Querying Edith Windsor, Querying Equality
9 Pages Posted: 1 Oct 2013 Last revised: 26 Jun 2023
Date Written: September 29, 2013
Abstract
In this short essay, I express skepticism about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, and especially the vision of equality articulated by it. Kennedy's vision of equality is one endorsed by many mainstream American LGB organizations as well. Yet, as this article explores, queer theorists, activists, and citizens have many reasons to be concerned by this articulation of equality, as well as the plaintiffs who instigate its expression. In this essay, then, after first problematizing the conceptions of equality circulating in the Windsor litigation, I try to conjure a queer politics of marriage and, simultaneously, a queer Edith Windsor. The hope is that by imagining this kind of plaintiff, a more queer — and more human(e) — articulation of equality might emerge from American courts and their resolutions of various same-sex marriage controversies.
Keywords: equality, marriage, queer, Windsor
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