Melanie Heath

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that chall...

When discussing the future of “the” family, people often start out from false premises. They compare the familiar pattern father-mother-child with a vague notion of “no family,” or assume that another kind of family is replacing the nuclear one. It is much more likely . . . that instead of one kind replacing the other there will be a huge variety of ways of living together or apart which will continue to exist side by side.—Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1992, p. 141)

Gender scholars have addressed a variety of gender gaps between men and women, including a gender gap in orgasms. In this mixed-methods study of heterosexual Canadians, we examine how men and women engage in gender labor that limits women’s orgasms relative to men. With representative survey data, we test existing hypotheses that sexual behaviors and relationship contexts contribute to the gender gap in orgasms. We confirm previous research that sexual practices focusing on clitoral stimulation are associated with women’s orgasms. With in-depth interview data from a subsample of 40 survey participants, we extend this research to show that both men and women engage in gender labor to explain and justify the gender gap in orgasms. Relying on an essentialist view of gender, a narrow understanding of what counts as sex, and moralistic language that recalls the sexual double standard, our participants craft a narrative of women’s orgasms as work and men’s orgasms as natural. The work to ...

Drawing on in-depth interviews with individuals in current and former plural Mormon fundamentalist families, I demonstrate how gender is structured relationally in plural marriage, dependent on noncoercive power relations. Men perform a “conciliatory masculinity” based on their position as head of the family that requires constant consensus-building skills and emotional labor to maintain family harmony. This masculinity is shaped in relation to women’s performance of “homosocial femininity” that curbs men’s power by building strong bonds among wives to deflect jealousies and negotiate household duties. I argue for the importance of studying masculinities and femininities together as a relational structure to better understand specific religious and family contexts.

In Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America, Jennifer Randles delves into the world of marriage education policy that has been the cornerstone of the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI). Created in 2002 as part of the Administration for Marriage and Families, it has awarded grants for programs across the nation that promote and support healthy marriages. Whereas in mid-twentieth-century America individuals were as likely to marry whether rich or poor, in contemporary America scholars have identified a trend they call the marriage gap. Today, individuals of all classes, races, and sexualities still aspire to marry, but marriage has become symbolically associated with class privilege, understood as an institution one enters into after completion of university, obtaining secure employment, and/or homeownership. Poor and low-income individuals who have children together tend to delay marriage, waiting to attain the markers of middle-class success before tying the knot. The idea that the institution of marriage provides the best environment for raising children has spurred marriage-promotion policies. Advocates believe that supporting healthy marriages can combat poverty, since two incomes are better than one. Randles provides an incisive analysis of healthy marriage policies by taking the reader on a journey inside the healthy marriage classroom. Her important ethnography offers the first in-depth, sociological study of healthy marriage programs that specifically target poor and low-income couples. A community-based healthy marriage organization in California received a five-year $2.5 million federal HMI grant to create what Randles calls the ‘‘Thriving Families’’ program for poor, unmarried couples who were either expecting a baby or had a child younger than three months old. Based on 150 hours of participant observation, three focus groups with fourteen couples, and 45 in-depth interviews, Randles offers a nuanced perspective on one of the fundamental paradoxes inherent in marriagepromotion policies: low-income parents who take the classes believe that marriage should come after achieving financial security. In contrast, the logic of the policies and the marriage curricula she studied views marriage as an important milestone to help couples achieve economic security. Ultimately, this basic contradiction means that healthy marriage policies miss the mark in their goal to help couples marry and become financially secure. The story is complex, and Randles does an excellent job of uncovering the logic that leads to the ‘‘telling contradiction between the lived experiences of lowincome, unmarried families and the legislative intent of healthy marriage policy’’ (p. 85). A major strength of the book is its illumination of the paradoxical ways that marriage education policies fail to grasp the structural conditions that make it difficult for poor couples to choose marriage. Instead, the main reasoning of healthy marriage education is to promote an understanding of love that requires rational personal choices to ensure that individuals make the right decisions in their love life. Low-income couples are taught that ‘‘skilled love’’ is something they can learn, placing the responsibility for making the right love and marital decisions squarely on the individual’s shoulders, while disregarding the structural constraints that make marrying difficult. Through her interviews, Randles offers insight into why this neoliberal strategy does not work: it offers individual solutions to complex structural problems that make marriage difficult for those who struggle to make ends meet. Poor individuals predominantly choose partners from a limited pool of other low-income individuals, and they face overwhelming stress in these relationships due to financial instability. When they are unable to live up to middle-class ideals, the response tends to be what Randles calls ‘‘curtailed commitment’’—couples view themselves as unprepared for marriage. 356 Reviews

