LOCATING AND UNSETTLING MYSELF AT THE OUTSET

As a critical feminist scholar, it is important at the outset to locate myself and my motivations for engaging in this theoretical work (Allen & Henderson, 2022; Fine, 1994). I come to this work with my own complex family narrative of marriages, divorces, and remarriages across generations of my family, and my own experiences of interracial marriage, divorce, cohabitation, motherhood, single-parenting, and step-mothering. As a White, cisgender woman, I am currently living with my partner and co-raising our children in a committed heterosexual union outside the institution of marriage. In writing this article, I am intimately familiar with the ways in which my union is problematized and denigrated in a society that sees marriage as best for children and for society (Skolnick, 1981). I am also aware of the ways my family as structured has been denied access to resources, benefits, rights, financial and legal protections, and cultural validation (Polikoff, 2008). Similar to Hardisty (2008), I question a society that espouses the virtues of liberty and justice for all, while coercing some of its citizens to enter into an institution built upon White heteropatriarchal supremacy to gain access to those benefits, rights, and protections (or face the possibility of financial ruin; see Geller, 2023).

I also approach this writing as a critical family scholar who, for some 30 years, has been studying and writing about the “Other” (Fine, 1994, p. 70), namely families experiencing marginalization at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and nation (e.g., Letiecq et al., 1996, 2008, 2023; Letiecq, Davis, et al., 2022; Letiecq & Koblinsky, 2004). Using community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) approaches (Letiecq, Vesely, et al., 2022) in partnership with Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families, my co-researchers and I have endeavored to expose the undue family health burdens that marginalized people endure because of structural inequalities. And while this collaborative work has been carried out with the promise of working to change systems and advance justice, over time, I have become increasingly unsettled.

There is abundant critical scholarship to unsettle the self (e.g., Arvin et al., 2013; Bonilla-Silva, 2023; Collins, 1998; Fine, 1994; Harris, 1993; Lehr, 1999; Leonardo, 2004; Wilson, 2018). Like many, I grew increasingly unsettled during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice that erupted in 2020 after the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd (Dow et al., 2022). Reading Eve Tuck's (2009) “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” was likewise disquieting. In her letter, Tuck (2009) implored researchers to “reconsider the long-term impact of ‘damage-centered’ research—research that intends to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression” (p. 409). She wrote further: “This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultaneously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless” (p. 409). Tuck then urged researchers to reformulate extant theories and methods and reimagine research conducted with communities experiencing marginalization. Yet, even those of us using democratic, participatory approaches like CBPAR have to consider if and how our research is centering damage and if we are subscribing to a flawed theory of change that is actually reinforcing deficit narratives rather than exposing how White supremacy operates to the advantaging of those racialized as White.

Like Jordan (2022), who advanced settler colonial theory as a critical framework for antiracist and anticolonial family scholarship, I acknowledge “the contraindications of being a White person working for justice without first seeking to disrupt Whiteness” (p. 465). Other White women scholars have also written about disrupting our Whiteness (e.g., Blume & De Reus, 2009; Earick, 2018; Fine, 1994) while Walsdorf et al. (2020) challenged family scholars to consider such disruptions within family science. Indeed, Walsdorf et al. (2020) asserted that family scholars must interrogate the supremacy of Whiteness in family scholarship and the complex, interlinked logics used to reinforce WHNF advantage in order to reimagine systems and structures and who and what needs to change to advance justice for all families. In response, here I interrogate White supremacy interlinked with heteropatriarchy to surface marriage fundamentalism as a structuring element that is key to the reproduction of WHNF hegemony and the maintenance of family inequality in the United States.

CONCEPTUALIZING WHITE HETEROPATRIARCHAL SUPREMACY, SURFACING MARRIAGE FUNDAMENTALISM

And the field of family science has been complicit in this centuries-old state-sanctioned project to maintain White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Most pointedly, researchers who compare two-parent married families to single-parent families as if comparable at the base—without controlling for structural (dis)advantages—are (perhaps inadvertently) fueling narratives of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy. In writing this article, I am urging family scholars to engage critical social theories (e.g., Collins, 2019) and structural analyses and continue to interrogate the mechanisms of structural oppression and unequal power relations, including marriage fundamentalism, operating to reproduce and maintain family inequality (see Young, 1990). Next, I delineate additional recommendations for needed family scholarship that will deepen our understanding of marriage fundamentalism so that it can be disrupted in family science and beyond.

