Conclusion: Sex, Marriage, and Conjugality

Abstract

Marriage no longer makes sense. By this, I do not mean that marriage is no longer a meaningful arrangement, but rather that its discursive coherence as a regulatory system is unraveling. As a mechanism of status relying on patriarchal and heterosexist regulatory orders, it is no longer viable. Theoretically and experientially, the old forms are being rejected. Where cohabitation counts, for certain purposes, as “marriage,” where covenant marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships compete as alternative forms of conjugality, and where certified marriage is defined in increasingly diverse and/or self-regulated ways, the world of intimate relationships can no longer be easily divided into that which is marriage and that which is not. The field of analysis has opened up. Not marriage but conjugality is the appropriate regulatory (and thus analytical) field.