Marriage promotion is a controversial US antipoverty policy that emerged as part of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which sought to end dependence on government benefits by promoting marriage and self-sufficiency and making work-related activities mandatory to receive aid. Marriage education and promotion activities have been supported by federal welfare funds through the Healthy Marriage Initiative (2002–2011) and the Fatherhood, Marriage, and Family Innovation Fund (2011–2015). Supporters of this policy argue that single parenthood is a cause of poverty and that encouraging and strengthening marriage through relationship education services is a plausible poverty-reduction strategy. Critics argue that marriage promotion is an ideologically driven policy that obscures the structural causes of poverty and diverts funds from programs that directly benefit families living in poverty. Marriage promotion activities are being funded through 2015. Their longevity suggests that they have become established public policy. Keywords: family; marriage; politics; poverty; welfare

... December 2006 Copyright 2006 Melanie Heath Page 2. ii Dedication ... initiative so closely and for welcoming my presence at events, activities, and workshops. Thanks to Mary Myrick and other staff members who took time out of their busy schedule to be interviewed. ...

In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai’s, Melanie Heath’s,and Jennifer Randles’s research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.

This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriage's significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same-sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self-reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriage's significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same-sex marriage as in need of special consideration.

Though political sociologists have sought to understand how self-interest influences politics and policymaking, little research has examined the mechanisms involved in the relationship between constructing knowledge and forming policy. This article extends the concept of epistemic culture to the field of policymaking to uncover the mechanisms of knowledge production in policy formation. It offers an extended case study of government marriage promotion policies that seek to fund and disseminate marriage education among poor couples with the goal of lifting them out of poverty. Based on an ethnography of a statewide marriage initiative in Oklahoma, this article maps out the parameters of an epistemic culture of marriage promotion shaped by three mechanisms: 1) The articulation of connections between policy, commonsense ideas, and extant epistemologies; 2) The formation of policy that consolidates research findings to quell controversy; and 3) The creation of networks to convince relevant actors of the importance of marriage promotion policy.

Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage promotion as a reaction of the gendered and sexualized state to crisis tendencies of institutionalized heterosexuality. Drawing on the first in-depth study of

In One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America, Melanie Heath contributes to the growing literature on the politics of marriage and family. Her book is a welcome addition to this body of work. Not only does it document the growth of the marriage movement in the United States, which until now has been woefully underexamined, but also offers a sharp and penetrating analysis of marriage promotion programs under welfare reform in the United States. The book does as it claims, which is to ‘‘uncover’’ the social consequences of efforts to create a marriage culture in the United States through government, legal, and cultural interventions. Heath explains the role which marriage promotion initiatives play in maintaining social and economic inequality in the United States, even though the claim of its supporters is the opposite. Yet, more than that, the strength of the book is in the details provided: stories and experiences she researches while doing deep ethnographic work in Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has been on the forefront of marriage promotion and is an excellent case study. By attending marriage promotion workshops, interviewing instructors and participants, and holding focus groups she saw firsthand how gender hierarchies and racial and economic inequalities are reinforced in the way that marriage promotion policies are implemented. In other words, she argues that cultural frameworks help us to understand political and economic issues. What Heath found was that marriage promotion and marriage education, the foundations of the ‘‘marriage cure’’ to poverty and a ‘‘destabilized’’ society, are circumscribed by a marriage ideology that has, on the one hand, an embedded morality that espouses a heterosexual gender order and, on the other hand, defines welfare dependency as contrary to freedom and responsible citizenship. Each chapter focuses on a specific site of on-the-ground policy enactment and an analysis of how it contributes to what Heath calls ‘‘boundary work.’’ She examines marriage workshops and classes that were offered to the general population, to welfare recipients, prison inmates, high school students, and Native Americans. The boundary work of these workshops and programs is to create and maintain a concept of marriage steeped in gender hierarchy and heteronormativity. In other words, she finds that in these workshops there is a persistent emphasis on teaching a ‘‘marriage ideology’’ that is about unequal gender roles and rendering homosexuality invisible. Moreover, these programs reinforce notions of outsider status, particularly of poor single women. Boundary work is also the work that policies do to maintain a line between those inside and outside the line of normal, moral behavior. Non-heterosexual, white and non-white single mothers, and divorced families fall outside the line. Marriage promotion policies work to either push some people further outside or to pull others more clearly inside with strong regulatory and even punitive measures. Heath describes marriage promotion ideology as it contrasts with the claims of same-sex marriage. She explains how the mere presence of a same-sex couple in a marriage education class disrupts the pervasive heterosexual imperative. The highlights of this book are the persistent paradoxes or inconsistencies revealed. Heath writes that it is a hard fact to swallow, and indeed it is, that even though the poverty rate is highest among poor women of color, the marriage initiative is not focused on them at all. A central finding of the book is that while marriage promotion programs are funded through monies designated for welfare programs, they are primarily targeted to and utilized by white middle-class couples. Relatedly, she also finds repeated examples of when the church is funded Reviews 215

