Democracy is built on the reproductive which paints queerness as antithetical.

Bennett insists that society must not affirm different ethical relations to mortality and sexuality. Citizenship is at stake. Bennett addresses citizenship in his discussion of a genetic predisposition to homosexuality. He is worried that an increasing number of children will grow up to be gay when the genetic argument for gay rights is recognized by state institutions. Two dangerous implications of legalizing same-sex marriage are hovering here. First, acceptance of homosexuality would undermine democratic self-governance. This follows from the notion that homosexuality is akin to addiction. The claim of addiction acknowledges that homosexuality may be deeply embedded in the individual. Nonetheless, individuals should strive to overcome it. Resistance to homosexual orientation itself is important to a “self-governing society,” which requires that individuals be able to reign themselves in. Democratic self-governance is at stake. How can individuals be trusted to conduct their affairs as citizens, if they are unable to ensure their personal well-being? Second, Bennett claims that there will be an increase in the number of gay men and lesbians due to same-sex marriage, with a concomitant decrease in heterosexual reproduction.49 The implication is clear: not only will growing acceptance of homosexuality undermine citizenship, it will decimate the nation.50 Demographic decline of the nation is thus the direct manifestation of an unhealthy way of life. As Kath Weston puts it elsewhere, “by shifting without signal between reproduction’s meaning of physical procreation and its sense as the perpetuation of society as a whole, the characterization of lesbians and gay men as nonreproductive beings links their supposed attack on ‘the family’ to attacks on society in the broadest sense.”51

Gay marriage is thus a radical threat to the future of the United States. Bennett realizes that such an argument might strike some as disingenuous, because “focusing on the alleged threat of homosexual marriage is itself a dodge, an attempt to avoid talking about the real threats to the American family, namely adultery, illegitimacy, and divorce.”52 Bennett acknowledges that divorce has hurt children and society tremendously. His book, moreover, tackles these problems of heterosexual life. At the same time, he insists that “homosexual marriage poses the greater threat.”53 Indeed, given the contemporary dissolution of marriage and family life, same-sex marriage would be the final nail in marriage’s coffin: “It strikes me as exceedingly imprudent to conduct a radical, untested, and inherently flawed social experiment on an institution so broadly under assault that nevertheless still stands as the keystone in the arch of civilization.”54

The Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed into law by the U.S. Congress in 1996 to prevent same-sex marriage, is thus crucial for helping to keep civilization intact; the same goes for efforts to amend the U.S. constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.55 Bennett is on a mission to save Western civilization from the decay of its families, i.e. to save that civilization from coming apart.56 However, this is also a peculiarly American call to action, directed at “the heart of every policymaker, every parent, and every prospective parent in the land.”Citizens in politics and more personal settings are reminded of the threat to “the vitality of the body politic” and of the commitment to family and marriage that citizenship entails. .57 The language of the body politic thus makes the issue perfectly clear: citizens whose sexuality is inherently non-reproductive cause the death, or at the least the degeneration, of the body politic.

Extinction II — Queer Legacies and the Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage

The debate on same-sex marriage in the gay and lesbian community has been contentious. Lesbian and gay opposition to same-sex marriage, too, is driven by anxieties which meet at the intersection of mortality, sexuality and citizenship. For queer critics, such as Judith Butler and Michael Warner, marriage is the lethal threat to queer forms of citizenship.

This comparison of straight opponents and queer critics of same-sex marriage might be perceived as inflammatory. It might seem to suggest that queer theorists have a profound affinity with homophobic voices. That is clearly not the case. My comparison focuses on the issue of cultural legacies, which both queer and straight critics raise in their objections to same-sex marriage.58 These anxieties about legacies turn on the relation between mortality, sexuality and citizenship. Reproduction of culture is thus at stake as well for queer critics, though they do not confuse that task with sexual reproduction.

The comparison does have key advantages, one being that it points to the fragility of gay culture. Since gay and lesbian individuals are not acculturated into belonging to the queer community by their families of origin, they are not — unlike their straight counterparts — socialized for the world they are supposed to inherit and perpetuate. To the contrary, their previous socialization may have prepared them to reject those institutions and practices. Accordingly, I argue that marriage causes intense anxieties about queer belonging and world-making because it is a culture that has operated outside and at times against the kinship system. A culture that has a tenuous existence is perceived to be threatened by being incorporated into the dominant culture.

