The title for this symposium, “Queer Theory after ‘Marriage Equality,’” suggests a distinct social and historical event and changed context that queer theory must pause for, grapple with, and perhaps even rethink itself in relation to. I understand “marriage equality” as naming the US legal institutional movement that sought state and federal marriage contracts, with their associated rights and recognitions, for same-sex couples who otherwise already possess legal standing with the state, such as US citizens and some permanent residents. Indeed, though “same-sex” marriage is legal in twenty-two countries, it has not always been understood in terms of marriage equality or achieved through legal movements and juridical power (in postcolonial Ireland, for instance, it was won through popular referendum rather than litigation).1 And, importantly, no other place used or appropriated a modern constitutional amendment for the abolition of slavery, in this case the Fourteenth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause, to make a claim to and for state power and recognition. In this manner, we ought to take as a first meaning of “queer theory after marriage equality” the naming and alerting us to the continued racialized geohistorical unevenness of queer theory and its knowledges. For even as we ask what it means to do queer theory after marriage equality, we ought not to presume to know already the time in which we are working and thinking. Indeed, marriage equality already institutes us into a temporality that privileges those subjects, objects, and epistemologies that naturalize the nation-state as a rational development of a globally universal historical time (Gopinath 2005; Manalansan 2003). To precritically orient the “time” of queer theory to marriage equality operates as a disavowal of what we do not know of other polities

中文翻译：

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种族与婚姻批判

本次研讨会的标题“'婚姻平等'之后的酷儿理论”暗示了一个独特的社会和历史事件，并改变了酷儿理论必须停下来思考、应对甚至重新思考自身的背景。我将“婚姻平等”理解为美国法律制度运动的名称，该运动寻求州和联邦婚姻合同及其相关权利和认可，适用于在其他方面已经在州政府拥有合法地位的同性伴侣，例如美国公民和一些永久居民。事实上，虽然“同性”婚姻在 22 个国家是合法的，但它并不总是从婚姻平等的角度来理解或通过法律运动和司法权力来实现的（例如，在后殖民时代的爱尔兰，它是通过全民公投赢得的）而不是诉讼）1，而且，重要的是，没有其他地方使用或挪用了废除奴隶制的现代宪法修正案，在这种情况下是第十四修正案和平等保护条款，来要求国家权力和承认。以这种方式，我们应该将“婚后平等后的酷儿理论”的第一个含义视为酷儿理论及其知识的持续种族化地缘历史不平衡的命名和警示。因为即使我们问在婚姻平等之后做酷儿理论意味着什么，我们也不应该假设已经知道我们正在工作和思考的时间。事实上，婚姻平等已经将我们置于一种时间性中，这种时间性赋予那些将民族国家自然化为全球普遍历史时间的理性发展的主体、客体和认识论（Gopinath 2005；马纳兰桑 2003)。将酷儿理论的“时间”前批判地定位于婚姻平等，是对我们不知道的其他政体的否定