12
The Butler/Warner critiques preclude a more incisive analysis of marriage and
overshadows many of those, not just queers, who suffer systematically and structurally
from marital policy. Thus, in addition to inadequately contesting the sexual injustices
resultant from an exclusivist health care system, Warner and Butler have no vocabulary
to address, inter alia, inheritance entitlements codified through marriage that reproduce
class and racial hierarchy (Stevens 1999, 135-41), the conferral of citizenship to marital
partners and their legitimate children (Stevens 1999, 102-13, 213-35), the reification of
gender roles through marriage (Stevens 211-235), and social policies like welfare reform,
not to mention welfare itself, that coerces poor women into marriage to receive social
services (Cohen 1997; Duggan 2004; Smith 2001); all of which—maybe with some
conceptual stretching—can be rendered as questions answerable to cross- or
postidentitarian progressive sexual politics.
15
These questions about larger structural and distributive arrangements situate an
analysis of Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical
Potential of Queer Politics?” and its impact for the development of progressive sexual
politics. It is necessary to consider “Punks” for three reasons: first, it is, as far as I know,
one of the strongest left critiques of queer theory and politics. Second, where Warner and
consider how distributive systems recursively produce desire and sexual identity, nor, more
importantly for this essay, how those systems constitute both permissible and punishable types of
sexualities and sexual practices beyond questions of economically enforced heterosexuality.
Thus, her argument permits her to enumerate the distributive injustices faced by gays and lesbians
whose relationships and families are not statutorily or economically recognized, and allows her to
ask, “Do poverty rates among lesbians not deserved to be thought of in relation to the normative
heterosexuality of the economy?” (273) What she is incapable of asking is how the economy
itself, not just the normative heterosexuality that underwrites it, produces sexual injustice. For
her, lesbians experiencing poverty is unjust because they are poor. But it is unjust not only
because they are poor, but because inadequate resources prohibit the flourishing of their sexual
relationships, which suggests that the poor, not just poor sexual minorities, are sexually
marginalized and misrecognized by economy. Inadvertently Butler veers into reifying the
cultural/material divide she sought to confound. Anna Marie Smith (2001b) also proposes that a
more historicized, empirical grounding of the debate between Fraser and Butler would reveal how
capitalism, and capitalist state policy, differently impacts sexual subjects at different historical
and political moments. She observes how the emergence of an “unmarried class” of citizens are
further socially and economically marginalized by same-sex marriage politics. (118)
15
Butler observes how in France arguments for traditional marriage and objections to PACS
largely hinged on a desire to preserve a homogenized and hegemonized white culture against
increasing immigration. (2004, 125) Nonetheless, she does not capture how marriage is racialized
or how alternative state-sanctioned relations might deracialize the distributive marital system.
Convention