Judith Butler criticizes the campaign for same-sex marriage, because it would undermine the vitality of a leftist and/ or queer political project vis-a-vis the competing vitality of the state. There exists, she thinks, a zero-sum game between the leftist/ queer project and the state: if one’s vitality goes up, the other’s goes down and vice versa. This zero-sum logic is evident in Butler’s description of the likely political effects of same-sex marriage:

Thus the successful bid to gain access to marriage effectively strengthens marital status as a state-sanctioned condition for the exercise of certain kinds of rights and entitlements; it strengthens the hand of the state in the regulation of human sexual behaviour; and it emboldens the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of partnership and kinship. Moreover, it seeks to reprivatize sexuality, removing it from the public sphere and from the market, domains where its politicization has been very intense.59

Legalization of same-sex marriage would not primarily benefit lesbians and gay men who make use of this new institution, but instead would benefit mostly the institution of the state. Instead of giving rights to lesbians and gay men, same-sex marriage would “strengthen the hand of the state.” Conversely, efforts to politicize sexuality in the public sphere would be squelched, since same-sex marriage would allow for the privatization of same-sex sexuality. Same-sex marriage would thus increase state power and forestall modes of political mobilization that concern non-state ways of life.60 One’s vitality would be enhanced — the other’s vitality depleted.

Butler’s alternative political project, on the other hand, would flourish to the extent that it manages to wrestle politics away from the state, i.e. to avoid marriage altogether:

Indeed, the only possible route for a radical democratization of legitimating effects would be to relieve marriage of its place as the precondition of legal entitlements of various kinds. This kind of move would actively seek to dismantle the dominant term, and to return to non-state-centred forms of alliance that augment the possibility of multiple forms on the level of culture and civil society.61

Same-sex marriage’s investment in the state cannot co-exist with the kinds of politics that Butler advocates. Indeed, Butlerian politics necessitates the dismantling of “the dominant term,” i.e. marriages’ cultural, legal and political dominance needs to be done away with. Only then can the kinds of non-state political identities she appreciates flourish.

This theme of loss and gain, framed in terms of a zero-sum game, replays itself in different contexts of Butler’s argument against same-sex marriage. For example, Butler frames the political campaign for same-sex marriage in terms of assimilation. While Butler acknowledges that some may consider same-sex marriage “an extension of democracy” and as counter-hegemonic, she thinks that it ultimately “remarginalizes others and forecloses possibilities for sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement.”62 The inclusion of some lesbians and gay men in the institution of marriage would come at the price of a renewed marginalization of other lesbians and gay men. Gain for some means losses to others. Furthermore, same-sex marriage would constitute a break with queer political traditions. The lesbian and gay movement, as Butler knows it, would come to an end. The assimilation of some lesbians and gays would lead to the evisceration of the queer movement. Any possible gains from same-sex marriage could not co-exist with possible advances for those lesbians and gay men not served by or not interested in same-sex marriage. While same-sex marriage undermines the livelihood of the gay movement as such, and of some lesbians and gay men, Butler claims that her politics is more inclusive. Butler thus contrasts assimilation with “greater democratization,” which she identifies with “a political culture of contestation.”63

For Butler, the campaign for same-sex marriage would also give up on the universalist aspirations of queer politics. It severs a variety of progressive political alliances:

And with whom would they break alliance? They break alliance with people who are on their own without sexual relationships, single mothers or single fathers, people who have undergone divorce, people who are in relationships that are not marital in kind or in status, other lesbian, gay, and transgender people whose sexual relations are multiple (which does not mean unsafe), whose lives are not monogamous, whose sexuality and desire do not have the conjugal home as their (primary) venue, whose lives are considered less real or less legitimate, who inhabit the more shadowy regions of social reality.64

For Butler, same-sex marriage means “identification with the institution of marriage,” which would thus involve a rejection of other forms of life. Married individuals, apparently, do not choose their political alliances based on a political thought process, but obey the traditional ethos of the institution of marriage. Apparently, you cannot have political alliances with non-married people if you are married. Same-sex marriage is thus a threat to coalition politics, which brings a diverse group together under the umbrella term “queer.” Essentially, the choice concerning same-sex marriage is about whether to preserve or abandon queer forms of life and politics.

In a more recent essay on marriage and kinship Butler radicalizes the theme of loss. The campaign for same-sex marriage not only does away with the lesbian and gay community as she knows it; the campaign not only severs the progressive political coalition — it moreover masks this loss. It leads to a loss that cannot be felt anymore — to an extinction that is so complete that it cannot be witnessed any more:

If we decide that these are the decisive issues, and know which side we are on, then we have accepted an epistemological field structured by a fundamental loss, one which we can no longer name enough even to grieve. The life of sexuality, kinship, and community that becomes unthinkable within the terms of these norms constitutes the lost horizon of radical sexual politics, and we find our way “politically” in the wake of the ungrievable.65

The campaign for same-sex marriage, in other words, leads to a death so profound — of a certain sexual culture, of a certain politics — that it becomes “ungrievable.” When certain forms of life become “unthinkable,” then we are not aware that they are dead. Something is so dead that it’s death is unknown. When Butler speaks of the political consequences of same-sex marriage as an “ambivalent gift,” she is understating her point.66 After all, her argument itself renders any benefits miniscule given the pervasive loss that would occur. Same-sex marriage is inherently destructive. It occasions an existential crisis of queer citizenship.

Michael Warner’s argument against same-sex marriage, too, is driven by a sense of crisis. The queer world he appreciates is threatened with extinction by the campaign for same-sex marriage. First, Warner argues that its gay advocates seek to dismantle queer life and politics. Second, Warner believes that marriage itself stands in opposition to queer culture. When conjoining the two ways of life, the latter will vanish. Same-sex marriage — intentionally and by its very ‘nature’ — leads to the extinction of queer culture.

The campaign for same-sex marriage constitutes a direct assault on the queer world to Warner. It is not what average queers want. National gay and lesbian elites have moved away from what Jane and Joe Queer want. A crisis of democratic legitimacy is underway. The queer demos is no longer represented by the queer public: “The most disturbing aspect of the debate, to my mind, is that its framing has created a widening gap in the United States between the national lesbian and gay movement and queers.”67 Moreover, Warner seems to believe that those not part of the demos — the straight press — contribute to the way in which queer citizens no longer find their views articulated in and by their public. Marriage is an elite-driven proposition: “The campaign for marriage, never a broad-based movement among gay and lesbian activists, depended for its success on the lawyers and the courts.”68 Here, Warner sounds like those U.S. conservatives who draw a contrast between legal elites and democratic approaches to political change; it is they who often consider legal challenges an usurpation of the democratic process.69

For Warner, those who are now arguing for same-sex marriage are not entitled to speak for the gay and lesbian demos: “Most queer people I know, however, do not see it that way.”70 Legitimate representatives of the queer nation think of other policy matters as more pressing: “No one is more surprised by the current language of gay politics than many veterans of earlier forms of gay activism, to whom marriage seemed less urgent and less agreed-on than” a variety of other political issues.71 Why does it matter what veteran queer activists think about same-sex marriage? Could other queer generations not arrive at different conclusions? What purpose do those veterans serve in Warner’s argument? Those unnamed veterans by virtue of their status give democratic legitimacy to Warner’s perspective. Veteran queer activist status signifies political authority: these are people who have earned the right to speak for “us” — unlike those who now campaign for marriage. Moreover, Warner suggests that queer veterans only campaign on issues that draw on a wider consensus, i.e. they genuinely represent the queer demos. Finally, the very fact that the veterans remain unnamed emphasizes their democratic credentials — their namelessness makes them stand in for every other nameless queer person. The democratic illegitimacy of the campaign for same-sex marriage and the democratic rootedness of Warner’s critique are thus overdetermined.

Warner thus defends queer tradition. His argument is “conservative” in that it aims to preserve an existing set of institutions, practices and values — those practiced and defended by queer “veterans.” Furthermore, the only legitimate source of a possible defense of same-sex marriage he can imagine is framed in terms of those ‘traditional’ values, albeit queer ones.

