I feel compelled to resurrect this blog (after a lengthy respite) by the course of current events in both Germany and the USA. This week, as almost everyone by now knows, the US Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on two cases concerning marriage equality for same-sex couples. Depending on how the justices rule, this can result in anything from nothing, to the overturning of the anti-gay Prop 8 in California all the way to the full federal recognition of marriage equality and the simultaneous striking down of all state-level laws and constitutional provisions against it. Big time stuff. If the best-case-scenario indeed came to pass, the USA would have full marriage equality even before Germany.
Germany has something commonly referred to in the press and popular parlance as the "Homo-Ehe", or "Homo-Marriage" (they don't mince words, the Germans..!). Despite the misleading name, it is not actually marriage, but a form of civil union that includes nearly all the legal benefits of marriage except for a peculiar structure of income tax benefit and the right to jointly adopt children, as a couple, from the start of the adoption process. The German Constitutional Court has recently chipped away at rules against gay couple's adopting, such that they can now do so, but "through the back door" (ha ha) and only after one of the partners is already the legal parent of the child(ren).
Court cases aside, opinion polls in both countries, as well as ever stronger commitments from the left/liberal parties in both countries, seem to suggest that full marriage equality for same-sex couples is only a matter of time. My question, and concern, is thus: what happens after that battle is won?
Of course, marriage equality is not the be all and end all of the LGBT movement. Sure, for many bourgeois types who insist we are JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, that may be enough. But for those of us who see "just like everyone else" as merely code for "the current order of sex, gender, and familial norms and structures is just fine and dandy", this remains problematic. Even "everyone else" aren't actually like everyone else - straight, cis-gendered white men also suffer and need liberating from this system. And, even if they were, why would anyone want to fit into a system of power relations and cultural hegemony in which rape culture is justified and normalized, in which signs of gender non-conformity even in young children are all too often greeted with horror and disgust, in which our trans* brothers, sisters, and somewhere-in-betweeners continue to face discrimination and violence, and on and on and on?
I see, on the horizon, a rupture in "the movement" rearing its head. This rupture, between the "we are/want to be just like everyone else", and the more radical forces who seek to question and subvert the current order of sex and gender relations has, of course, always been there. The marriage equality issue has simply made it less apparent, as even those who find marriage to be an institution mired in a history of sexual domination based on the ownership of women by men agree that, in our day and age, it should be an equal opportunity "oppressor". Perhaps the movement as such will more obviously splinter, and probably have less money at its disposal from the bourgeois HRC-type conforming gays. Then again, a leaner, meaner, more culturally aggressive movement, unafraid to offend certain sensibilities, couldn't be all bad.
How my homeland and adopted country compare is, overall, a wash. In some ways, gender and sex relations in Germany are more progressive (from my point of view). Women hardly ever wear heels, childcare burdens seem more evenly shared, the law provides for paternity leave in addition to maternity leave (the US provides for neither..), and so on. More broadly, the general German willingness to engage with ideological commitments and personal convictions as matters of a shared social life, rather than as personal consumption-oriented lifestyle choices, seems to me to enable social transformation of gender and family life more in the long-run than it does in the US. On the other hand, radical voices are also present in great numbers in the US, and often institutionalized in settings like the university in a way they are not here in Germany. For example, Queer/Gender Studies is nearly non-represented in degree and course offerings in the German university landscape.
Of course, I can't cover the entire landscape of the German and American LGBT rights movements and the cultures of gender etc in each country in one blog post. I simply wanted to ask the question, what comes next for the movement after this battle is won? I'm not sure what it will look like, but I am sure that, 10 years post-marriage equality, it will be an entirely different beast.
No comments:
Post a Comment