The article compares the struggles for the rights to interracial marriage with those for same sex marriage. By comparing both of these issues on a time line, Somerville exposes the reality of the history of discrimination our country chooses to participate in. While we are conditioned to recall these struggles as two separate entities, they are intertwined as pieces of the picture of the struggle for minority rights.
The similarity of these struggles is countered at points in Somerville's article. She also shows how using this analogy of same sex marriage to interracial marriage may not be as beneficial to those supporting this cause as one would think. The analogy is not as cut and dry as it seems
Do cases allowing interracial marriage apply to all groups requesting equal marriage rights?
U.S. law often serves the purpose of a rhetorical reminder of what is acceptable as our status quo. It is the root of the nationwide group think epidemic. Marriage was always more threatening to the status quo than was simply a relationship. The public scrutiny, which again was often backed by the law, still has the power to push same sex relationships behind closed doors. In the instance of both homosexual and interracial unions, the most effective control was asserted over the legality the marriage. While relationships can be outlawed, laws against marriage protect the lineage and fiscal interest of a power class.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
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Comments on "Cherrie Moraga's Going Brown"
This essay is an analysis of the works of Cherrie Moraga, a Chicana lesbian feminist writer who incorporates her Mexican heritage into much of her work. The critic, Sandra K. Soto, emphasizes the importance of challenging “the commonplace that queering makes the most sense and is most productive when the object of analysis is in some way normative.” Soto believes that even inherently queer texts should be read with a critical eye—the fact alone that the writer is queer does not suffice for a truly queer piece.
• Moraga often employs her own life experience as evidence, and as Soto states, “these difficulties” that present themselves when this kind of historicizing occurs “can be compounded in particular ways when one approaches noncanonical texts that are self-consciously produced.” Therefore, much of Moraga’s evidence in her texts is self-made—she often neglects to refer to other sources to support her claims.
• Moraga, as she clings to her Chicana heritage, has a way of objectifying other Chicana/o people when she refers to her background and experiences as a lesbian in her culture. Soto points out certain claims made by Moraga in her works, such as the desire for a Chicano sperm donor or shame about her “pink-nippled breasts,” and contrasts them with a description of Chicana/o culture as teaching her to “take [her] whiteness and run with it.”
• Moraga refers to her return to Chicana/o culture from whiteness, and as Lora Romero put it, Moraga “assumes that community inhibits intellectual mastery” through her claims that she is “self-exiled” from the community. Romero claims that Moraga represents the Chicana/o community as an “undifferentiated, unthinking mass next to which the unique, thinking, “self-exiled” individual stands out.” While Moraga claims to have embraced this culture, she still puts herself on a higher level, intellectually than those with whom she so strongly identifies.
• Moraga not only claims Chicana/o culture as her own, but she also portrays it as something exclusive that should be bestowed upon an individual. Soto refers to the basis of Moraga’s claims about race as “an unlikely conception that likens race to a commodity, alienable and possessable.” “There is no denying,” she
writes when discussing her choice for a sperm donor, “that I had this baby that he might be a Mexican, for him to know and learn of mexicanismo, for him to feel that fuego, that llama, that riqueza I call lo mexicano.” Soto says of this claim, “This objectification of race and the subsequent attempts to handle it are, not incidentally, deeply resonant with the traditional conception of power as something that can be apprehended, arrested, and seized through sheer determination, force, or law, which is to say, through individual agency.” Moraga employs the tools of the hegemony to express her solidarity and identification with a specific minority.
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