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The Invisible Queer: Alternatives to Biological Assumptions in
Traditional Family Values
In The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, Nancy Folbre provides a
critique of capitalism that is founded on what she considers the three basic family
values: love, obligation, and reciprocity. In a world where capitalism poses itself as
the only “viable” economic system, the neoliberal privileging of the individual can
have negative effects on interpersonal relationships and the provision of care. This
system which takes for granted care work performed by women within the
heterosexual nuclear household and relegates it to “women’s work” positioned
outside of the workings of the masculinized market, Folbre argues, forces women to
take on an unfair share of care work and diminishes the quality of care. While the
points that Folbre makes about the unequal distribution of care work are important
and potentially transformative, her argument relies on several presuppositions
about what constitutes “family” that ignore the existence of kinships that are not
nuclear, heterosexual, and/or reproductive.
In one of the only instances that she acknowledges the existence of
homosexuality, Folbre asserts that
Marriage is the primary form of non-biological kinship that we
recognize, yet marriage is, for many adults, a relatively short-term
relationship. Rather than making divorce more difficult, which would
probably discourage marriage, we could define simpler, more flexible
domestic partnerships that set some guidelines for individuals who
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choose to live together. Gay and lesbian couples should be able to opt
for these (or for marriage, if they so desire). (228)
As she does throughout the book, Folbre here assumes that the basic (nonbiological) unit of family is the romantic, monogamous dyad legitimized by the state
through marriage and teleologically oriented toward reproduction. She discourages
making divorce more difficult because that might lead to a decrease in participation
in marriage, which she assumes is an unequivocally positive institution. Even when
extended to include monogamous homosexual couples, however, marriage
perpetuates hierarchical gender norms and relations and privileges one type of
relationship over all others. This paper offers a queer critique of Folbre’s theory,
showing how queer families, or “families we choose” to borrow Kath Weston’s
(1991) term, tend to balance the “invisible heart” of family values with the invisible
hand of the capitalist market better than families based on the nuclear heterosexual
paradigm. Or, if they aren’t better than heterosexual families at striking a balance,
which would simply reverse the hierarchical hetero/homosexual binary that
grounds heteronormativity, perhaps queer families provide a critique of the
dualistic symmetrical binaries of male/female and hand/heart themselves.
Kath Weston’s groundbreaking ethnography of lesbian and gay family
relations, Families We Choose, reveals some of the ways that queer families can
contest traditional notions of kinship. In the introduction, Weston writes:
Because discourse on gay families critiques many of the procreative
assumptions that inform hegemonic notions of kinship in the United States, it
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can yield insights into how the cultural domain of kinship becomes defined
as its boundaries are drawn, contested, and redrawn. (17)
While homosexual individuals are not precluded from procreation, especially with
the development of artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood, queer
families do not presume the end-goal of procreation. When a queer person decides
to become a parent, it is inevitably after a conscious decision because queer
relationships do not imply a reproductive telos. Thus queer families—whether
connected by direct bloodlines or non-biological relationships or a mix thereof—are
always families we choose.
According to Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,
Folbre could be characterized as subscribing to a politics of reproductive futurity
that privileges heteronormativity and grounds the very category of the “political” in
an assumption of procreation. In a discussion of care as biologically informed
altruism, Folbre writes:
We are often altruistic toward our mates, who share responsibility for
our actual or potential offspring. Our brothers, sisters, nephews, and
nieces, as well as our children, share our genes and will combine them
with those of other people when they have children of their own. Kinbased altruism reinforces our concerns about the future. Worrying
about the future impels us to worry about those who will inhabit it,
alongside our immediate kin. (19)
This assertion of a biological or “natural” explanation of altruistic feelings is based
on several assumptions and elisions informed by the ideology of reproductive
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futurity. By referring to a collective “we” who posses mates with whom “we” have
the potential to produce offspring, Folbre discursively excludes from consideration
anyone who is sterile, non-monogamous, and/or queer. In addition to assuming that
this “we” aims to produce offspring, Folbre extends this reproductive telos to all the
relatives of that “we,” who will apparently pass on the genes they “share” with us
“when they have children of their own” (my emphasis). Thus Folbre expels the
possibility of queerness from family discourse in order to provide heteronormative,
biological evidence for the origins of altruism. In this way she privileges biological
kin and the monogamous reproductive heterosexual dyad (enforced and embodied
by marriage) as the only relationships that qualify as family.
