CHAPTER 4Neurobiology and the Queerness of Kinship
PRELUDE
When the wedding photo of Lela McArthur and Stephanie Figarelle went
viral, it was not because the couple looked great in their tuxedo and wedding
dress (they did), or because the setting was so spectacular (it was). It was,
rather, because the most popular conservative media outlet in the United
States, meaning to illustrate nuptial bliss, used the image to accompany a col-
umn titled “To Be Happy, We Must Admit Men and Women Aren’t ‘Equal.’ ”
Repeating a familiar premise, the column’s author Suzanne Venker (2013)
argues that the decline in marriage rates in the United States can be blamed
on forty years of feminism, with its claim that “gender is a social construct.”
While the “cultural script” of gender equality has confused people into think-
ing that men and women are the same, Venker claims, we would do better
to value the natural differences between them. When we ignore these dif-
ferences, no one knows “who’s supposed do what,” leaving young people to
battle the war of the sexes indefinitely and rendering marriage undesirable.
I won’t bother to argue with Venker. Rather, I want to recall the egg on the
news organization’s face when it became clear that McArthur and Figarelle
were not a great illustration of traditional marriage (Breslaw 2013). In fact,
they are a lesbian couple, the first same- sex couple to be legally married at the
top of the Empire State Building. The much- discussed blunder highlights the
article’s exclusion of an ironic fact about marriage: Despite the overall decline
in marriage rates, many people are actually clamoring to get married, so that
their kinships, the enduring bonds they make with and feel for specific others,
will be legally and socially recognized.
The misidentification of the happy couple as straight results from the het-
eronormative gaze, a way of looking that erases not only individual bodies