Symbolic Rights

[ajnabieh]

I am watching two political struggles going on today. The first is the attempt to get the New York State Senate to pass a bill allowing same-sex marriage. The second is the "Women 2 Drive" protest in Saudi Arabia, where dozens of women who hold international driver's licenses are driving in violation of the law. (Check the Twitter hashtag if you want to see what's going down right now, on 6/17.)

The differences here are obvious and striking. One is about negotiating within a highly fractious electoral public, and mobilizing constituent power for and against a political position that's at the center of ongoing debates. The other is about civil disobedience against an authoritarian government, in the hopes of mustering transnational support for a change in policy. But what I keep coming back to is that both of these struggles are about symbolic rights.

I support both these demands. In fact, I'm spending a lot of my time engaged in the one that's happening in my home state (*ahem*). And I think the Saudi protest is pretty amazing, considering precisely how hard it is to mobilize any action at all in KSA. By calling these "symbolic rights," I'm not trying to diminish the importance of the claim, nor the strength of those making it.

But the centrality of driving to Saudi women's protest is largely about its symbolic value. Of all the injustices that Saudi women cope with--an enforced dress code, highly segregated work opportunities, unequal access to marriage and divorce, etc--driving seems relatively minor by comparison. And yet, it isn't: it's a daily insult to their personhood that, despite being autonomous adults with responsibilities and roles in the world, they have to be driven around like ten year olds going to soccer practice. The symbolic injustice so rankles that it becomes a mobilizing force for change.

I feel similarly about marriage. Frankly, in the world where I am philosopher-king, there would be no state-recognized marriages. 'Marriage' would be a purely social bond, which people could enter into or not enter into as they saw fit, in whatever configurations they felt appropriate. Simultaneously, the state would allow people to formally establish family relationships (among couples raising children, friends collectively supporting each other, siblings caring for an elderly parent, etc) which would provide for legal rights such as hospital visitation, tax benefits for providing unpaid caring work, rights of survivorship, etc. Being 'married' would be one thing. Being a legal unit would be another.

I don't get to be philosopher-king, so that's not how it works. But, even in this world, marriage isn't the battle I would put first of all my queer rights. I'd rather we were fighting harder for non-discrimination legislation, for the inclusion of material on LGBT issues in educational institutions, to make it easier for trans people to legally transition, and for rights to adoption and parenthood. And, frankly, I am married--I've got the white dress and the credit card debt to prove it, and anybody who tries to tell me I'm not is both empirically wrong and a douche of epic proportions, as far as I'm concerned.

And yet, it rankles whenever I look at my "legal docs" file, and realize that I have to have a will, a power of attorney, a health care proxy, and a living will to give my wife the same rights that straight couples get merely for registering their relationship. It rankles when I say "my wife" and people respond "your partner." (No disrespect to the many same-sex and opposite-sex couples I know who use partner; I think it's a good word. It's just not mine.) And, yes, it rankles that if I were an infertile man, my name would be on my son's birth certificate as his father even though he was conceived with donor sperm, but because I'm a woman I had to drop thousands of dollars and collect letters of reference to earn the right to be his legal parent.

The insult to me, and to thousands of queers like and unlike me, is enough that it's worth fighting for. And the massive insult that the Republican caucus can't even decide to bring this to a vote--and that thousands of people are mobilized to condemn my relationship--well, that makes me want to get a big angry sign and go yell at somebody, long and loud.

The deep political insight here is the one that Axel Honneth makes so clearly in his work--that the vast majority of injustices that people experience are injustices based in misrecognition, the sense that something crucial and important about yourself is being disregarded, misinterpreted, or silenced in social interactions. And the more daily one is that disrespect is a key experience of being an oppressed group within a society. Symbolic victories are real, because they undo this disrespect, and counter with the sort of recognition that make societies possible.

So, yes, I'm cheering for the women in Saudi who are driving through the streets, and hoping for their safety. Yes, I'm dropping emails to state senators, bombarding my poor Facebook friends with action links, and endlessly refreshing New York 1's website. Because symbolic rights are rights nonetheless, and we all deserve them.

And you know if the law passes, my ass is getting married. Again.

Comments

[serene]

I don't think you're trivializing the issues, but I also don't agree that these are purely (or even mostly) symbolic rights. The right to drive is no less essential or more symbolic than the other things you listed. Likewise, marriage may have a symbolic aspect, but legal marriage carries over a housand legal rights, few of them trivial or non-pragmatic.

[ajnabieh]

I suppose my thing is that I can't imagine a rank-order of "things I need to feel fully socially acknowledged as a queer human being" that would put "legal access to marriage" in the top five. Maybe even the top ten. It's an insult to be denied the legal right, but it seems...hollow, in many significant ways. Perhaps because it's not the state that I need to recognize my intimate relationships--it's my community. Although I'm insulted that I have to have a will and a health care proxy and etc to mimic the state of marriage, I feel reasonably well protected by them--and moreso by the fact that my social relations support my marriage, such that I judge the odds of, say, my in-laws trying to seize control of my wife's property upon her death to be relatively low. Now, not everybody has easy or any access to those things--and that's an injustice. But I just can't get hung up on this. I'd like to be able to be legally married--but I worry more about losing a job, or having my kid told homophobic things by his schoolteachers.

I get that my marriage politics aren't everybody's, though. *g* And I do think it's essential that we win these fights wherever they crop up, or at least fight them down to the ground. Now that this is the terrain we're on, this is where we have to make our stand. And, like I said, I'm gonna be in line...well, if not the first day, probably the first week, if this goes through.