Unlike the nuclear heterosexual family, queer families do not presume the
end-goal of procreation or base their relations of care in genetic relatedness. In the
words of Edelman, “Queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’
the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of
reproductive futurism” (3). If we do not oppose queerness and procreation
diametrically as Edelman does, we might avoid reifying the dualism that informs
hierarchical hetero/homo and male/female binaries. Perhaps queer kinship can
offer a critique of reproductive futurism by redefining the traditional notion of
family. This critique would inevitably call capitalism into question as well, for “The
family, according to the dominant ideology, is a realm in which we build permanent
and caring relations, rather than fleeting and competitive relations. These relations
will sustain those who labor in the harsh public world of the market” (Lehr 19). The
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primacy of the heterosexual nuclear family is thus integral to the functioning of
neoliberal capitalism because it:
1) Is the basic unit of capitalist consumption.
2) Is the site where (most) new labor is produced, raised, and cared for.
3) Reifies the dualistic constructions of self/Other binaries that give
hierarchical priority to “biological” relationships based in bloodlines or
heterosexual desire and thereby
4) Legitimizes the capitalist prerequisites of private property and
inheritance.
5) Is the naturalized, exclusive location of non-competitive relations based
in love, obligation, and reciprocity.
Folbre is right to assert the harm that neoliberal ideology can wreak on the quality
of care but risks bolstering the very norms she critiques by assuming the totality of
the nuclear heterosexual “family-household system [that] exists and works to
reinforce a sex/gender system embedded in the family and the economic realm. Yet
the social functions served by the family-household system are denied through the
ideological assertion that this way of life is natural” (Lehr 21). In other words, the
discursive positioning of the dominant conception of family as “natural” masks the
support that it lends to the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism.
Why should love, obligation, and reciprocity be isolated to select “biological”
relationships rather than informing all forms of human interaction? The
implementation of biological discourse to position blood kinship and heterosexual
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couples as the “natural” sites of care and altruism obscures the cultural contingency
of all relationships. According to Weston,
No search is more fruitless than the one that seeks revolutionary
forms of social relations which remain ‘uncontaminated’ by existing
social conditions. Not surprisingly, then, discourse on gay families
transfigures the exclusively procreative interpretations of kinship
with which it takes issue in such a way that it remains of them but no
longer completely contained within them. (210)
By defining new forms of kinship that are not uniquely based in genetic relativity,
queer families have the potential to break down the binary oppositions of
nature/culture and family/Other that legitimize the privatization of care.
Establishing relations based in love, obligation, and reciprocity among people who
are not “biological” relatives or reproductive, heterosexual couples undermines
capitalism by denaturalizing the presupposition of competitive individualism. In
other words, queer families subvert the logic of competition that drives capitalism
by revealing biological reproductive imperatives to be a social construction rather
than a “natural” law.
Folbre acknowledges the fact that “Human beings share a common genetic
heritage” but then attributes the origin of care to biology, stating, “Altruism toward
immediate kin fosters altruism toward others who are less closely related” (19). By
positing genetic similarity as the motivation for relations based in love, obligation,
and reciprocity, Folbre implicitly condones the competitive individualism that
impels the invisible hand of the market. The self/Other or us/them distinction that
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legitimizes competitive capitalist social interactions becomes naturalized by a
biological discourse that allows for the attribution of greater value to certain lives
over others. Although people have the ostensible freedom to choose the
relationships to which they attach value, the imperative of reproductive futurity
embodied by the institution of marriage regulates the types of relationships that are
legitimized by society through state recognition.
Although queerness and queer families present the potential for subverting
capitalism’s devaluation of care work and encouragement of competition, not all
queer relationships or actions are unequivocally subversive. Assimilationist politics
in the “gay movement” are ambiguous in the way that they both alter and reify the
heteropatriarchal structures in which they aim to gain inclusion. As Suzanna Danuta
Walters asserts in "Gays and Marriage in the Era of the Visible,”
It is strangely disconcerting that the two most public issues identified
with lesbian and gay rights have been inclusion in marriage and the
military, two institutions notorious as sites for the reproduction of
some of the most troublesome values and practices around
masculinity and violence. But in a dominant culture in which
masculinity and violence are such recurrent and persistent tropes,
should this be any surprise? (Queer Families 346)
While some advocates of marriage equality believe that inclusion of homosexual
individuals will incite change in the institution itself, marriage is inextricably
implicated in the enforcement of gender norms and the privileging of “legitimate”
relationships based in love, obligation, and reciprocity over others. In fact, Walters
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believes that gay marriage “might grant visibility and acceptance to gay marrieds,
but it will not necessarily challenge homophobia (or the nuclear family) itself;
indeed, it might simply demonize nonmarried gays as the ‘bad gays’ (uncivilized,
promiscuous, irresponsible) while it reluctantly embraces the ‘good gays’ who settle
down and get married” (Queer Families 349). The “reluctant embrace” of tolerance
would allow marriage to pose as accepting of difference while maintaining its
monopoly as the only reciprocal care-based relationship recognized by the state.
