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REFRAMING MARRIAGE EQUALITY AS DEATH EQUALITY
- Author(s):
- Michelle Martin-Baron
- Editor(s):
- Kreg Abshire (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Subject(s):
- Culture--Study and teaching, United States, Americans--Social life and customs, Culture and law, Gays
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- American cultural studies, American culture, Law and culture, Queer/gay
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6HQ3RZ19
- Abstract:
- A provocation: what would it mean to reframe the marriage movement as a crusade for death rights and death equality? Even though weddings are the performative centerpiece of the activism that successfully challenged the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the ground-breaking case of Windsor vs. The United States (2013) is one about death rights. When Edie Windsor's partner of over forty years, Thea Spyer, passed away, Windsor found herself in a precarious position; Spyer had left Windsor her estate, but was not considered to be a "surviving spouse," the term spouse referring "only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife" under DOMA.[1] These legal restrictions famously cost Windsor $300,000 more in inheritance taxes than she would have been charged if she and Spyer had been in a heterosexual marriage. In other words, the "price" of being LGBT in the United States had a concrete figure, which Spyer's attorneys used to make their case.[2]
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article Show details
- Publisher:
- Rocky Mountain American Studies Association
- Pub. Date:
- November 2016
- Journal:
- Quarterly Horse: A Journal of [brief] American Studies
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2470-6191
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial
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