Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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Producing Norms: Same-Sex Marriage, Refiguring Kinship and the Cultural Groundswell of Queer Coupledom / Rob Cover
Abstract: Poststructuralist feminism, postmodern inquiry, queer theory and various radical and liberal-humanist forms of lesbian/gay rights have worked to undo the claim to the naturalness of masculine-feminine and male-female complementarity in sex and relationships. That is, the rhetorical grounding of the very notion of relationship ‘coupledom’ has been put in question over the past half-century and opened the possibility of a radical reorganisation of modern kinship. The destabilising impact on much contemporary western legislation concerning family, children, IVF access, adoption, immigration rights and social security centers on whether or not the subject of that legislation is ‘single’ or ‘coupled’. Such legislation frequently seeks to restore coupledom’s claim to normativity: in conservative formats as a claim to heteronormativity, and in more liberal and sometimes radical perspectives as a claim to the normativity of coupled relationships, regardless of the genders involved. Taking a queer theory approach, this article examines the ways in which lesbian/gay cultural rhetoric has sought to re-affirm coupledom as the primary, acceptable form of everyday sexual and relational sociality. The dominant political strand of lesbian/gay politics asserts a pro-coupledom discourse through the claim to same-sex partnership legislation and gay marriage rights. Arguing that the normalisation of coupledom is out of step with the radical roots of (1970s) lesbian/gay politics, a number of the mechanisms by which same-sex coupledom becomes popular, enters public sphere dialogue and achieves a political groundswell are examined here.
<1> Over the past decade the ‘gay marriage’ issue has entered the public sphere through lesbian/gay political activism, the force of lobbying, United States, Australian, Canadian and British electoral politics and—of course—the interest of news media. The issue has taken an array of forms, with structures such as ‘civil unions’, actual marriage equivalent to heterosexual nuptial traditions, domestic household benefit rights: all of these centre upon and rely on the notion of ‘the couple’ as a kind of linch-pin of socio-sexual organisation, regardless of whether we speak of gay male (predominantly) or lesbian (less frequently) partnership. The basis of much contemporary western legislation on family, children, IVF access, adoption, immigration rights and social security is on whether or not the subject of that legislation is ‘single’ or ‘coupled’. The backlash discourse from the conservative right, Christian and orthodox religious organisations and other non-liberal and anti-liberal perspectives have also contributed to the debate, putting into further circulation the idea of same-sex marriage and firmly entrenching it in public sphere dialogue. However, for a minority-rights issue to become and remain a public interest beyond momentary spectacle depends on a cultural ‘groundswell’ of both those whom it purportedly serves to provide social or economic gains as well as broad support from a wider population (Lovell 2003). Such a groundswell is produced not merely through political articulation, leadership and media interest but through history and discourse, the relationship between self-perception of a minority group and the articulation of identity/subjectivity in its cultural formations. Much has previously been written on the legislative politics of same-sex marriage; the debates between conservative voices and lesbian/gay lobbying groups are relatively well-understood, and some of the more nuanced debates within lesbian/gay cultural politics on the appropriateness or futility of seeking same-sex domestic partnership rights, civil union entitlements or full-blown same-sex marriage privileges have been well-articulated (Baird & Rosenbaum 1997; Eskridge 1996; Sullivan 1997). One area in the contemporary history of these gender, sexual and kinship re-arrangements that has not been well-explored is that of how the groundswell has been produced within lesbian/gay culture, and the ways in which traditional and new relationship arrangements and attitudes to sex (whether in relationships or casual) relate to the perception of support for the politics of seeking same-sex partnership or marital legislation. Likewise, the significance of ‘coupledom’ as a form of socio-sexual relationality that simultaneously underpins and is produced by concepts of marriage has remained relatively unexplored.
<2> The critique of ‘coupledom’ is particularly important given that the ways in which ‘coupledom’ figures in lesbian/gay cultural discourse is not always or all the time commensurate with heteronormative forms of coupledom, but appears increasingly to embrace the signifiers that make heteronormative coupledom appear simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘civilised’. The question here is how the assertion of same-sex coupledom operates at once both in support of heteronormative coupledom and againstit by undoing its ‘naturalness’. Importantly, the logic of coupledom has traditionally been grounded in the presumed ‘naturality’ of heterosexual complementarity. As Gagnon and Parker put it:
traditionally, sexual desire was assumed to be natural and automatic and heterosexual and universal. The penis desired the vagina and the vagina desired the penis (Gagnon & Parker 1995:12).
The male/female and active/passive dyads, which in western humanist discourse suggest the complementarity of gendered bodies, extends to the ‘functionality’ of those bodies (Lingis 1994:148). That function, although not the exclusive utility of gendered bodies, is read as the desire to couple sexually or romantically—it is the foundationalist myth of the twoness of sex (Copjec 1994:17). However, the increasing de-emphasis on the naturalness of heterosexuality through lesbian/gay representation and the (problematic) bio-essentialist assertion of homosexual identity have placed the foundational myths that support coupledom in question, thereby requiring them to be reproduced anew—this perspective is central to all aspects of the same-sex marriage debates. That is, the critique of masculine-feminine complementarity that emerges through the liberal discourse of essentialist or ‘ethnic’ homosexuality leaves coupledom without its ‘natural’ ground. Increasingly the respective genders of the members of the couple are made irrelevant as the call to same-sex domestic partnership rights has attested. Rather than heteronormative complementarity, coupledom is articulated through privacy. The privacy that has been afforded the monogamous couple since the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries is not only figured and produced through public and legislative discourses related to access to resources, but is afforded a certain privacy characterised by the home (Foucault 1990:38). As the figure of coupledom is repeated in legislative and popular discourse it becomes naturalised external to the masculinity-femininity and male-female dyads, and stands as figurative of sociality, romance, love, and sexuality on its own. Yet the ‘logic’ of coupledom is not only antithetical to the concept of same-sex sexuality, but is traditionally and historically marginal in the recent past of Gay Liberationist discourses on sexuality.