Because they do not necessarily challenge the primacy of marriage and the
heterosexual nuclear family as the sites of care-based relationships in the capitalist
system, certain isolated queer relationships might be complicit in reinforcing such
institutions. However, the queer family, if it includes more than two members,
inevitably poses a challenge to a traditionally gendered distribution of care work. In
“Queer Families and the Politics of Visibility,” Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann
claim, “Regardless of whether queers are seeking acceptance or transformation, the
categories and tools of mainstream society will not easily meet their needs” (Queer
Families 14). One of the main “tools of mainstream society,” biological discourse that
defines family by relationships based on bloodlines and/or heterosexual desire,
does not meet the needs of queer people. Any queer family that has more than two
members inevitably entails relationships of reciprocity that are not based in
reproductive futurity because they are not predicated on direct genetic relatedness.
Even if there are members within a queer family that marry and/or have children,
the monolith of the heterosexual nuclear family is challenged by the separation of
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sexuality from the teleological assumption of procreation and altruism from genetic
blood relations.
Folbre asserts that “If democracy can work in a nation-state, it can also work
in a family” (205). In addition to taking for granted the notion of self/Other that the
paradigm of the nation-state encourages, this statement assumes that all families
are inherently un- or pre-democratic. Folbre does not seem to realize that the feudal
privatization and gendering of care is perpetuated by the institutions of marriage
and the heterosexual nuclear family which are naturalized as the exclusive sites of
relationships involving love, obligation, and reciprocity.
Valerie Lehr argues in Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the
Nuclear Family that
The extension of rights depoliticizes issues that need to be subject to
public debate and discussion. To foreclose such controversies through
the extension of rights is not to resolve them; it its to deny the full
significance of such questions for society by containing debate. The
extension of marriage and family rights to gays and lesbians would
serve to foreclose serious questioning of the values embedded within
current understandings of marriage and family. (14)
The organization of the “gay movement” around marriage equality precludes debate
over whether it is proper for the state to recognize one type of reciprocal
relationship over all others. The granting of access to institutions such as marriage
to cis-gender homosexuals allows the heterosexual majority to continue privileging
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care based on bloodlines over non-biological interpersonal reciprocity and
relegating care work to a feminized realm outside of market value.
Assimilationist gay politics mitigate the subversive critique that queer
relationships and families can provide of the capitalist devaluation of care work and
the restrictive notions of traditional, “natural” family. If the cumulative detriments
of capitalism are to be opposed, change must come from collective approaches that
eschew neoliberal individualism and the gendered privatization of care work. Folbre
suggests that “We should encourage both men and women to combine paid work
with family and community work—a new division of labor that would develop
men’s capabilities for care along with women’s capabilities for individual
achievement” (226). While this method would be a good start at “democratizing” the
heterosexual nuclear family, it does not question the symmetrical opposition of
competition to care that sustains the workings of capitalism. In addition, it reifies
the gender roles that it purports to alter. As Cindy Patton writes, “’Queer’, if it is to
have any utility, is best understood, not as a model of identity and practice that can
be imitated or molded to a local setting, but as evidence of a kind of unstoppable
alterity that flies, like a stealth bomber, beneath the annihilating screen of nation”
(Queer Globalizations 210). While queerness is not completely outside the politics of
reproductive futurity, it may provide a critical “alterity” that breaks down the
biologically legitimized, hierarchical isolation of care to relationships based in
procreative assumptions. By challenging traditional gender roles and legitimizing
love, obligation, and reciprocity within relationships that are not predicated on
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heterosexual desire or direct genetic relatedness, queer families can subvert the
capitalist privileging of such relationships, and even certain lives, over others.
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Works Cited
Bernstein, Mary & Reimann, Renate. (Eds.). (2001). Queer Families, Queer Politics:
Challenging Culture and the State. New York, NY: Columbia UP.
Edelman, Lee. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC:
Duke UP.
Folbre, Nancy. (2001). The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York,
NY: The New Press.
Lehr, Valerie. (1999). Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear
Family. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP.
Malavé, Arnaldo-Cruz & Manalansan, Martin. (Eds.). Queer Globalizations: Citizenship
and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York, NY: New York UP.
Weston, Kath. (1991). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York, NY:
Columbia UP.
© Andrée McKee — Not for use without author approval.