Hi, my name is Sophie and I\u2019m a family abolitionist who is married. I could tell you it was \u2018for the green card\u2019 and I wouldn\u2019t be lying. But it would be a cop-out. All marriages are green cards of a kind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I find it endearing that, as leftists, when it comes to these contracts in particular, we like to suspend our otherwise dearly-held analytic sensibilities and imagine we can game the state, pretending maritality while jumping through hoops in exchange for visas and tax breaks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ll do it differently, we declare. But marriage, ineluctably, does us<\/a>. The prevailing mode of production gripping our planet seems inherently flexible about the content of individuals\u2019 beliefs about marriage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n What it does care about, though, is the continued naturalisation of the private household. In this sense, marriage is marriage is marriage, be it \u2018gay\u2019, \u2018visa\u2019, \u2018love\u2019 or \u2018of convenience\u2019. Marriage is the particular kind of interpersonal alliance that the state sanctions. Kinship law demands it \u2013 or something like it \u2013 in order to fulfil its function of administering property relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1960s and 70s, our family-abolitionist ancestors<\/a> in the children\u2019s, women\u2019s and gay liberation movements wanted to dismantle it. Their revolutionary imagination targeted the entire sex\/ gender system, seeking to build instead whole cities and societies designed for friends, not families; kith, not kin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marriage, they said, attaches us to our own scarcity. It is also a material catastrophe for the millions abused and battered within its precincts with impunity. Legally and ideologically, it draws a circle around a sphere of protected interests, turning people away from the task of building universal abundance, permitting us to give care only to, and expect care only from, \u2018our own\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the outside of this circle swarm all the others, economic and sexual deviants, whose otherwise ways of living and loving will always be marginal unless marriage is abolished (or until we all fold, normatively, into married productivity).<\/p>\n\n\n\nConjugal questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n