Regulatory fictions: On marriage and countermarriage

This chapter focuses on two unlikely sources of legal innovation to expand the thinking about marriage alternatives: literature and anti-gay law. It explores a world beyond the marriage regime by looking to some unusual sources: fiction and anti-gay law. The chapter also focuses on fictional sources to canvass some unusual visions of what marriage might be. These include exploding marriage, three-strikes marriage, line marriage, renewable marriage, self-marriage, and exculpatory marriage. The chapter describes another unlikely source for imagining countermarriage possibilities for all: anti-gay laws, in the form of state Defense of Marriage Acts. It explores a regulatory universe even further afield from current marriage law. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe novel Elective Affinities entertains different countermarriage regimes that play with the permanence of marriage. The novel implies that it is dangerous to question the commonplace pieties about love, marriage, and permanence.