I suppose I don't have a good way to characterize the social importance of driving as a right, as I'm nearly thirty and still can't drive. From where I am, it strikes me as the territory on which the battle's being fought, but the battle is much bigger.

[holyschist]

Your philosopher-king plans are much like mine.

Also,

It rankles when I say "my wife" and people respond "your partner."

....seriously, people do this?! How...does it seem like a good idea to tell people they are using the incorrect term for their spouse/romantic partner/whatever?

[jae]

In one of the political circles I travel in, it's customary to say 'partner' for anyone's life partner, regardless of gender or marital status (And that was the case well before same-sex marriage was legal in my country, too.) I actually kind of love it.

-J

[holyschist]

Which is fine (it's my preferred term), but if someone's preferred term is something else, I think it's rude to tell them they should be using "partner," especially if that person would not "correct" someone in a heterosexual relationship the same way.

[jae]

I guess what I meant was that a conversational move like that doesn't necessarily have to be interpreted as a correction. I mean, I'm sure ajnabieh knows better than I do what this particular person meant, but I could very well imagine a different situation where someone from my political party has heard someone say "my husband blah blah blah" and responds with "your partner blah blah blah" without meaning it as anything but using one's own preferred term for the same thing. (In fact, I've actually probably done that myself.)

-J

[holyschist]

That can still be problematic; I have a friend who is really bugged (and I believe her partner is as well) by people referring to them as "girlfriends," because a) that's not the term they use and b) her partner is genderqueer and does not consider "girlfriend" to be an accurate term.

If I were slightly more vested in what other people say, I'd be bothered by people referring to me and my partner as "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," because those terms are used much more broadly and do not imply the commitment level of "partners."

I don't necessarily interpret malice into people changing up terms, but I still think it is polite to use the terms people prefer for themselves.

[ajnabieh]

I attribute the problem slightly differently--in that it's that people are used to using "partner" for same-sex couples and "husband/wife" for opposite-sex couples, and so, instinctually, they realize I'm queer, and assign "partner" as the appropriate. I don't think it's malicious. I think it's just a sign of the fact that people have different words for these different classes of relationships stuck in their head, and those habits are hard to break out of.

Now, the dude who I got my MA with, who, when I saw him at a conference, insisted that I referred to my wife as "my husband" at one point in time...that was another issue.

[azurelunatic]

That dude sounds all sorts of problematic.

[ajnabieh]

I clarified a little downthread with jae, but it's less about correcting and more about defaulting to "partner" with queer couples, but not necessarily with straight couples. Which is an issue.

I have always said my real goal was to find an uninhabited island nation somewhere and install a queer socialist utopia. Gaydonia, I'm going to call it. Everybody's invited. Open borders are the rule of the day. Somewhere with a Mediterranean climate would be nice...

[holyschist]

Yeah, the different classes of relationships thing is...yeah. I mean, people may assign different meanings to those classes, but people definitely have them, and it can be very revealing.

[jae]

Man, I SO feel the same way you do about same-sex marriage. I'm so glad that that battle is over in my own country so that the queer movement here can finally fight the battles that actually matter. But it still makes me smile when one more country joins in and allows equal marriage. Because every little bit counts.

-J

[ajnabieh]

Exactly--I'd like this *done*, so I can stop caring about it. I'm at the phase of my life where parenthood rights are much more important to me (in part because the spousal rights are easier to hack, whereas very little serves in place of being my child's parent). But, even for folks to whom those don't matter, I have a hard time seeing marriage as *the* issue. But it's become *the* issue, so the insult of the whole process is compounded and compounded.

[jae]

The thing is, it's become "the issue" worldwide, too. As in: even in countries that already have equal marriage and have for years. And this means that there are certain segments of the queer community in Canada that think of this country as a place where we now "have rights" (and often in smug contrast to places where we "don't have rights") so there's no real incentive to do anything about say, the workplace issues that very much still exist here.

And yes, I realize those are probably people who never would have been particularly activist to begin with, but still!

-J

[nanila]

I use "other half", "boyfriend" and "partner" interchangeably for the young man I'm shacked up with. However, when other people use a particular term to describe the significant others in their lives, I tend to stick with that one for the course of the conversation. (Exceptions made if terms are flippantly derogatory. If sincerely derogatory, I may choose to terminate the conversation.) Surely this is polite?

And you know if the law passes, my ass is getting married. Again.

If it does, I'll be on hand to throw virtual confetti if you like.

[azurelunatic]

And there's something to be said for simplicity of quick explanations. "Brother-in-law" is easy to shout in a gay bar in the Castro on Halloween. "The boyfriend, partner, registered domestic partner, and fiancé of the little brother I adopted off the internet" is significantly less so.

During the Prop 8 trial, one of the testimonies was from a married couple, about their experiences with extended family before and after the wedding. Their own relationship was improved, but the difference in the extended family relationships was dramatic. The family's paradigm did not know how to treat "partner", which seemed impersonal and impermanent to them. "My granddaughter's wife" had a place in the family.

I think I'm of the group and generation that cheerfully embraces "partner" as a gender-neutral term that covers the whole-life interdependence of a long-term committed couple, rather like a modern equivalent to "helpmeet", without touching on legal status. Marriage in the eyes of the law is very important, or something legally equivalent in every respect to it. I don't want to jump through different hoops just based on who I wind up marrying. It's also important for people like my brother's parents to know that, when my brother gets married, that his marriage is equal to theirs in the eyes of the law, if not in the eyes of his parents' fuckwitted church.