<3> In thinking through the cultural production of a ‘groundswell’ that sees the politics of seeking same-sex marriage gain a dominant level of support among sexual minorities that—I assert—have no ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ reason for supporting the doctrine of coupledom or legislative recognition of same-sex partnerships, I want to explore the following discursive conditions producing that support: (1) Political change as it relates to lesbian/gay identity and self perception, and their relationship with dominant public institutions; (2) the assertion of lesbian/gay promiscuity as a ‘social flaw’ manufactured in diametric opposition to a coupledom presented increasingly as a ‘normalised’ sexual-relational structure; (3) The force and appeal of popular romance as it is utilised in lesbian/gay culture and the ways in which it affirms coupledom at the expense of monogamy as a key feature of coupled/marital fidelity; and (4) the ‘heterosexualisation’ of contemporary lesbian/gay cultural formations for which I utilise Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a useful means to demonstrate the ways in which heteronormative institutions are introduced to, and normalised within, lesbian/gay culture. Ultimately, same-sex coupledom is about the production and performance of coherent lesbian/gay identities, and it is through forms of sexual and relational behaviour that these identities are played out ‘in accord’ with culturally-given codes of intelligibility and recognition.
THE FORCE OF POLITICS: SHIFTING LIBERALISMS AND THE END OF THE RADICAL QUEER?
<4> The dominant political schemata of lesbian/gay culture have shifted markedly from a 1970s liberationist radical perspective which self-consciously sought to critique and (sometimes ultimately overthrow) heteronormative institutions to one which seeks a ‘place at the table’ through assimilating lesbian/gay cultural and behavioural ‘norms’ to heterosexual institutions such as family, marriage, household, personal economics and representation (Epstein 1990). In other words, there has been a relatively conservative shift in lesbian/gay discourse from a radical Gay Liberationist formulation to a civil-rights and minoritarian politics. Where Gay Liberation policy was once strongly influenced by Frankfurt School re-readings of Freud and Marx, it was able to propose a Marcusean flourishing of polymorphous pleasures (Weeks 1985:165; Marcuse 1969). The one-to-one coupled or marital relationship was rejected as “selfish and constricting” (Altman 1971:137), and a replication of patriarchal standards (Jeffreys 1990:149). The distancing from a radical socialism in the conservative swing of lesbian/gay political advocates, as well as the marginalisation of various feminist perspectives by Gay Liberation’s own male domination (Jeffreys 1990:150), results in the collapse of policies to end more widespread ‘oppressions’ (gender-based) and ‘restrictions’ (coupledom). Such a shift is the product of increasingly widespread liberal—as opposed to liberationist—thought in contemporary political cultures.
<5> The encroaching dominance of the ‘ethnic rights’ or ‘civil rights’ or ‘assimilationist’ or ‘liberal-humanist’ or ‘reformist’ political process within lesbian/gay culture has come simultaneously, as Tony Bennett puts it, from ‘government’ and ‘community’; from ‘above’ and ‘below’ (Bennett 1998:202). As Dennis Altman tells us in describing ‘gay politics’ in North America,
groups are allowed to maintain their identity within American society only to the extent that they are prepared to subscribe to the dominant values of the society; to go outside these values is to be denounced as un-American (Altman 1982:ix).
Steven Epstein, similarly, refers to the criticisms of the sort of liberal pluralist politics in which the goal is simply to get a ‘piece of the pie’ by appeal to a hegemonic order, and the corollary lack of potential or desire to challenge the structural roots of inequality (Epstein 1990). This discourse of lobby-politics has been described as the ‘default model’ for all minority political claims, following the precedent of the Black Civil Rights movement (Sinfield 1996:271). Where concepts of stable coupledom and family are the pivots around which the more conservative articulations of hegemonic sociality en-circle, it is in the appeal to those structures and rituals that a lesbian/gay reformism comes to depend on the notion of the stable couple, domestic partnership and legitimated marriage. The political schema requires affirmation of existing heteronormative institutions in order to gain recognition as a minority group, and this requires (at least) evidence of socio-sexual relationality that can be assimilated into those ritual practices. In other words, to not enter the debate and seek same-sex marriage rights is to maintain a radical approach to the politics of sexuality, and that involves a discourse that has been unable to dominate lesbian/gay culture now for nearly twenty years.
<6> An alternative way of articulating this political shift is through the continued narrative appeal of the private bourgeois household. The changes in social interaction that have occurred in line with but not necessarily as a result of mass communication are exemplary. As Raymond Williams points out, the advent of mass communication was in line with, and further extended, the social conditions which organised the “small family home” (Williams 1990:20), as a result of relative improvement in wages and working conditions and qualitative changes in the distribution of time into work and off-work periods. At the same time, changes in capitalist labour-relations in the mid-twentieth century allowed the evacuation of persons from the heteronormative patriarchal ‘family home’, and a decreased reliance on different-sex coupling (and reproduction) for economic-social survival (D’Emilio 1992:6-8). While economic determinants permit the ‘family home’ as central western bourgeois social ‘unit’ to become an un-necessity, the discourses of sociality come into play to prop up what becomes a residual (culturally unnecessary but experienced) institution. These discourses feed directly into lesbian/gay politics and subsequently its ‘lifestyle’ discourses, evidenced by the emphasis in media publications on home-making, by the frequent real-estate supplements and guides in lesbian/gay newspapers, and by a growing discussion of the lesbian/gay ‘family’ lifestyle and ‘home’ (e.g. Ingram et al:1997:14). In the mix of this discourse is the rhetoric of public/private distinction. The broad shift in the relationship between ‘deviant’ sexualities and dominant legal and social understandings of those sexualities in many western regions has brought lesbian/gay sexualities far more in line with the social organisation of the ‘family’ and the ‘family home’. Where once, and not many years ago, it was not uncommon for two lesbian women or gay men living together to be ‘raided’ by authorities, the trope of ‘privacy’ has come to protect even the same-sex household. The irony here, in fact, is that as gay men and lesbians are no longer characterised with ‘privacy’ by the false privacy of the ‘closet’ (Sedgwick 1990:71), the move to be accepted by and acceptable to ‘the public’ involves a privatisation into the structuration of the marital/familial home.
<7> The counter-argument that rejects the trope and rhetoric of the bourgeois private home is made on the radical fringes of lesbian/gay cultural politics, generally invisibilised in order to present the same-sex marriage debate as emanating from a singular, unified minority. Part of that argument asks the following question: if it serves no purpose other than legitimation and a restatement of property and legal rights which might just as easily be provided by other existent forms of legislation, is it worth the resources dedicated to the campaign when, in a political culture with limited resources, the available cash, time, effort, and energy might better be spent on causes related to poverty, homelessness and so on. Vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, Paula Ettelbrick, argues that it will not “help us address the systemic abuses inherent in a society that does not provide decent health care to all of its citizens”—a right that should not depend on the health coverages/insurance of one’s partners (Ettelbrick 1989). At the same time this stance points to the bourgeoisisation of the homosexual (to adapt Dennis Altman’s terminology). The radical group Homocult (U.K.), who position themselves against lesbian/gay civil rights politics, make the same point: “We say fuck minority politics. The only minority we see are the pathetic rich who try to control us” (Homocult 1992). That is to say, a significatory connection is read between coupledom and contemporary bourgeois discourses upholding capitalism, whereby a dynamic relationship between gay marriage, the private household and consumer capitalism is articulated. This counter-position argues from both within lesbian/gay discourse and at its margins, aiming to use popular cultural practice as a means of disrupting the dominance of institutionalised minority politics. The volume Queer with Class: The First Book of Homocult, a collection of graffiti and propaganda distributed in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, presents a manifesto stating that they are “out to make war on our lesbian and gay leaders” (Homocult 1992). I want to quote a passage from the Homocult book which is demonstrative of the anti-assimilationist and anti-coupledom argument and presents the possibility of articulating a radical reorganisation of contingent sexual and emotional relationship and kinship structures:
The whole truth starts Here
Believing in the great divide
Live a half Life
Incomplete
Looking for your other half
Poor little love birds
Coupled and controlled
Staying in place
Married & Mortgaged & Monotonous
Feathering nests against the world
Two create isolate
Anti Society
Paranoiacly [sic] promoted in the interests of the rich
Divide & Rule
Me Barbie You Ken
Adam & Eve Butch & Fem
Pathetically copied by Hetrogays
Grow up
Fuck about
communicate
Divorce Yourself from Ignorance
Advance beyond couplism
Build Society (Homocult 1992)
While multiple political approaches remain competitive, it is the case that since the 1980s the reformist/assimilationist approach has dominated, and this has meant not only the promotion of coupledom and the public rhetorical ‘invisibilisation’ of promiscuity, but the sidelining of those discourses that prompt something other than either coupledom or casual sexual relationality.
THE FORCE OF CHANGE: PROMISCUITY AS PERCEIVED SOCIAL FLAW
<8> If romantic coupling is a recurringly compelling possibility for the performance and articulation of sexual subjectivity, then how do we explain the recent paradigmatic shift from promiscuity-as-norm to coupling-as-norm within lesbian/gay discourse? While the framework for this shift is given in the politico-structural changes I have described above, it is of course not at all the case that such structural change produces cultural and ritualistic change. Indeed, whether there has been a significant change in behaviour since the lesbian/gay cultural articulation of sexuality as ‘free’ and ‘non-monogamous’ in the 1970s is unknown. What has changed, however, is the self-representation of a lesbian/gay community that no longer centres itself on the symbol of freedom of sexual behaviour, and instead on the representation of heteronormative ‘same-ness’ in coupled relationships and relationality. What needs to be asked, then, is how does this shifting self-perception and self-articulation become an acceptable representation for those who fall within lesbian/gay cultures patterns of sexual and subjective identification? I am arguing here that this shift occurs in some ways through the articulation of casual, non-monogamous and non-relational sexual expression in recent dialogue on same-sex relationships as a social flaw and as which will be ‘corrected’ through the civilising force of legislated domestic partnerships, same-sex marriage or other forms that provide public legitimacy and certified officiality to lesbian or gay coupled relationships. ‘Coupling’, and what I refer to as ‘promiscuity’, are the two widely available modes for the expression of sexual desire in lesbian/gay discourse (and in western culture in general). Despite the frequent socially negative significations of the term ‘promiscuity’, I use it here to describe and indicate sexual behaviour experienced by those not in a coupled relationship. In other words, that which is often referred to as casual sex, anonymous sex, the one-night-stand, sex-without-emotion, sex-without-love or non-committed sex. These two forms of social and sexual expression are dichotomously located—a coupledom/promiscuity binary—whereby the concepts legitimate each other even as one position may denounce its opposite, and are presented as the two viable patterns of sexual/emotional life excluding any other configuration (polygamy, multiplicity, fluidity, contingency) from representation in law, ritual and popular culture.
<9> The distinction is simple. Coupledom is marked by the significations of various combinations of enunciative ‘commitment’ which might include the performatives of the marriage ritual, declarations (whether verbal or not) of longevity, co-habitation, and (usually) sexual fidelity. Promiscuity, on the other hand, is linked with sexual freedom, ‘casual’ sexual encounters, and brevity in such encounters. It is often also marked by various modes of social ritualistic behaviour, ‘partying’, recreational drug usage (Lewis & Ross:1995), and other ‘lifestyle’ codes which are traditionally understood to fall outside the articulations of family, home environment, the suburb, property ownership and tropes of personal economies. Promiscuous sexual behaviour, often referred to as ‘cruising’, was long a stereotype of homosexual men and originated in the circulation of stories of male homosexuality throughout medical, psycho-therapeutic and literary/filmic discourses (Bell & Weinberg 1978:69). Michael Schofield, in his study of sexual behaviour, defines promiscuity as “sex without love, casual sex—all those occasions when two people have sexual intercourse without committing themselves to loving each other for ever or living together for life” (Schofield 1976:11). His study indicates that the word has traditionally held a variety of meanings (ibid:17), but underlying any definition was the fact that it was regarded as “the antithesis of love” (ibid:15-16). At the same time, the definition involves a numeric component: “anyone who had had more than one partner in the last year was regarded as promiscuous” (ibid:130).
<10> Several neo-conservative gay writers (e.g. Sullivan 1997) and critics from the North American religious right (e.g. Prager 1997) characterise gay male promiscuity as a ‘social flaw’ that can be ‘fixed’ by encouraging same-sex domestic partnerships or marriage rights through legislation, making the claim that there is an ideology communicated within lesbian/gay culture which somehow mysteriously ‘convinces’ gay men to turn away from coupledom and experience a ‘loveless’, facile and apparently fruitless sexuality outside a committed, closed relationship (often emphasising that ‘coupledom’ is slowly being restored in gay male circles). Murray refers to a gay ideology where it is not “who does what to whom . . . but getting what one wants” (Murray 1996:175). He does, however, go on to suggest that “gay men have become more cautious and less willing to experiment with unconventional forms of sex and relationships than we were in the heyday of sexual liberation” (ibid:177-8). The terms employed by this writer—‘experiment’ and ‘unconventional’—can be read as signifying something not ‘real’, something ‘virtual’ or something contingent in what is posited as a social, idealistic and behavioural ‘real’. Bell and Weinberg find that anti-homosexual attitudes, and the absence of legal sanctions such as marriage, cause disabling anxieties in homosexuals which “make it difficult for them to sustain lasting emotional commitments” (Bell & Weinberg 1978:83). They do concede, however, that there are strong arguments suggesting cultural structures such as large sexual marketplaces which may militate against monogamous coupledom. For these writers, it is not a ‘natural’ behaviour but something which is to be understood as a practice over which men have no agency—they are ‘conditioned’ through community institutional practices communicating an ideological non-coupling or anti-coupling, or as the result of psychological anxieties leading to an inability to perform ‘the natural’ social relationship of coupling. Even without its heteronormative foundation, coupledom here is asserted as a biological norm—taken outside of gender complementarity it is rewritten as a human condition.
<11> Alternatively, promiscuous behaviour is sometimes relegated to the natural and relationships to the unnatural, but ‘civil’ or ‘human’, along the lines of the classical nature/culture dichotomy. William Eskridge suggests that if males in our culture have been more sexually venturesome, they are “more in need of civilizing” (Eskridge 1996:9). He further states that promiscuity encourages a cult of youth worship and has contributed to the stereotype of homosexuals as “people who lack a serious approach to life” (ibid:10). Jonathan Rauch found that civilising males is a social problem requiring urgent attention. “Being tied to a committed relationship,” he suggests “helps stabilize gay men . . . coupled gay men have steady sex partners and relationships that they value and therefore tend to be less wanton” (Rauch 1997:177). He further states that:
Around the partners is woven a web of expectations that they will spend nights together, go to parties together, take out mortgages together, buy furniture at Ikea together, and so on—all of which helps tie them together and keep them off the streets and at home. Surely that is a very good thing, especially as compared to the closet-gay culture of furtive sex with innumerable partners in parks and bathhouses (ibid:178).
Rauch suggests here that without the conventions of coupledom, gay men will automatically not be able to restrain themselves. He does this without explaining, of course, why commitment or stability in coupledom might be ‘good’, ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’. The signification implied by both Rauch and Eskridge is that (gay) men are sexual monsters, primitive in their inability to perform ‘civility’ offered by the heterosexual coupledom paradigm. In their pro-coupling and pro-gay marriage stance, both Rauch and Eskridge present arguments at variance from those of Bell and Weinberg and Murray. Their implication is that there is an ideological force within lesbian/gay discourse or culture which hegemonically interpellates self-identifying gay men to ignore the ideologies of civility and coupledom and return to a ‘natural’ state. They are considered ‘unnatural’ in their rejection of contemporary bourgeois values of romantic coupledom. Rauch and Eskridge accept that the couple paradigm is not rooted in a ‘natural’ desire to couple, but find it a useful tool for civility, for maintaining a contemporary social order. McWhirter and Mattison state as much when, in discussing gay male and lesbian monogamy paradigms, they claim that the ‘rules’ for sexual behaviour established within couples “are attempts at control in an area that continues to be an elusive source of anxiety and fear for most couples. They feel that the sexual monster inside of each of us needs bridling” (McWhirter & Mattison 1984:259).
<12> The neo-conservative rhetoric that produces an anti-promiscuity perspective within lesbian/gay culture was furthered, of course, by some responses in the late 1980s and 1990s to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. For Baird and Rosenbaum, the advent of AIDS “made clear the value of monogamous relationships” (Baird & Rosenbaum 1997:13). The course of the epidemic throughout the 1980s had two effects of concern to us here: (1) It posited the need to re-consider the way gay men, particularly, arranged sexual and emotional everyday life, and allowed a logical assertion of monogamy as one possible way of reducing the risk of being infected with HIV; (2) it wiped out much of a generation of lesbian/gay identifying persons and activists, incapacitating many radical Gay Liberationist voices in political organisations, and it can be considered partly responsible for the dominance of civil-rights politics. Equally this may prove to have as much to do with the rhetorical connection between Gay Liberationism and ‘hedonism’—the latter being a highly-charged signifier of ‘risk’ in an HIV/AIDS ‘effected’ cultural environment. Alexander Düttmann describes AIDS as “a moment in the history of that which they designate as the ‘gay community.’ This history reaches its positive pinnacle with the creation of a ‘gay collectivity,’ which provides the fundament for ‘gay subjectivity’” (Düttmann 1996:58). We might extend Düttmann’s point by suggesting that it is not merely the constitutive moment of gay subjectivity, but a nodal point in the shared, collective and memorialised history of lesbian/gay community that reformulated lesbian and gay subjecthood. It is not, that is, that HIV/AIDS substantially shifts (predominantly gay male) sexual behaviour; rather it is drawn upon retroactively to provide an existing and relatively socially-conservative argument for coupling with a ‘moral’ and epidemiological legitimation. Aiding in the production of a stigma and an aversion to sexuality itself (Warner 1999: 50), it correlates with the political shifts and presents a lesbian/gay minority collective that seeks to ‘overcome’ coupledom’s other.
POPULAR ROMANCE AND THE LESBIAN/GAY RENEGOTIATION OF COUPLING NORMS
<13> In addition to the lesbian/gay political shifts and the force of an anti-promiscuity discourse within lesbian/gay culture, same-sex coupledom and the search for gay marital legitimacy achieves popular groundswell through a third factor that comes into play in the daily lives, expressions and rituals of lesbian/gay sexual identity: the force of popular cultural romance myths, and their strategic utilisation in lesbian and gay coupled relationships. According to Catherine Belsey, coupledom operates as the “conventional tale of desire framed by true love, contained by marriage, and generating the nuclear family, which is understood to be the primary source of domestic comfort and emotional support for all normal members of a civilized society” (Belsey 1994: 193-194). The Hollywood love story—as the western cultural story circulated in obsessive repetition—likewise narrates the happy outcome of seeking coupled relationality over other forms of constructing desire, and a ‘happy ending’ or ‘unhappy ending’ continues to be determined by whether or not characters end up in ‘coupled’ relationships (Harvey & Shalom 1997:2). Naturally, this has a structuring force for lesbian/gay individuals who are, in spite of sexual difference, bound by the need to establish identifications through contemporary-cultural kinship relations, and to articulate desire against broader social customs. However, what I want to show here is that although (heteronormative) popular culture ‘romance stories’ have considerable influx into lesbian/gay relationships and sociality, they are not produced the same way and there is a significant de-valuing of monogamy—not as a means of putting into question coupledom but as a form of supporting and reinforcing the concept of coupledom over alternative socialities.
<14> Eskridge uses various social tropes to determine what is, and what counts as, a couple. He claims that “an exclusive dating arrangement signals a certain level of love and commitment” (Eskridge 1996:71) In his argument for same-sex marriage, he further suggests that “[g]etting married signals a significantly higher level of commitment, in part because the law imposes much greater obligations on the couple and makes it much more of a bother and expense to break up” (ibid). Eskridge is here relying on a particular cultural notion of the ‘couple’ as one which depends on longevity and fidelity, a relationship of two which, in its commitment, excludes forever the external outside(r), and presumes always the possibility of the longevity of that exclusion. Eskridge sees such commitment and longevity as significantly more important than an exploration of other possibilities of social arrangement—it is, for him, the ‘norm’ to which gay men and lesbians should aspire. Importantly, he marginalises the possibility that there may be some couple situations in which an ease of breaking-up is a necessity, such as situations of domestic violence and partner abuse (cf. Renzetti & Miley 1996).
