MARRIAGE PROMOTION

One Marriage Under God
The Campaign to Promote Marriage In America

Melanie Heath
Publisher: NYU Press (2012)

Book Summary: The meaning and significance of the institution of marriage has engendered angry and boisterous battles across the United States. While the efforts of lesbians and gay men to make marriage accessible to same-sex couples have seen increasing success, these initiatives have sparked a backlash as campaigns are waged to “protect” heterosexual marriage in America. Less in the public eye is government legislation that embraces the idea of marriage promotion as a necessary societal good.

In this timely and extensive study of marriage politics, Melanie Heath uncovers broad cultural anxieties that fuel on-the-ground practices to reinforce a boundary of heterosexual marriage, questioning why marriage has become an issue of pervasive national preoccupation and anxiety, and explores the impact of policies that seek to reinstitutionalize heterosexual marriage in American society. From marriage workshops for the general public to relationship classes for welfare recipients to marriage education in high school classrooms, One Marriage Under God documents in meticulous detail the inner workings of ideologies of gender and heterosexuality in the practice of marriage promotion to fortify a concept of “one marriage,” an Anglo-American ideal of Christian, heterosexual monogamy.

State of Our Unions:
Marriage Promotion and the Contested Power of Heterosexuality

Melanie Heath
Research article published in Gender & Society (2008)

Abstract: Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage promotion as a reaction of the gendered and sexualized state to crisis tendencies of institutionalized heterosexuality. Drawing on the first in-depth study of marriage promotion politics, the author examines polycentric state practices that seek to stabilize the norm of the white, middle-class, heterosexual family. While explicit policy concerns focus on race and class, state-sponsored marriage workshops teach about gender hierarchy to rehearse an implicit ideology of marital heterosexuality. In contrast to feminist state theories that present a monolithic, top-down model of state control, the author offers a more nuanced examination of the relationship between macro and micro levels of power and their uneven consequences for social change.

Keywords: marriage promotion; state; heterosexuality; gender, race, and class

Making Marriage Promotion into Public Policy:
The Epistemic Culture of a Statewide Initiative

Melanie Heath
Research article published in Qualitative Sociology (2012)

Abstract: Though political sociologists have sought to understand how self-interest influences politics and policymaking, little research has examined the mechanisms involved in the relationship between constructing knowledge and forming policy. This article extends the concept of epistemic culture to the field of policymaking to uncover the mechanisms of knowledge production in policy formation. It offers an extended case study of government marriage promotion policies that seek to fund and disseminate marriage education among poor couples with the goal of lifting them out of poverty. Based on an ethnography of a statewide marriage initiative in Oklahoma, this article maps out the parameters of an epistemic culture of marriage promotion shaped by three mechanisms: 1) The articulation of connections between policy, commonsense ideas, and extant epistemologies; 2) The formation of policy that consolidates research findings to quell controversy; and 3) The creation of networks to convince relevant actors of the importance of marriage promotion policy.

Keywords: Marriage promotion, Public policy, Epistemic culture, Knowledge

Sexual Misgivings:
Producing Un/Marked Knowledge in Neoliberal Marriage Promotion Policies

Melanie Heath
Research article published in The Sociological Quarterly (2013)

Abstract: This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriage’s significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same-sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self-reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriage’s significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same-sex marriage as in need of special consideration.

Marriage Goes to School

Orit Avishai, Melanie Heath, and Jennifer Randles
Research article published in Contexts (2012)

Abstract: In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai’s, Melanie Heath’s,and Jennifer Randles’s research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.