Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Summer 2013
OCLC FAST subject heading
Civil rights
Abstract
This essay challenges the privilege attaching to marriage as a distinct form of relationship. Responding to Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s new book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, the essay identifies the legal and extralegal privileges flowing not just to monoracial marriage but to marriage. States recognize and support one form of relationship between adults to the exclusion of all others, creating privilege that flows outside of the home into the workplace and beyond. Instead of arguing that such privilege should be distributed more equally between monoracial and multiracial couples, this essay seeks to disrupt the marital ideal itself. This challenge to the marital ideal strives to acknowledge more diverse forms of personal relationships at home and work, but it also has the potential to do more. Indeed, given marriage’s role in the construction and performance of race, a challenge to the marital ideal also has the potential to disrupt limited understandings of race in employment discrimination law.
Recommended Citation
Laura A. Rosenbury, Marital Status and Privilege, 16 J. Gender Race & Just. 769 (2013) (reviewing Angela Onwuachi-Willig, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (2013)), available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub/727