Ironically, the tradition that Warner cites in opposition to same-sex marriage includes pro-marriage activism. These precedents, acknowledged by Warner, include a 1970 lesbian wedding ceremony; another instance is a suit by a Minnesota gay couple for a marriage license to challenge second-class citizenship. Are these events part of a queer tradition of politicizing marriage, of challenging the privileges of heterosexuality? Is the tradition more diverse than Warner would have it? Warner argues that these two events remained singular, i.e. that the gay and lesbian movement moved on.72 As Warner puts it, “there were cogent reasons that the gay movement for decades refused to take the path on which it is now hell-bent. They lay at the heart of an ethical vision of queer politics.”73 A singular movement made a singular decision, once and for all.74 One might say, a binding queer social contract had been created. Warner lists twelve reasons why marriage was not part of the queer political vision. They include the rejection of straight norms and the state regulation of sex; they posit that marriage is a system of rewards and punishment (the latter for those not part of it); they furthermore consist of the development of alternative sexual values and institutions that affirm the dignity of those penalized by society. In short, they resist state power and heterosexuality while affirming a counter-public.75 This queer ethic strives for “more sweeping changes designed to ensure that single people and nonstandard households, not just same-sex couples, would benefit from it.”76

The current campaign for same-sex marriage, on the other hand, does not speak to the traditional ethic of queer citizenship. “Those who now advocate gay marriage have not shown how doing so is consistent with this tradition. They have induced amnesia about it.” Indeed, many same-sex marriage proponents actively seek to abandon this tradition, which they think of as “antiquated ‘liberationism.’”77 Warner provides the examples of Andrew Sullivan, William Eskridge and others. Queer culture and politics are furthermore undermined by those who think that marriage should be available as a personal choice.78 But Warner does not think that marriage is benign:

But as long as people marry, the state will regulate the sexual lives of those who do not. It will refuse to recognize the validity of intimate relations — including cohabiting partnerships — between unmarried people or to grant them the same rights as those enjoyed by married couples. It will criminalize our consensual sex. It will stipulate at what age and in what kind of space we can have sex. It will send the police to harass sex workers and cruisers. It will restrict our access to sexually explicit materials. In the modern era, marriage has become the central legitimating institution by which the state penetrates the sexuality of its subjects; it is the “zone of privacy” outside which sex is unprotected.79

Marriage is the central pillar in an oppressive system of sexual regulation. Same-sex marriage might afford privileges to those who accommodate their sexual identities and practices to this normative institution. However, those who will not or cannot do so suffer all the more. To say “I do” to marriage is the same as saying that non-marital queer sex should be criminalized. To gain marriage rights at the same time means “invalidating, delegitimating, or stigmatizing other relations, needs, and desires.”80 This regulatory regime should not be endorsed by queers — nor has it been in the past. Indeed, “the gay and lesbian movement was built to challenge this regulatory system.”81 In other words, opposition to marriage is fundamental to lesbian and gay culture and politics. Advocating for same-sex marriage is thus a double reversal: first, it reverses a long-standing goal; second — and more dangerously — it endorses rather than challenges that which is so destructive for queers.

Queer citizenship is destroyed by marriage’s anti-political pursuit of love:

As Hannah Arendt puts it, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.” In the name of love, Sullivan would obliterate not just queer theory ... but the world-making project of queer life. ... But who is left? A potent constituency, to be sure, but with no politics, no public, no history of activism or resistance, no inclination to deviate from the norm, and no form of collective life distinct in any way from that of “society.”82

Same-sex marriage occasions a crisis of democracy that is more fundamental than simply an attempt to redefine the lesbian and gay movement. Married lesbians and gays would be isolated individuals, indistinguishable in a mass society. To emphasize the Arendtian texture of this conclusion, freedom and the world that subtends it would disappear. The story to be told about same-sex marriage, hence, is one of profound loss. While Warner reminds his readers that queer counterpublics still exist in all their “vitality,” the debate for same-sex marriage has already isolated them from “national organizations, magazines and publics.”83 Warner is worried about the long-term vitality of these counterpublics.

While Butler’s and Warner’s arguments are recognizable as narratives of crisis and loss, what does this have to do with mortality? After all, they do not associate homosexuality with death. To the contrary, if anything is “deadly” in their narrative, it is marriage itself, i.e. heteronormativity. Marriage would destroy queer community, culture and politics. As with Bennett before, the question is appropriate whether the apocalyptic scenario for the legalization of same-sex marriage is warranted. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Butler and Warner — like Bennett — defend “traditional values,” though queer ones. Why is the preservation of “tradition” so central to the queer argument? Mortality offers an answer. The fact that (practically) all lesbians and gay men are neither born to nor raised by lesbian and gay parents may explain queer anxiety around marriage. The concern for the loss of a tradition may follow from the fact that lesbian and gay sexuality is not reproductive: the transmission of cultural memory from one gay generation to the next is thus more precarious than heterosexual transmissions of culture.84

Warner in fact addresses the problem of cultural transmission for those whose sexuality is essentially childless. Unfortunately, Warner does not use this insight into the connections between cultural memory, death and sexual reproduction to rethink the anxiety of his position on same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, Warner’s contribution is significant in that it highlights the problems concerning the continuation of a cultural legacy in a community, which does not raise its own children:

One reason why we have not learned more from this history is that queers do not have the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built. Every new wave of queer youth picks up something from its predecessors but also invents itself from scratch. Many are convinced that they have nothing to learn from old dykes and clones and trolls, and no institutions — neither households nor schools nor churches nor political groups — ensure that this will happen. And since the most painfully instructed generation has been decimated by death, the queer culture of the present faces more than the usual shortfall in memory.85

If queer children were born into queer families and educated for and by a queer world, then there would not be the persistent danger of a forgetting of what queer culture has been in the past. Then, the queer culture of the future would draw on, perpetuate and amend the queer culture of the past.86 However, since queer children are raised in straight families and socialized by straight institutions, their identification with existing queer culture cannot be taken for granted.

Warner also refers to a particularly gay generation gap, which contributes to the tenuousness of queer memory. Older lesbians and gays are not experienced as people from whom lessons can be learned, but as “old dykes and clones and trolls.” The last two terms indicate that sexual desire may in fact complicate cultural transmission among queers. “Trolls” are men considered less desirable due to age or looks; their efforts to be social might not be welcomed by younger gay men. The term “clones” as well implies a generation gap marked by desirability — in this instance the erotic appeal of a particular style separates gay generations. Queer cultural transmission is thus further hampered by sexual perceptions. Finally, Warner suggests that AIDS has robbed younger gay men of the opportunity to learn political lessons from a generation of gay men, who would have counseled them to resist normalizing impulses and pressures.

Warner’s argument about cultural transmission points to a structural problem of queer culture and memory. First, the genesis and socialization of gay men and lesbians does not prepare them to perpetuate a queer world. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, “advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, ... is less ubiquitous than you might think”; as a matter of fact, most social and cultural institutions and practices are invested in producing heterosexuals.87 Second, sexual desire rather than kinship or its proxies (e.g. teacher/ student) inflects the relations across generations. Sexual desire, however, potentially increases the distance between the generations, whereas straight culture has many social institutions and venues that foster connections across generations as well as cultural continuity.

Butler’s and Warner’s fears capture the potential of same-sex marriage, given the structural tenuousness of queer culture. While queer anxiety surrounding cultural transmission is warranted, it nonetheless may exaggerate the extent to which the campaign for same-sex marriage must constitute a turning away from queer culture. Warner’s argument about the fragility of queer cultural memory seems to contain the following assumption: if only younger gay men and lesbians had been socialized by queer culture, then they would be perpetuating queer values and institutions. Younger generations of lesbians and gay men would not think of same-sex marriage, because they would be invested into assuring posterity for the recent queer past. Undistorted communication between generations thus would seem to imply a faithful adherence to cultural legacies of the past, to past cultural accomplishments.88 In that sense, there is a profound similarity between straight and queer opponents of same-sex marriage: Both sides assume that cultural transmission under normal circumstances leads to the perpetuation of a cultural legacy, and that departure from such legacies is the consequence of individuals being exposed to views other than the ones that should come “naturally.” A notion of “false consciousness” thus inhabits these understandings of the perpetuation of community and culture.89 Both undercut a fuller meaning of ‘democracy’ by constricting the possible directions of democratic political processes.