First, family scholars must continue the close interrogation (and dismantling) of existing family theories that rely on key logics and assumptions that undergird White heteropatriarchal family supremacy and develop new family theories and new imaginations that challenge Whiteness, White supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the unfettered promotion and advantaging of WHNFs (Allen & Henderson, 2022; Blume & De Reus, 2009; Few-Demo, 2014; Fine, 1994; Letiecq, 2019). As Jensen and Sanner (2021) concluded in their scoping review on child wellbeing and family structures, “[t]he inherent and unchallenged bias toward the nuclear family model looms large in this literature” (p. 15).

Building new theories and models to understand and explain White heteropatriarchal family supremacy in a field heretofore dominated by White people, many of whom have benefited from Whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) and WHNF advantaging, will require deep reflexivity and self-interrogation to unsettle the self (Allen et al., 2019; Letiecq, Vesely, et al., 2022). Family scholars must work to surface unearned family privileges and the unchecked assumptions linked to marriage fundamentalism operating in our own lives and in the institutions (including the academy) that we inhabit (Allen et al., 2019; Fine, 1994; Letiecq, 2019). Family scholars should also take up what Gilbert and Sliep (2009) refer to as the practice of inter-relational reflexivity to be carried out in the context of social action and community-based work. Inter-relational reflexivity goes beyond self-reflexivity and occurs dialogically in relationship with others to interrogate moral and ethical issues and negotiate unequal power relations as we take collective action together to transform family-based systems of inequality (Gilbert & Sliep, 2009). Inter-relational reflexivity in partnership with those experiencing family marginalization and relationship-status discrimination can meaningfully surface currently hidden forms of family inequality in need of redress. Conversely, both self- and inter-relational reflexivity can be used to interrogate the ways in which people unduly advantaged by marriage fundamentalism consciously or unconsciously work to maintain and reproduce those advantages within their families and within other social institutions (e.g., education, health care, and housing).

Second, there is a critical need to think more deeply—and more relationally—about systems and the people working within those systems who, for a complex host of reasons, “support and execute the will of the powerful” in reproducing structural oppression (Young, 1990, p. 31). Recent studies of how White people are experiencing the growing racial, class, and gender diversification in the United States can inform this line of family study. For example, evidence suggests that the demographic shift toward growing diversity in the U.S. as well as perceived gains being made by Black, Indigenous, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and other peoples are often interpreted by White, cisgender people of European ancestry as a threat to their dominant social position in the U.S. and an erosion of the power of their Whiteness (Danbold & Huo, 2015). Indeed, research has found that reminding White people of their declining relative group size led to greater bias, anger, and fear toward Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other people of color (Craig & Richeson, 2014a) and an endorsement of conservatism among the politically unaffiliated (Craig & Richeson, 2014b). As noted by Bonilla-Silva (2023) and Young (1990), we must examine both how the mechanisms of structural oppression work, and who is enacting, enabling, and enforcing the practices, often cruelly (see Bhatia, 2020) within social systems and institutions that perpetuate family inequality. Family scholars should also work to interrogate and clearly map the powerful influences and roles of special interest groups, think thanks, and their media operations (see Meagher, 2012) in the reproduction of WHNF supremacy.

Lastly, family scholars, guided by critical social theories, must continue to develop measurement and analytical techniques that meaningfully capture the complex and interlinked manifestations of structural domination and oppression in American family life (see Cross et al., 2022; Williams, 2023). Several examples already exist (Baker & O'Connell, 2022; Curtis et al., 2022; Everett et al., 2022; Williams & Baker, 2021). In addition, family scholars should also take up “new” research methodologies and approaches in family science, including CBPAR and decolonizing approaches (e.g., Letiecq, Vesely, et al., 2022; L. T. Smith, 2021), that reimagine research to ensure it is conducted by, for, and with communities experiencing marginalization, but not reproducing damaged-centered narratives that reify White heteropatriarchal supremacy (Tuck, 2009). These approaches are critical to disrupting scientific racism and unchecked marriage fundamentalism, structural racism, and other systems of power that continue to plague research across disciplines, including family science (Bonilla-Silva, 2023; Roberts, 2012; Saini, 2019; Williams, 2023).

Some 30 years ago, Fine (1994) called for a check on cultural imperialism evident in work that centers the “Other,” while protecting (i.e., not studying) those in power. She asked, “[W]hy don't we know much about how the rich live? Why don't we study whiteness?…Whose dirty linen…gets protected by such work?” (p. 73). Fine's (1994) questions are still relevant today and demand answers as we not only talk about family diversity, inclusion, and equity but walk toward the dismantlement of marriage fundamentalism and interlinked forms of structural oppression to advance justice for all people under the law. There is much work to do. As Wilson (2018) concluded, unless and until we commit to understanding, disrupting, and dismantling White heteropatriarchal supremacy and the ways in which modern iterations of laws, policies, and practices continue to perpetuate it at a structural level, it will remain an enduring feature of American society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS