In Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality, Katherine Franke asks what kind of freedom and what kind of equality the capacity to marry mobilizes. She explores this question comparatively through, on the one hand, the case of African Americans after slavery and, on the other, the options for sexual minorities in the United States after the legal case of Obergefell v. Hodges. This essay considers the role of the contemporary marriage equality movement as a vehicle for lgbtq political transformation through the experiences of a group that lies at the intersection of the arguments advanced in Wedlocked: African American lgbtq people interested in the right to marry. Drawing from the experiences of African American lgbtq people and their intraracial relationships as they relate to the marriage equality campaign, the author explores what might be gained for socially oppressed populations when marriage is used as the platform for reducing the stigma associated with same-sex desire.
Marriage Equality and the African American Case: Intersections of Race and LGBT Sexuality
mignon r. moore is the chair of the department of sociology at Barnard College. She is the author of Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women (2011) and numerous scholarly articles on lgbtq families, lgbtq people of color, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. She has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Aging for her research on sexual minority seniors. Her current book project is a social history of black lgbt older populations, tentatively titled “In the Shadow of Sexuality: Social Histories of African American lgbt Elders.”
Mignon R. Moore; Marriage Equality and the African American Case: Intersections of Race and LGBT Sexuality. differences 1 September 2018; 29 (2): 196–203. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-6999858
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