i'll take an x on my finger

quotes from the essay "gay marriage and queer love" by ryan conrad (from the book queering anarchism: addressing and undressing power and desire)


"marriage has never been centrally organized around love, but the buying and selling of womyn as property through a patriarchal dowry system that evolved into the soft coercion of domestic indentured servitude."

"now, in the aftermath of the nauseatingly class-elitist failed campaign, gay and lesbian organizations, and the professional activists that prop them up, remain resiliently resistant to critically questioning what we, as queer and trans subjects, are seeking to be equal to in the first place.  do we really want full inclusion in the institution of marriage, a social contract that explicitly limits the ways in which we organize our emotional and erotic lives?"

"these state benefits and privileges, as outlined in the defense of marriage act, are overwhelmingly about the transfer of money and property (including children, as the only way marriage allows us to think about them is like property).  the almost exclusive emphasis on property rights highlights that marriage has little to do with love, but with benefits and privileges as doled out by the state to those who adhere to a specific set of moral values determined by the church."

"what if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage's forbidden fruits (i.e., healthcare, freedom of movement across nation-state borders, etc.) for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?"

"neoliberalism, which i broadly define here as the concentrated privatization of every facet of our daily lives, depends upon this affective discourse, which asserts that the immediate family constitutes an unproblematized site of safety and security while the rest of the world is rendered a dangerous outside."

"furthermore, equality rhetoric has created a vacuum of gay pragmatism in which our queer political imagination has withered away."

"equality rhetoric. . . positions our most fantastic queer futures as not only unattainable but also unreasonable.  it demands that we put our time and energy into the desperate fight to be equal participants in oppressive and archaic institutions instead of attempting to actualize our dreams of queer utopia. . . i invoke utopia here not as a naively conceived physical time or space, but rather as a mode of critical inquiry, an understanding that we should always be attempting to realize our most fantastic and equitable queer futures in the here and now.  why aim for anything less than the horizon of becoming?"

and some words from emma goldman (1917)