were failing to meet their familial obligations. From a feminist perspective, the idea that caregiving obligations ought to be distributed equally shared across the genders is entirely legitimate. However, if we look at the actual legislation that Obama has sponsored, we can see that this bill, like its predecessors in Congress, is specifically tailored as a poverty law reform measure. Further, it would have major implications in the child support enforcement system that lies at the heart of the most important poverty assistance program, namely TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.) The welfare-based child support enforcement system sets up “simulacra marriages” between the custodial mother and the absent father. The system invades the privacy of the mother and places enormous pressures upon the absent father. In many cases, the custodial mother is placed at a much greater risk of harassment and assault where the absent father resents being saddled with the support burden and blames her for his predicament. This paper will draw out the legal implications of Obama’s “responsible fatherhood” initiative and will bring to light the related controversies that deserve much greater attention from feminist scholars and advocates.

ANNA MARIE SMITH
Government, Cornell University

Prof. Smith is the author of three books, Welfare and Sexual Regulation (Cambridge, 2007), Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (Routledge, 1998) and New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1994.) She has also published articles in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Citizenship Studies, Constellations, Social Text, Radical Philosophy, Diacritics, Feminist Review, and New Formations, as well as in numerous anthologies. She is currently a Mellon New Directions Fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality and the Law at Columbia Law School.

The Race to Marriage

Ironically, campaigns for same-sex marriage in the US inadvertently have revived long dormant conflicts over polygamy, as the propinquity of the recent raid on the polygamous YFZ compound in Eldorado TX and the historic California Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage suggest. Drawing from field research on polygamy and same-sex marriage in post-Apartheid South Africa, where forms of both are legal, I discuss the racial and sexual politics of the unhappy arranged marriage between the politics of polygamy and gay family rights in the U.S. The legal fate of both forms of intimacy may prove to be more entwined than either of their constituencies would wish.

3:30 - 4 pm         Closing Remarks

4 - 5 pm               Reception

GETTING to UCLA

From the LAX airport

By public transportation:
Many local bus lines (MTA, Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, Culver City Bus) serve the UCLA campus.

By car:
If you are driving to UCLA from the 405 North Freeway, exit at “Wilshire Blvd. East.” Turn left onto Westwood Blvd. Take the first right onto Lindbrook Drive, and then turn left onto Hilgard Ave. Go up the hill until you reach Westholme and take a left to enter campus at the Westholme parking information kiosk.

PARKING:
Daily parking permits cost $8 and only cash is accepted.

You can also click on this link http://www.ucla.edu/map/ to find more detailed driving directions and a campus map.