Toward a political sociology of conjugal-recognition regimes: gendered multiculturalism in South African marriage law

Abstract: While conjugal-recognition policies are often a subject of political debate, scholars rarely attempt to explain the causal roots of such policies. When they do, their methods typically focus on discrete policies in isolation—same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, etc.—with comparatively little investigation of potential connections among policies. This article begins to develop a more holistic approach focused on identifying and explaining what I call conjugal-recognition regimes. Adapting the concept from the existing literature on welfare regimes, I argue that conjugal-recognition regimes exist when an identifiable pattern or principle organizes an institution’s conjugal-recognition policies. Such regimes shape social relations at multiple levels, both between the individuals in conjugal relationships and among the multiple institutions (state, religious, and so on) that confer official conjugal recognition. I argue that these organizing patterns or principles emerge out of historically specific, institutionally situated, and discursively constructed political debates on specific conjugal issues and, to the extent a regime in fact exists, go on to shape subsequent conjugal-policy controversies. I demonstrate these ideas through an extended analysis of post-apartheid South African marriage law, which has recently incorporated numerous previously excluded conjugal formations but has also assigned each new form to its own statutory and administrative structure or, as I call it, “silo.” I argue that these silos entrench a principle of “gendered multiculturalism” that officially defines cultures in terms of their supposedly characteristic gender relations. This principle increasingly tends to embed religious and cultural elites’ understandings of their respective traditions into the state’s marriage laws

Evaluation of the Photometrics CH250 CCD Camera for use in the NOAA/MLML Marine Optics System

This report summarizes initial work to incorporate Photometries CH250 charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors in the NOAAIMLML Marine Optics System (MOS). The MOS spectroradiometer will be used primarily in the Marine Optics Buoy (MOBY) to surface truth the ocean color satellite, SeaWiFS, scheduled for launch later this year. This work was funded through Contract NAS5-31746 to NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center. (PDF contains 24 pages

Evaluation of Job Benefits of Members of the American Agricultural Editors Association

The Communication Clinic Committee of the American Agricultural Editors Association (AAEA), in cooperation with the Iowa State University Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, surveyed AAEA members to determine salaries, fringe benefits, and satisfaction with benefits

Shear stress cleaning for surface departiculation

A cleaning technique widely used by the nuclear utility industry for removal of radioactive surface contamination has proven effective at removing non-hazardous contaminant particles as small as 0.1 micrometer. The process employs a controlled high velocity liquid spray inside a vapor containment enclosure to remove particles from a surface. The viscous drag force generated by the cleaning fluid applies a shear stress greater than the adhesion force that holds small particles to a substrate. Fluid mechanics and field tests indicate general cleaning parameters

South African Marriage in Policy and Practice: A Dynamic Story

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law\u27s role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. Accordingly, while my argument broadly distinguishes the more repressive regimes of colonialism and apartheid from the more expansive post-apartheid legal regime, it also partially undoes that periodisation by highlighting limits and evasions of repressive law and obstacles impeding access to post-apartheid law\u27s expansive promises

Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage within Ongoing Struggles over African Marriage in South Africa

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in many cases, facilitate their acceptance. At the same time, continuing contestation over such understandings helps drive instances of opposition

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority of Bridewealth in a Post-Apartheid South African Community

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage within lobola’s framework. In particular, I argue that dyadic narratives of marriage increasingly circulate in lobola processes alongside the extended-family narratives “traditionally” associated with African marriage. As key agents in this circulation, young women remain among lobola’s strongest supporters even as many yearn for what they call “50/50,” gender-egalitarian marriages. To help build this argument, I synthesize actor-oriented analyses of legal pluralism with Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) theorization of the role of lay action in producing legality, in order to illuminate how lay actors contribute not only to the form and content of different legal systems but also to the reach of their authority