QUEERING CONFLICT: EXAMINING LESBIAN AND GAY EXPERIENCES OF HOMOPHOBIA IN NORTHERN IRELAND Duggan, M. (2012) Famham: Ashgate Publishing. 174pp. hbk. £55.00 ISBN 978-1-40942016-3This short, but packed, book offers a focused account of homophobia in the particular setting of Northern Ireland, where social, political and religious currents create tempestuous storms. Tracing different strands present in that space, and making sense of one manifestation of those currents, is a daunting prospect. The author states that the aim of the book is to 'account for the ways in which homophobia has become normalised in facets of Northern Irish social and political cultures to the detriment of those affected by it (p. 3) and certainly the book does this. It also presents a wider and soundly theoretical account of ways in which particular discourses work to support and legitimate fierce heteronormativity. Marion Duggan introduces her work by referring to the public statements of Mary Robinson in 2008 condemning homosexuality. This illustrates her contention, that the microcosm of Northern Ireland has produced particular and traceable manifestations of homophobia that contain lessons for understanding homophobia more generally.The author offers six chapters, all of which present a different perspective and can be read alone. The first of these gives an overview of the history that has created the Northern Irish position that is one of the most concise and clear accounts of this troubled period that I have read. Using this background, the author develops a sophisticated account of ways in which nationalist and loyalist discourses both situated homosexual as 'other' and 'threat'. Linking this with colonial discourses makes for a convincing argument for the specificity of the experience of homophobia at this point. This argument is well made and presented in writing that moves from theoretical to practical with clarity. This chapter is the conceptual underpinning of Duggan's account.The following chapters establish this conceptual analysis within action and reaction. The British Government's failure to extend the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, (decriminalising some sexual acts between consenting men), to Northern Ireland meant that being gay was experienced against a background of secrecy, vigilance and fear even after the social positioning of gayness had begun to change on mainland Britain. This experience was situated against political, moral and religious discourse that Duggan presents as creating a climate of fear and revulsion which also created and recreated particular forms of support for families and masculinity. In their turn, these institutions were inimical to homosexuals.There is a sense of relief in this reader when much of the work concentrates on the voiced experience of gay people, living through and resistant of the dominating force of homophobia so well established and explained. Chapter two uncompromisingly begins by discussing techniques of resistance to the actual and the perceived danger. …

Sure, nontraditional families can be successful, and they deserve our sympathy and support. But here is what social scientists call a confirmed empirical generalization: these families are not as successful as conventional two-parent families. Want further confirmation? Ask any child which kind of family he or she prefers.-David Popenoe, New York Times, December 26, 1992 When discussing the future of the family, people often start out from false premises. They compare the familiar pattern father-mother-child with a vague notion of no family, or assume that another kind of family is replacing the nuclear one. It is much more likely ... that instead of one kind replacing the other there will be a huge variety of ways of living together or apart which will continue to exist side by side

