Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-27 02:13Z by Steven

Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 7, Issue 3-4, 2008
pages 145-169
DOI: 10.1080/15299710802170771

Jacqueline Battalora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Saint Xavier University, Orland Park, Illinois

This article is concerned with epistemology and the assertion of supremacy. Focusing on the resources deployed to make marriage restrictions logical, this article investigates their descriptive and structural underpinnings. I juxtapose support for the Defense of Marriage Act and Federal Marriage Amendment with antimiscegenation case law and examine descriptions of fact, the patterns they shape, and the underlying structure that holds them together. These laws are an arena of contestation not only over policy choices but over God and nature, and ultimately difference. I pay attention to the ways in which constructions of difference work to exclude and erase and I argue that these laws share a common structure of supremacy. Dualistic constructions of difference work to erase those whose bodies threaten the clear lines that justify exclusion by law. Those who are multiracial, where whiteness is a contributor, and those who are bisexual represent such a threat to racial marriage bans on the one hand and same sex marriage bans on the other. The formula of difference-making, erasure, and supremacy in law has important implications not only for challenging marriage restrictions today but to measure future law and policy.

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Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-01-26 21:57Z by Steven

Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 2, Issue 2 & 3 (October 2002)
pages 53-71
DOI: 10.1300/J159v02n02_04

Sikorski Grace, Associate Professor of English
Anne Arundel Community College, Maryland

Passing novels, exemplified here by E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life, often perpetuate the representation of bisexuality and/or bi-racial identity as a tension on the border between communities and bodies that threatens to break down or leak when tested. Alice Walker offers an alternative representation of sexual and racial terrain for such hybrid identities. In The Temple of My Familiar, the characterization of Lissie, a multiple reincarnation, and the use of skin as a charged metaphor bring categories of sexual and racial purity to the point of collapse, suggesting the potential to reimagine identity as plural, fluctuating, regenerative, erogenous and permeable. 

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