Abstract
J. Stacey, Unhitched. Love, Marriage and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China, New York University Press: New York and London, 2011; 275 pp.: ISBN 978 0 8147 8382 5, $27.95 (hbk), ISBN 978 0 814 78383 2 (e-book)
Unhitched. Love, Marriage and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China is a critical engagement with marriage ideologies. Judith Stacey sets out to challenge the US moral, social and legal discourses depicting marriage, and the heterosexual nuclear family, as the only morally acceptable way to organize family life, to meet needs for intimacy and care, and to raise children. She critiques the idea of heterosexual marriage as the solution to social problems and questions the coupling of hetero-sex, love, marriage, parenthood and kinship. Moreover, she critiques the lack of legal protection for alternative forms of intimate life.
Stacey builds her argument through drawing on original empirical research exploring less familiar forms of intimacy, that is to say that of gay men in Los Angeles in the USA, South African polygamists and also the uncoupling of desire and domesticity among the Mosuo people of south-west China. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to an exploration of gay men’s intimacies. Stacey draws on interviews with men in a variety of intimate arrangements among friends, lovers and ex-lovers, and also gay parents. She shows that while some arrangements mirror conventional family patterns, others uncouple sex, love and domesticity in imaginative ways. In Chapters 3 and 4 she then critically engages with the supposed ‘slippery slope’ between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing polygamy. She compares the US social and legal discourse with that of South Africa (where in contrast to the USA, both gay marriage and polygamy is legal). In the fifth and final chapter, Stacey explores the arrangements of domesticity and desire in the pre-modern matriarchal kinship system of the Mosuo people in south-west China and where desire and domesticity are completely separated. Women have (male) lovers, often long-term, but live and raise children with their maternal kin. Men visit their (female) lovers at night but live and work with their own extended kin where they also help raise their female relatives’ children.
This book is a powerful and thought-provoking critique of US marriage ideologies, and its racialized and classed underpinnings. It will benefit undergraduate and postgraduate students, and academics and researchers working in the area of family, kinship, intimacy and personal life, and sexuality, gender and queer studies. The three case studies are interesting and accessible in themselves, but what really makes this book is the way that Stacey draws on her different studies to critique US family ideology, and also to imagine alternatives. Her comparative analysis of the USA and South Africa brings into view the complex relationship between legal and social support for diverse family relationships. Although legal support for family diversity exists through extensive anti-discriminatory legislations in South Africa, Stacey shows that socially and culturally, racial inequalities, sexism and homophobia run deep. Consequently, same-sex couples may not, in reality, be able to access the legal privileges now available to them. In contrast, the social and cultural context in the USA can in many cases support a de facto family diversity, while failing to support them in law. Stacey’s reflection on polygamy, in particular, is a clear sighted critique of a US system where polygamy is criminalized and deemed morally reprehensible at the same time as plural intimate relationships and philandering, adultery and closeted polygamy exist in practice. She makes a strong argument that highlights the shortcomings of a legal system that fails to protect people’s diverse intimate choices, and the children born as a consequence. Stacey’s account of the Mosuo kinship system deepens her argument that human intimate life comes in many shapes and forms. It is also illustrative of the possibility of uncoupling desire from domesticity.
Stacey’s book is a deeply political text, and as such it is both useful and thought provoking. The focus on US debates, particularly about legalizing same-sex marriage, means however that the book might have limited relevance for scholars in countries where debates about same-sex intimate lives have moved in somewhat new directions. Stacey’s book is polemic in tone, which can at times be off-putting for the reader. As a sociological account of diverse intimate experiences and lives, I think it could also have benefited from a deeper and more nuanced discussion of the case studies, and also methods. Stacey does not engage particularly critically in the unusual family forms explored in this book or investigate their embedded complexities. For example, she gives an extremely positive account of the Mosuo’s kinship system, and the way in which that uncouples desire from domesticity. Although interesting, I was left wondering about the possible complexities, conflicts, power issues and inequalities residing within the Mosuo families. The invisibility and complete denial of same-sex desire reported to exist among the Mosuo, for example, raised questions for me about the powerful limits for legitimate desires in this culture. Equally, I think the text would have benefited from a more nuanced account of gay male life and to some extent, polygamy.
These drawbacks aside, I think this is a well-presented and important book about the diversity of intimate lives, and a powerful argument against the privileging of marriage.
University of Manchester, UK