Marriage Proposals

Anita Bernstein is Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and the author of many books, including Questions and Answers: Torts, now in its third edition, The Common Law Inside the Female Body, and Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status.

Marriage Proposals brings new insights to the marriage debates by discussing the provocative idea of getting the government out of the business of marriage recognition altogether. Anyone seeking to think clearly about the nature and function of marriage in our society should read this collection. - Brian Bix,Frederick W. Thomas Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Law School Bringing together insights from law, anthropology, and political theory, the rigorous essays in Marriage Proposals strip away easy assumptions about marriage. Readers will emerge from the volume inspired to bring the national conversation on these issues to a deeper and more interesting level. - Suzanne B. Goldberg,author of Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial Enjoyable and provocative. . . . This collection nicely reveals and sorts through a host of exciting and complex questions about marriage. - Martha McCluskey,co-editor of Feminism, Media, and the Law One of the curious features of the early twenty-first century has been the noisy presence of & marriage in the public culture. The result has been a public dialogue that often marries bad social science and homophobia, with understandable public anxieties about how children grow up in our world. We deserve better and Marriage Proposals provides it. Anita Bernsteins collection draws on the best work by some of the smartest and most thoughtful participants in the recent marriage wars. The authors ask the reader to think hard about how marriage can be justified today. And the result is a book that confronts some of the hardest and deepest questions that face us as a society. - Hendrik Hartog,author of Man and Wife in America: A History

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Playing Innocent: Childhood, Race, Performance * 1 Tender Angels, Insensate Pickaninnies: The Divergent Paths of Racial Innocence * 2 Scriptive Things * 3 Everyone Is Impressed: Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom's to Uncle Remus's Cabin * 4 The Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann * 5 The Scripts of Black Dolls Notes Index About the Author