<15> McWhirter and Mattison found that life-long relationships have been endowed culturally with such high value that the inability to maintain a lasting relationship is deemed indicative of personal failure (McWhirter & Mattison 1984:xiii). With this in mind, they determined for their study a very narrow definition of a male couple as “two gay men living together under the same roof for at least one year and identifying themselves as a couple” (ibid:8-9). They went on to provide four potential examples which did not fit into their research population. Two men living apart who describe themselves as a couple; two men describing themselves as a couple but living in different cities; a male couple in which one member is in a heterosexual marriage; brief relationships lasting less than a year (ibid:9-12). What is indicated in this discussion is that cultural definitions of couple, while potentially multiple, all involve the notion of living “together under the same roof” (because those who do not are not deemed, by McWhirter and Mattison at least, to be the epitome of coupledom). Secondly, there is the notion of longevity. Thirdly, there is the assumption that should there be any encroachment from the ‘outside’ or the ‘external’ to the relationship the cultural notion of the couple would be undermined, their example being the presence of a third party. However, it would seem that longevity is the crucial and most highly-valued element and descriptor of the couple.
<16> Interestingly, McWhirter and Mattison personify the relationship as a ‘child’ in order to claim it as a third party in itself. They argue that:
There are three beings in a male couple: the two men and their offspring, which they shape and which, in turn, shapes them. Its birth, more often than not, is a joy. Its development through the lifetime may cause the couple unnecessary anxiety. Like all growth in nature, its development can be observed and assisted (ibid: 1984:13).
What is evident here is an acknowledgment of the institutional nature of coupled relationships, something which is not viewed as a negative, and considered essential for maintaining the longevity of the relationship. The ominous terminology of surveillance and normalisation—“observed and assisted”—suggests the institutional requirement for longevity, and their characterisation of the relationship itself as a child strongly implies that any end to the relationship would constitute infanticide.
<17> Longevity and commitment are two terms in the discourse which seem to be used interchangeably. In his case for same-sex marriage, Dwight Penas writes:
Same-sex marriage would foster commitment, loyalty, and intimacy, just as does heterosexual marriage. There is no evidence that gay men and lesbian women in committed relationships are any less committed to the permanency of their relationships than are heterosexual partners (Penas 1997:154).
Penas differs from McWhirter and Mattison in that his polemic suggests that evidence of gay male and lesbian partnered commitment is a reason for further institutionalisation (in legislation) of the same-sex couple. McWhirter and Mattison, on the other hand, see institutionalisation as something which can assist the same-sex couple in its permanency.
<18> Same-sex coupled relationships (more particularly those of gay men) have de-centred the concept of commitment as fidelity in terms of it being a defining factor of coupledom. There is a dynamic stress between permanency and monogamy/non-monogamy which has been shifted and innovated upon by a gay-male culture. Monogamy is no longer a requirement of the definition of the couple. As Mary Fitzpatrick et al put it “gay male couples who were sampled in research showed little evidence of relational exclusivity, yet clearly had committed relationships” (Fitzpatrick et al 1994:268-9). What appears to matter for these writers is the degree of agreement between partners about sexual exclusivity in the production of “satisfying relationships” (ibid). Where traditionally infidelity was unacceptable, it was, at least for a period, a norm in the discourse of lesbian/gay relationships. Altman pointed out in 1982 that monogamous relationships for gay men were almost unknown and, despite the stereotype of lesbians obsessed with fidelity and commitment, he found that they too tended to break the monogamy trend (Altman 1982:187). Despite Murray’s claim that the advent of the current AIDS period reduced the likelihood of non-monogamy (Murray 1996:174), Green et al found that rates of sex with persons outside the couple relationship continued to be significantly higher than for male-female relationships (Green et al 1996:214). A growing number of writers are making bids for the ‘introduction’ of monogamy into the discourse on gay male relationships. Andrew Sullivan, who has long attempted to place himself as the arbiter of the terms of lesbian/gay norms and values, states that “a small minority of male-male marriages may perhaps fail to uphold monogamy as successfully as many opposite-sex marriages” (Sullivan 1997:281). Presumably Sullivan has not read the statistics cited by the writers and researchers mentioned here, for it would seem clear that lesbian/gay discourse and practice does not uphold the notion of monogamy to the extent Sullivan believes it either does or should.
<19> What is important here is that the non-monogamy trend does not in fact destabilise the concept of relationships, coupledom or marriage, but adds to it. Rather than non-monogamy being an exclusion from what is defined as the couple in contemporary lesbian/gay discourse, it allows a greater range of behaviour to be included under coupledom’s umbrella, without at any stage de-centring the primacy of coupledom as the dominant paradigm of social-sexual-self organisation. What appears to matter to the definition of the couple is the notion of permanency or longevity, though that is temporally open to wide interpretation. Alongside the articulation of equal rights, it is nevertheless the crux of the argument utilised in lobbying for same-sex marriage—that marital legitimacy will produce longer, more permanent lesbian and gay couples regardless of whether those couples are monogamous or based on a clear-cut condition of sexual fidelity. Coupledom itself is primary, and while it is tempting to see non-monogamy or open relationships as an opportunity to re-figure coupledom and marriage, it appears more the case that such new formats are in fact just new means of ensuring that coupledom lingers. One might refer to this primacy as duo-centrism—a centrism which runs through all contemporary discourses, institutions and institutional hierarchies. As we witness in the debates on same-sex marriage, coupledom becomes the heteronormative norm for which the more conservative debaters call for legitimatory access for lesbian/gay couples (for example, through the call for gay marriage rights). The negotiation of sexual fidelity in lesbian/gay discourse and the lesbian/gay coupling itself both serve to uphold the duo-centrism of the couple in place of the very de-naturalising of the ‘natural’ logic of coupledom that same-sex attraction has posited.
THE FORCE OF CULTURAL SHIFTS: QUEER HABITS AND HABITUS
<20> What occurs in the popularisation of domestic coupledom and same-sex marriage in lesbian/gay culture is a shift in paradigmatic norms from discourses of heteronormativity into a lesbian/gay culture—a culture which had, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, little rhetorical investment in institutions, rituals and behaviour anything that reeked of heteronormativity. Bourdieu’s conception of the ‘habitus’ provides a convenient way of understanding how the notion of coupledom (as the privileged position in the coupledom/promiscuity dichotomy) enters lesbian/gay discourse, becomes naturalised through the political rhetoric of same-sex marriage and garners support for the political search for same-sex coupled legitimacy. Although contemporary lesbian/gay culture is necessarily reliant on contemporary western liberal discourses (Cover 1999), it has often been figured as outside that heteronormative formation. Victoria Brownworth writes that
we are fundamentally outside the heterosexual culture and society. WE are not simply separated by our sexual partners, and those queers who say the only difference between us and straights is whom we fuck are perilously ignorant. WE have our own queer culture and society, just like people of color have their society separate from white European culture, or Jews have a society predicated on a history completely separate from Christians (Brownworth 1996:95)
However, that cultural experience is not as fundamentally outside ‘heterosexual culture’ as she suggests. Aside from the deconstructionist point that there is no discrete separation because neither side can have self-presence, there are significant sociological reasons to suggest an inter-cultural interdiscursivity. If, as Richard Mohr claims, even without legitimate and legislated marriage contemporary lesbian and gay couples are living as heterosexual married partners do (Mohr 1997:86), and if, as McWhirter and Mattison suggest, gay men only have the culturally mythical heterosexual couples as “models” for their partnerships—Romeo and Juliet, Kramer and Kramer, Adam and Eve (McWhirter & Mattison 1984:1)—then the cultural understanding of coupledom for lesbians and gay men bears the continuing ‘trace’ of heteronormative complementarity. Certainly an element in early HIV/AIDS discourses deploys a viral trope to suggest that heterosexual coupledom is ‘pure’ and homosexual promiscuity is ‘unclean,’ thereby providing a particular ‘appeal’ to political uses of coupledom in relation to the public sphere and governmental policy. If the dominant discursive disseminations of coupledom in lesbian/gay culture, media and advertising are modelled on heterosexual marriages yet can operate similarly but without the ‘constraint’ of ‘monogamy’, then it would seem that Bourdieu’s rhetoric of ‘habitus’, with its strategy and disposition, is a relevant means by which to understand the lesbian/gay cultural shift from anti-coupledom to coupledom.
<21> Bourdieu describes ‘habitus’ as a way of understanding particularised ‘structurings’:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them, and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor (Bourdieu 1977:72).
The concept of habitus provides a suitable way of getting around the problem that occurs in suggesting that the articulation of lesbian/gay coupledom or lesbian/gay promiscuous sexuality is produced ideologically. Hegemonic ideology, in that usage, is problematic, as it is always possible to find evidence of resistances. Foucault likewise has pointed out that ideology as a concept is problematically understood to stand against something which is construed as ‘truth’ (Foucault 1980:118). There is no ‘true’ or ‘proper’ form of sexual relationship, only various means through which trajectories of desire are channelled; these allow the diverse articulation of sexual behaviours but contain particular norms or patterns and particular forms of coherence and intelligibility in order to produce the conditions for social participation and community belonging. The sexual subject is constituted in its performativity in terms of a normalisational discourse, and it is the relationship between discourse and habitus which is important here. Habitus defines and lays out the agents’ interests, opportunities, strategies, and relegates the juridical or customary rule to the role of a secondary principle of “the determination of practices, intervening when the primary principle, interest, fails” (Bourdieu 1977:76). In view of this principle, the promiscuity/coupledom binary operates not to privilege one or the other depending on the cultural and political will of a discursive arrangement, but as discursively available opportunities for the strategising of the performativity of a lesbian/gay subjectivity. It is a particularly useful concept as it presupposes a complicity which is neither passive submission to a constraint, nor an adherence with free agency (Bourdieu 1991:50-1; Butler 1997:134-5).
<22> According to Bourdieu, the fundamental effect of habitus is to orchestrate ‘commonsense’ (Bourdieu 1977:80). The ‘beginning’ of a sexual relationship, an encounter of identification with an other, relies on particular discursive codes or norms of behaviour. While there is conflict in reception between codes which are easily mis-read, it would appear that the two available paths resulting from that first ‘encounter’ with codes of normalised performativity are the promise of coupling or the promise of sexual ‘non-emotional’ experience. It is thereby ‘commonsensical’ that an agent behave, or seek to behave, or accept, that the two modes of behaviour in the case of the encounter are either coupledom or promiscuous casual sex. Linguistic and cultural competence (ibid:81) are the vital factors in negotiating (strategising) the encounter while the “harmony of ethos and tastes” dominates (ibid:82). In the case of same-sex ‘encountering’, the habitus operates by the agents appropriating the cultural practices learned in what might be called the habitus-of-origin (dominant or heteronormative cultures).
<23> What needs to remain unsettled here is the fact that habitus operates most distinctively for Bourdieu in the case of class cultures (ibid:85-6), and lesbian/gay culture differs by being something an agent is understood to enter at a culturally-sanctioned age (Fraser 1999:101-110; Hargrave 1992:59) rather than to be that ‘environment’ in which social strategies are ‘learned’ (at, say, an earlier age characterised by childhood, education and learning environments, and best seen in ethnic minorities or in heteronormative families). In other words, lesbian/gay culture and its discourses are not those which are ‘environments’ of structuring structures for the significant proportion of an agent’s early life. They do not necessarily operate pervasively after that moment of entry or ‘coming out’ (for no one minoritarian culture can foreclose on the discourses of dominant or relative cultures). It then follows that while lesbian/gay discourse provides a historically-embedded series of structuring structures of its own (coupledom without monogamy), it has proved unable to re-write discourses of relationships that cannot be affected by the habitus in which the agent gathers dispositions and learns to strategise through and around them. For Bourdieu, the structure which has produced the habitus governs the systematic application of principles coherent in practice (Bourdieu 1997: 87-88). For lesbian/gay discourse, then, this element demonstrates a colonisation of the queer habitus or system of understandings and strategies developed in the years of Gay Liberation. In other words, the early culture and its political agents attempted to posit a potentiality, to arrange and mediate anti-heteronormative discourses of sexuality such that there would be a de-privileging of dominant cultural values (coupledom, misogyny) and a bias for the seeking of new and non-habitual ways of structuring relationships, understandings and sexualities. In this view, there was no logical platform for an alienated behaviour (anti-heteronormative sexuality) to lead to coupling. In the process of political ‘tolerance’ of lesbian/gay cultural practices, in the increased ease with which an agent can ‘slide’ into lesbian/gay sexual practice, and in the crisis of sexuality brought about by the mediated dissemination of HIV/AIDS knowledge, the discourses of coupling are more easily transplanted into lesbian/gay discourses of sexuality. Coupling becomes not only a strongly recommended (although by no means hegemonically insisted-upon) everyday lifestyle practice, but posited as the essentially ‘natural’ one.
<24> The habitus operates not only as a set of available strategies which effect discourse, but the possibility for the drawing upon discourses which have no ‘logical’ or ‘ethical’ connection with the discourses which are available for the legitimation of the behaviour. That is, it permits the drawing upon by agents of strategies which, quite simply, have little historical-discursive place in contemporary lesbian/gay discourses. The inter-discursive operation of habitus transplants what Monique Wittig calls the ‘straight mind’ into the discourses which originally opposed such a mind-set (Wittig 1992). As she has put it: “the straight mind cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order not only all human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape consciousness, as well” (ibid:28). As a result of the interdiscursive shift of habitus, contemporary lesbian/gay culture promotes the foundationalist myths of the ‘straight mind’ but this is obscured by the imputation of a binary-separated culture as wholly different.
<25> This culminates in what has become the dominant call in lesbian/gay political and civil-rights lobbying: the call for the legislative enactment of a right to same-sex marriage. In contemporary western society, marriage in all its forms is part of a residual culture, active in the cultural process but not substantially expressed or verified in terms of the dominant culture (Williams 1977:122). Nevertheless, it is justified in lesbian/gay political campaigns on the basis that: “Gay and lesbian couples are living together as married people do, even though they are legally barred from getting married” (Mohr 1997:86). Through the application of Boudieu’s concept habitus, it is possible to suggest that the seeking of rights to same-sex marriage is the culmination of the paradigmatic shift of the ‘straight mind’ into what was for a time a non-heteronormative culture of difference.
<26> Although the force of the political lobbying for marital rights, as it depends on and produces normalised same-sex coupledom, has entered public sphere discourse with such intensity and through a stolidly supportive—if inaccurate—representation of a unified lesbian/gay minority community, the usefulness of this critique is to turn the attention on the ways in which this process of normalisation forecloses on imaginative, radical possibilities for performing sexual and emotional relationality otherwise. This is not intended to suggest that a kind of utopianism is possible through a radical reorganisation of kinship relations—which, as Judith Butler cogently points out, does not guarantee a radical reorganisation of “the psyche, sexuality, and desire” (Butler 1993:96)—can be offered as an appraisal of the narrow set of trajectories through which coupledom is produced, and which operate to uphold the sexuality-gender positioning through the re-articulation hetero/homo binary. It does, however, remain the case that coupledom—generally—produces not only pleasure, safety, financial security and satisfaction but anxiety, stress, domestic violence, financial insecurity, dependence, upsetting or costly divorce and, in the most extreme cases, spousal murder. Queer theorist and radical Michael Warner puts it best when he suggests that it is by advocating a politics that frankly embraces “queer sex in all its apparent indignity, together with a frank challenge to the damaging hierarchies of respectability” we can produce a more imaginative set of discourses and relationships and open the field of possibilities for performing ourselves and our sexualities otherwise (Warner 1999: 74). The anxiety here is that the habitus of coupledom, disconnected from its heteronormative foundations, is strengthened and solidified by its utilisation within lesbian/gay culture in such a way that the criticism of it, and the refusal to adhere by it, becomes doubly more difficult for those incapable (for whatever reason) of performing it in their own lives.
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