Intersectionality in California’s Same-Sex Marriage Battles: A Complex Proposition

This article employs what the author calls “foundational ” intersectional analysis to investigate the coalitional and rhetorical strategies mobilized by Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative in California designed to eliminate the right of same-sex marriage. The author argues that foundational intersectionality is the only method that sufficiently contextualizes the historical legacies constructing the political institution of marriage and that this method must incorporate the factor of religion, because religion is central to the politics of “moral values. ” The first part of the article differentiates foundational intersectionality from identity intersectionality as a framework. The author then sketches how marriage is a political institution constructed in the United States through the simultaneous interactions of gender, sexuality, race, and religion. The second part of the article applies the framework to an empirical analysis of four discursive strategies employed by pro – and anti–same-sex marriage forces in California in order to “link their fate, ” or sense of political alliance, to other groups. Keywords intersectionality, sexuality politics, Proposition 8, same-sex marriage Can the politics of any marginalized community sustain anything other than a single-dimensional or single-axis approach to politics or liberation? Cathy Cohen (1999, 19) Perhaps the most compelling claim about intersection-ality as a research paradigm is that it can move beyond single-axis or additive models of identity to illuminate how intersecting forms of domination produce locations of both oppression and privilege ” even within a singl