Vicarious Immortality and Extinction Anxieties

The strong sense that succeeding generations will perpetuate the cultural practices of their “ancestors” — whether defined by kinship or otherwise — deserves further scrutiny. Could it be tied to the quest for personal, vicarious immortality? An immortality achieved by reproduction across generations? William Bennett in fact links his opposition to same-sex marriage explicitly to vicarious immortality. How about queer opponents of marriage? Do they, too, have an investment in vicarious immortality, which shapes their sense of crisis regarding same-sex marriage? A case in point would be that Warner wishes to preserve a form of queer culture, which he acknowledges as personally meaningful in the context of his “coming out.”90 In other words, the queer culture that he wants to preserve has been central to the formation of his identity. If that culture were to cease to exist, would that not indicate that his identity will cease to exist with his death?91 Does Warner implicitly seek vicarious immortality, that is, to see himself live on through a world that he identifies with?

Warner considers vicarious immortality in his essay on “Irving’s Posterity.”92 He associates the desire for vicarious immortality, however, with a reproductive narrative; he calls for a relation to the future — to the preservation of culture — that frees itself from a reproductive narrative. So Warner constructs the desire for immortality — contrary to Zygmunt Bauman’s more expansive understanding — as purely heteronormative. A queer alternative relation to the future would be free of the desire for immortality; reproductive fantasies defeat queer world-making.

Warner develops his opposition to fantasies of immortality with respect to Washington Irving’s attempt to address his peculiar position as a bachelor in 19th century America. In particular, Warner locates Irving’s anxieties about his own sexual sterility as a bachelor in a cultural context, which is concerned with the relation between reproduction and death transcendence. Irving distinguishes between good and bad bachelors, i.e. between those who act as fathers and those who do not. To Warner this indicates “a deep and resilient moral fantasy: that reproduction is essentially generous.” Warner dissents from this image of fatherhood. In fact, the moral fantasy of generous reproduction “says nothing of the ways the patriarch lives for himself: neither of the gratifications of authority, nor of the narcissism of reproduction, nor of the dream of self-perpetuation, nor the public status of the pere de famille.”93 While some of the benefits of reproduction thus concern the role of the individual in his social relations — authority and public status — the other two concern existential questions. Namely, reproduction seems to offer the individual a life beyond death.

Conversely, an individual who does not have children may face an existential crisis. The sense of mortality might be heightened. This is exactly what troubles Irving. The sterile bachelor “is alienated from life itself, and especially from the continuity of generations.”94 In other words, non-reproducing individuals face radical mortality. This cultural imaginary persists in contemporary, homophobic portrayals of lesbians and gay men. Bennett and others assume that lesbians and gay men are alienated from life itself, because they their sexuality does not entail the possibility of reproduction.

How should queers respond? Should reproduction be made metaphorically accessible to those who cannot or do not wish to reproduce? Irving pursues this option when he figures literary production as reproductive behavior. With Irving’s bachelors, “sterility leads each to literature, and to literary posterity.” Writing becomes an alternative means of reproduction. When Irving imagines a way in which the bachelor can project himself into the future without biological reproduction, he nonetheless, according to Warner, adheres to the view that culture-building occurs only through reproduction. The figure of the reproductive bachelor thus does not contest fundamental associations between sexual reproduction, life and culture.95 It leaves intact what marginalized bachelors in the first place. Irving provides thus a cautionary tale of those stigmatized by heteronormativity attempting to exemplify the very values of that system, instead of contesting their marginalization.96 In fact, this may be the very hallmark of heteronormativity: it extends beyond the immediate matters of sexuality.

For Warner, Irving is able to conceive of the reproductive bachelor precisely because modernity is the age of heteronormativity: “Modern culture contains an acute contradiction: sexuality no longer needs to be reproductive, but the norms of reproductive narrative continue to saturate the moral imagination of time, both in Irving’s day and in our own.” Warner is referring to a modern shift, namely that biological reproduction and kinship have become less central for the ways in which societies are structured. Accordingly, the stigma of bachelorhood has decreased as well.97 Though biological reproduction may have become less central for modern society, Warner contends that its role in circumscribing social norms has actually intensified. “More and more detached from kinship roles, modern individuals have had to develop styles of self-transcendence, of linking themselves to a posterity so as not to be barren and sterile. The forms of reproductive narrative have proliferated under this pressure.” The narrative of sexual reproduction thus describes the ways in which all individuals relate to their mortality and to that part of the future which will not include them. “Whether we bear children or not, our lives converge on a future that continues to be imagined not as the activity of other adults like ourselves, but as the inheritance of children — our donatees, our surrogates, our redeemers, our alibi.”98

Imaginaries of sexual reproduction thus haunt contemporary efforts to relate to past and future. Reproductive metaphors even shape the ways in which childless individuals imagine their contribution to their societies. They inhabit that stigma, though they find ways to feel “at home.”99 What is at stake then for Warner is to cultivate alternatives to social structure built around reproductive ideology:

In our own day, with more and more forms of surrogacy challenging the form of reproductive ideology — from public schooling, to the social movement form, to lesbian parenting, to queer culture — the strenuous attack in the name of family values has targeted an extrafamilial intimate culture that we are still learning how to have. Perhaps we will learn to think of it as something other than surrogacy, to see in these conditions a future in which reproductive narrative will appear as an archaism.100

Warner is thus concerned with the purity of the queer alternative, which he sees under attack by virtue of the persistence of the reproductive narrative’s extension to non-biological reproduction.101 Those “extrafamilial intimate cultures” should not be understood in the terms of that which they replace, namely biological reproduction. Those alternative spaces are to be pried loose from biological reproduction; their representations should also be freed from the metaphors of reproduction. Warner’s demand for purity goes further — he hopes for a culture cleansed from the reproductive imaginary altogether. The reproductive narrative would become archaic. It would no longer be used to conceive of relations to mortality, cultural production and the building of a future. In other words, lesbians and gay men must not appropriate reproductive metaphors for their own relation to mortality, sexuality and world-making. Same-sex marriage must be avoided.102 It would link queer life to the kinship system’s relation to mortality and immortality. It turns out to be, at least for Warner, a misguided response to mortality.

Warner takes the heteronormative promise of immortality via reproduction too seriously — too seriously in the sense that he thinks that by resisting reproductive imaginations one resists fantasies of immortality. However, Bauman’s point about strategies of immortality is precisely that all aspects of human culture are concerned with immortality. Indeed, Bauman’s argument focuses on cultural production in the widest sense, whereas he considers sexual reproduction “unfit for the role of the vehicle of individual transcendence of death” because procreation secures species “immortality at the expense of the mortality of its individual members.”103 In other words, fantasies of immortality may exist outside the reproductive paradigm — and Irving’s attempt to find vicarious immortality may not be reducible to a heteronormative strategy of consolation.

These juxtapositions of Bauman and Warner complicate the latter’s sense that any attempt to imagine a future by definition implicates one in heteronormativity. Put more succinctly, giving up on reproductive relations to the future does not constitute the break with fantasies of immortality Warner makes it out to be. Indeed, there are other ways — nonheteronormative ways — in which we equate world-making, i.e. citizenship, with vicarious immortality. The queer dream of immortality may not rely on reproduction. But it, too, is a way of coping with mortality by leaving a mark on the world, by leaving something behind that transcends generations. In Warner’s and Butler’s critiques of marriage it is quite clear that a culture that they are invested in, that they helped to build, is one that they want to see continue. They take same-sex marriage so personally, because queer culture is so personally meaningful. If my argument is correct, this personal meaningfulness exceeds the meaning that Butler and Warner consciously attribute to it. That neither of them argues that the preservation of queer culture is about vicarious immortality is beside the point. As Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes, the immortalizing function of culture is highly successful insofar it remains opaque to those participating in the making of this culture.104 In raising the question of how much queer critics of marriage are themselves invested in strategies of immortality, of a nonheteronormative kind, I thus hope to contribute to a reflection on the anxieties driving the queer critique of marriage. Attending to anxieties about mortality, I believe, will help move the same-sex marriage debate among queer theorists away from concerns with transcending death and towards a more complex awareness of the challenges of political strategies for plural queer communities.