Johanna, 24, is currently studying to become a teacher at a large university in southern Germany. Recently, she says, a fellow student in the seminar wanted to know from the others how they imagined an ideal family. She described her own ideal as follows: Two partners who are fluid in their sexual orientation live together with children of different skin colors and different producers in a harmonious and at the same time exciting way. There should also be a wedding, preferably performed by a lesbian pastor. Fellow student Johannas describes herself as "queer".
Rainer Hank
Freelance writer in the business of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The ideal of a family outlined in this way was acknowledged by the other seminar participants without contradiction. Only Johanna dared to timidly ask whether the conventional family, i.e. the one with "father, mother, child", would still have a future in the future. The others quickly agreed that this design of the family was hopelessly outdated, even reactionary – discussion pointless.
Even the seminar leader did not dare to intervene in a differentiated way. It was not conclusively clear whether she remained silent because she agreed or – more likely, according to Johanna's impression – did not dare to contradict in order not to be considered outdated or even LGBTQ-discriminatory.
Radical positions, moderate reality
Even more radical than this student is the position of the Frenchwoman Emilia Roig, also "queer" by her own admission, for whom all marriage represents a "normed relationship" that controls sexuality, possessions and labor, serves as a pillar of capitalism and cements binary gender roles.
Roig fights against the "supremacy of couples" and wants to abolish marriage altogether, which in her opinion would be liberating not only for women, but for all people. "Because only then can we rethink and live love in freedom at eye level with each other" – this is how the trailer for her new book, which has been high on the rankings for weeks, reads. "If you want to abolish inequality and oppression of women, you shouldn't get married," Roig demands. It manages to combine radical feminism with radical anti-capitalism.
Both positions, that of the fellow students in the teacher training seminar and that of Emilia Roig, are not only radical, but (at least currently) still in the minority, even if their advocates do not want to admit this because they live in closed worlds. Of course, both positions differ in that the students attach importance to the ritual of the wedding (including the lesbian pastor) and call it that, while Emilia Roig releases wedding rituals themselves as a mechanism of oppression for ostracism.
Empirically, it seems to me that the students are closer to reality. In any case, the visual appearance and statistics speak for themselves. On the first weekend in May we were in a large estate hotel in Münsterland. There you could experience weddings of the conventional kind en suite: one on Friday, even three on Saturday. The bride in white, the guests festively dressed, the buffet at its finest, the full program.