Wedlocked

“Wedlocked is a brilliantly conceived cautionary tale of the risks of securing a & freedom to marry. Drawing upon original research into the complications that marriage rights carried for slaves freed in the 1860s, Katherine Franke warns that marriage rights are not the unalloyed triumph for gay people and same-sex couples that the Supreme Court and virtually all commentators have claimed. Anyone interested in gay marriage should read this bookbut so should anyone concerned about the stubborn perseverance of racism in America. For those who appreciate irony, compare this fascinating book with Justice Thomass skeptical dissent in the recent marriage equality cases.” - William N. Eskridge Jr.,author of Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 “A provocative intervention into legal and cultural debates concerning same-sex marriage. Plumbing the well-known analogy between race and sexual orientation in new ways,Wedlockedoffers a clear-eyed meditation on the traps and tripwires that marriage, as a highly regulative and deeply gendered legal construct, imposes on non-normative communities. With compelling stories, the book takes on the tenets and truisms of same-sex marriage proponents in startling ways. A real conversation-starter.” - Martha Umphrey,Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College “If marriage is the much-exhausted metric of morality in our times, Katherine Frankes Wedlocked turns razor-sharp insight to the tangled genealogy of its often-incoherent power in the American context. Franke aligns struggles for gay marriage rights with African Americans first access to the right to marry, smartly exposing the malleable line between intimacy and the untouchable.” - Patricia J. Williams,author of the column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” for The Nation “[E]ven if same-sex marriage recognition does not exactly replicate the experiences of post-Civil War African American couples, the history of state-sanctioned African American marriage, by turns exhilarating and crushing, remains an important challenge to the dominant narrative that recognition is a pure good, as well as a reminder that there are always (at least) three parties in every marriage. And yet the romantic conception of marriage continues to peddle the idea that intimate relationships are the most private and personal of decisions made between two people.” (Times Literary Supplement) “Apersuasive and provocative addition to scholarship on the history and the influence of marriage.” (Women’s Review of Books)

Katherine Franke is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University. In addition to her academic work, she is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights.