While we celebrate our spouses this Valentine’s Day, we’re also thinking about the complicated nature of marriage and its place in our cultural landscape. Challenge your views about the meaning of marriage through the fascinating studies below—find books on the unique experiences of interracial marriage, government efforts to promote marriage, the path to gay marriage legalization, and much more. Get each eBook for just $1.99 through the end of February!
Offer good through February 28, 2021, only available through US retailers
Boundaries of Love
Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race
“Despite dramatically distinct histories and ideologies of race and intermarriage, Chinyere Osuji’s in-depth portrayal of the experiences of these couples and their families reveals startling consistencies and differences across the two societies. Boundaries of Love deftly compares how race operates across these two societies and interrogates how national ideologies, race, gender and other social categories together produce particular meanings of race-mixing. This nuanced and pathbreaking study is sure to challenge previous notions of interracial marriage.”—Edward Telles, author of Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America
The Gay Marriage Generation
How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture
“Public opinion typically changes slowly. The transformation in Americans views regarding same-sex marriage is a notable exception—with public opinion dramatically shifting from strong opposition to strong support in a very short period of time. How do we explain this remarkable exception? Marshalling insights from historical data, national surveys, and in-depth interviews, Peter Hart-Brinson skillfully and convincingly documents the powerful role of generations in effecting change. The Gay Marriage Generation is an important and provocative book that will encourage us to reassess our assumptions of how social change occurs.”—Brian Powell, author of Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and American’s Definitions of Family
Modern Families
Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship
“[A] fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family.”—Booklist
“[Gamson] shares their tales with an engaging, gently humorous, and at times poetic style. At the same time, he also teases out the connections between individual family stories and the social systems in which they are immersed.”—Philadelphia Gay News
“In Modern Families, Gamson offers both the personal and the critical perspectives. The stories of the journeys to kinship are beautifully rendered, novelistic page-turners. They are told, though, in context of the overarching social forces and disparities.”—PsychCentral.com
After Marriage Equality
The Future of LGBT Rights
“After Marriage Equality addresses the question of what is next now that marriage is attained. Its contributors, almost all of whom are academics who study social movements, sketch out future priorities for the LGBT movement. They are sensitive to the ways that marriage campaigns created not only new possibilities but also new constraints.”—The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review
“Terrific! Ball’s book is a gift to readers interested in LGBT rights and many critical social and civil rights questions of our time. Its outstanding collection of expert authors advances a well-rounded and well-grounded interdisciplinary framework for thinking about the future.”—Suzanne B. Goldberg, Columbia University
Wedlocked
The Perils of Marriage Equality
“Even if same-sex marriage recognition does not exactly replicate the experiences of post-Civil War African American couples, the history of state-sanctioned African American marriage, by turns exhilarating and crushing, remains an important challenge to the dominant narrative that recognition is a pure good, as well as a reminder that there are always (at least) three parties in every marriage. And yet the romantic conception of marriage continues to peddle the idea that intimate relationships are the most private and personal of decisions made between two people.”—Times Literary Supplement
Unhitched
Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China
“In her new book, Unhitched, Judith Stacey, a sociologist at NYU, surveys a variety of unconventional arrangements, from gay parenthood to polygamy to—in a mesmerizing case study—the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers only under cover of night.”—Kate Bolick, The Atlantic
“Throughout her travels and exhaustive research, Stacey pokes and prods, and eagerly calls into question everything we think we know about love, marriage, and the baby in the baby carriage.”—Publishers Weekly
One Marriage Under God
The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America
“Heath convincingly demonstrates how marriage intensifies racial, cultural, and economic inequality and cultivates a form of individualism that promotes market fundamentalism with religious zeal.”—Sociology of Religion
“Heath’s work is ambitious, addressing multiple populations and connecting several large themes, including religion, gender, sexuality, race, and poverty, into a coherent argument about marriage promotion … The breadth of Heath’s research is remarkable and her insights about marriage promotion astounding.”—Social Forces
When Gay People Get Married
What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage
“When Gay People Get Married devotes considerable time to contemplating whether marriage discrimination against same-sex couples can be equitably rectified by alternative forms of family recognition—something that could satisfy or at least appeal to both conservative and radical opponents of marriage.”—Women’s Review of Books
“Amid the intense controversy still surrounding same-sex marriage in the U.S., Badgett speaks in a refreshingly tempered voice. . . . Its a fine piece of social-science research, painstakingly detailed and compelling in its findings.”—Ms. Magazine
Marriage Proposals
Questioning a Legal Status
“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
