Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States

Co-Winner of the 2015 Charles Tilly Award for Best Book of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section from the American Sociological Association

Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. The first large-scale occurrence of legal same-sex marriage, these unions galvanized a movement and reignited the debate about whether same-sex marriage, as some hope, challenges heterosexual privilege or, as others fear, preserves that privilege by assimilating queer couples.

In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality.

During her deeply personal conversations with same-sex spouses, Kimport learned that the majority of respondents did characterize their marriages as an opportunity to contest heterosexual privilege. Yet, in a seeming contradiction, nearly as many also cited their desire for access to the normative benefits of matrimony, including social recognition and legal rights. Kimport's research revealed that the pattern of ascribing meaning to marriage varied by parenthood status and, in turn, by gender. Lesbian parents were more likely to embrace normative meanings for their unions; those who are not parents were more likely to define their relationships as attempts to contest dominant understandings of marriage.

By posing the question-can queers "queer" marriage?-Kimport provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.

Author: Katrina Kimport
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 11/21/2013
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9780813562216

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2014

About the Author

KATRINA KIMPORT is an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and a research sociologist with the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research examines the (re)production of social inequality, with a particular focus on gender, health, and reproduction. She is the author of No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive (Rutgers University Press) and coauthor of Digitally Enabled Social Change. She is the coauthor of Digitally Enabled Social Change.