In One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America, Melanie Heath contributes to the growing literature on the politics of marriage and family. Her book is a welcome addition to this body of work. Not only does it document the growth of the marriage movement in the United States, which until now has been woefully underexamined, but also offers a sharp and penetrating analysis of marriage promotion programs under welfare reform in the United States. The book does as it claims, which is to ‘‘uncover’’ the social consequences of efforts to create a marriage culture in the United States through government, legal, and cultural interventions. Heath explains the role which marriage promotion initiatives play in maintaining social and economic inequality in the United States, even though the claim of its supporters is the opposite. Yet, more than that, the strength of the book is in the details provided: stories and experiences she researches while doing deep ethnographic work in Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has been on the forefront of marriage promotion and is an excellent case study. By attending marriage promotion workshops, interviewing instructors and participants, and holding focus groups she saw firsthand how gender hierarchies and racial and economic inequalities are reinforced in the way that marriage promotion policies are implemented. In other words, she argues that cultural frameworks help us to understand political and economic issues. What Heath found was that marriage promotion and marriage education, the foundations of the ‘‘marriage cure’’ to poverty and a ‘‘destabilized’’ society, are circumscribed by a marriage ideology that has, on the one hand, an embedded morality that espouses a heterosexual gender order and, on the other hand, defines welfare dependency as contrary to freedom and responsible citizenship. Each chapter focuses on a specific site of on-the-ground policy enactment and an analysis of how it contributes to what Heath calls ‘‘boundary work.’’ She examines marriage workshops and classes that were offered to the general population, to welfare recipients, prison inmates, high school students, and Native Americans. The boundary work of these workshops and programs is to create and maintain a concept of marriage steeped in gender hierarchy and heteronormativity. In other words, she finds that in these workshops there is a persistent emphasis on teaching a ‘‘marriage ideology’’ that is about unequal gender roles and rendering homosexuality invisible. Moreover, these programs reinforce notions of outsider status, particularly of poor single women. Boundary work is also the work that policies do to maintain a line between those inside and outside the line of normal, moral behavior. Non-heterosexual, white and non-white single mothers, and divorced families fall outside the line. Marriage promotion policies work to either push some people further outside or to pull others more clearly inside with strong regulatory and even punitive measures. Heath describes marriage promotion ideology as it contrasts with the claims of same-sex marriage. She explains how the mere presence of a same-sex couple in a marriage education class disrupts the pervasive heterosexual imperative. The highlights of this book are the persistent paradoxes or inconsistencies revealed. Heath writes that it is a hard fact to swallow, and indeed it is, that even though the poverty rate is highest among poor women of color, the marriage initiative is not focused on them at all. A central finding of the book is that while marriage promotion programs are funded through monies designated for welfare programs, they are primarily targeted to and utilized by white middle-class couples. Relatedly, she also finds repeated examples of when the church is funded Reviews 215

Though political sociologists have sought to understand how self-interest influences politics and policymaking, little research has examined the mechanisms involved in the relationship between constructing knowledge and forming policy. This article extends the concept of epistemic culture to the field of policymaking to uncover the mechanisms of knowledge production in policy formation. It offers an extended case study of government marriage promotion policies that seek to fund and disseminate marriage education among poor couples with the goal of lifting them out of poverty. Based on an ethnography of a statewide marriage initiative in Oklahoma, this article maps out the parameters of an epistemic culture of marriage promotion shaped by three mechanisms: 1) The articulation of connections between policy, commonsense ideas, and extant epistemologies; 2) The formation of policy that consolidates research findings to quell controversy; and 3) The creation of networks to convince relevant actors of the importance of marriage promotion policy.

“coming out.” Sloop examines the media coverage and speculation concerning Janet Reno, and the much publicized case of Barry Winchell, a US Army private murdered while stationed at Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tennessee. The analysis of each case strongly supports ...

Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage ...

Queering Conflict offers a unique culturally specific analysis into the ways in which homophobia in Northern Ireland has been informed and sustained during the latter half of the 20th century. This book takes the failure of the British Government to extend the 1967 Sexual Offences Act to Northern Ireland as its central point to demonstrate the subtle, but important, differences governing attitudes towards homosexuality in Northern Ireland.

This article examines the tensions in the identities of men who belong to the Promise Keepers (PK) move-ment by uncovering the social conditions that lead men to rethink gender and racial ideologies. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, the author draws on ...

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that chall...