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IntroductionTwo recent romantic comedies—Friends with Benefits and Friends with Kids—seek to re-situate the cultural logics of marriage by representing that supposed impossibility: the friendship between people of different sexes. These friendships are chosen as the site for particular kinds of intimacy—sex, in one case, and parenting in another—through a rejection or disenchantment with the limitations of heteronormative approaches to relationships. This initial, but of course not final, rejection of the investment in romance is obviously not entirely unheard of in the genre of romantic comedies—indeed, ambivalence about or even rejection of romance is central to many a romcom plotline, especially on the part of men. But the shift marked by these two films lies in the explicit and thorough problematisation of the optimistic investment in the marriage-like relationship (if not marriage itself), with the couples in both films proposing that the problem lies in expecting the marriage-like relationship to live up to the expectation that it will fulfil all of their needs. Heteronormativity is a term used to capture the ways in which heterosexuality is produced as normal, natural and normative (Warner), the “straight” line, the supposed “life line,” with which everyone is expected to align (Ahmed 19-21). It is a truism to say that romantic comedies both display and reinforce heteronormativity, but as a result of their representations of it, they can also model and give voice to the anxieties, uncertainties and renegotiations that are being staged with this supposedly timeless institution. Both films, then, offer a critique not simply of heteronormativity itself, but also a critique of what Lauren Berlant names “cruel optimism.” The alignment with heteronormativity that Ahmed describes is shaped by the recognition of normative, romantic, marriage-like heterosexual relationships as “good objects,” essential to a properly “good” life. But as Berlant demonstrates, this recognition is an attachment, and one which is sincerely and overly hopeful, as this object is unable to fulfil all of these hopes. This is “cruel optimism:” a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments... is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. (21) In other words, there are numerous aspects of life that we believe are “good,” and enhance our lives and happiness, promising futures that we consider promising. But this commitment—attachment—to believing them to be key to the good life means that we miss, more and less consciously, the fact that they are frequently not giving, and perhaps not capable of giving, us happiness. We remain optimistic, but this optimism is cruel, because even when we arrange our lives around these “goods” and what they promise, they will almost disappoint us, wearing us out, threatening our well-being and undermining our relationships. But we remain committed to them because this has come to be what we understand life to be, and these “goods” remain core to our capacity to be future-oriented. The protagonists in Friends with Kids and Friends with Benefits critique the optimism involved in being attached to marriage-like relationships, namely, the hope that they will fulfil most or all of the needs for romance, sex, intimacy, parenting and so on. As a result, they participate in the kind of creative relationship-formation that Foucault identified as the value of friendship. Thus, this critique is thorough-going, articulate and lived, especially in the dialogue-focussed Friends with Kids, and the friendships—and what they enable—are depicted in both films as transgressive and significant. The turn back towards normativity at the close of both films, then, brings with it a peculiar significance, especially for the relationship between cruel optimism and heteronormativity. Let’s Be Friends: Friendship as the Recognition of Cruel Optimism Friends with Benefits and Friends with Kids are two recent movies that, at least to begin with, explore contemporary challenges to the heteronormative monogamous coupledom formula. In both movies, a man and a woman who are already very close friends make the (apparently, according to the films, very unusual) choice to share a part of their life they usually reserve for their (potential) love-relationships: in Friends with Benefits, Jamie and Dylan begin having sex together, and in Friends with Kids, Jules and Jason have a baby together. These decisions are both made because the arrangement enables the individuals to fulfil a desire that is conventionally associated with a love-relationship, while also pursuing their love-relationships separately, enabling the fulfilment of a range of needs. This decision is a form of resistance to heteronormative requirements of love-relationships, situating intimate, different-sex friendship as a site of potential resistance in a similar way to Foucault’s description of the potentials of homosexuality: “Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities... because the “slantwise” position of the [homosexual], as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light” (206). That is, as a result of these apparent transgressions of the usual line between friendship and relationship, both films lay out, though also undermine, some interesting critiques of heteronormative dating and married life. Throughout Friends with Benefits, Jamie and Dylan explicitly refer to, and reject, the heteronormative fantasies depicted in porn and (more often) in romantic comedies. This playful self-reflexivity has been characteristic of romantic comedies over the past few decades, so that this generic referentiality in fact becomes part of the signalling that despite the title, the film falls firmly within the genre. Indeed, the occasion of the “deal” developed by Jamie and Dylan follows the shared viewing of a made-up romantic comedy, in an echo of a number of earlier romantic comedies which also use the watching of a romantic films to situate themselves generically (McDonald 94). This kind of self-reflexivity goes beyond generic self-referentiality, however, and demonstrates both an awareness of, and engagement with, entertainment-consumption as “public pedagogy” (Giroux). Their conversation following the film critiques the role that entertainment-consumption plays, first, in the constitution of heteronormativity in its broadest sense—that is, including complementary and distinct gender roles, models for romance, models for proper heterosex, and the goal-defined temporality of dating leading to commitment—and second, in the cruel optimism involved in becoming attached to heteronormativity. In an articulation of self-aware and self-reflexively critical cruel optimism, Jamie says “God, I wish my life was a movie sometimes. You know, I'd never have to worry about my hair, or having to go to the bathroom. And then when I'm at my lowest point, some guy would chase me down the street, pour his heart out and we'd kiss. Happily ever after.” Dylan rolls his eyes over her sentimentality and suggests that women’s problematic tendency to imagine their own lives and desires through these filmic fantasies is part of what complicates sex. He suggests, that is, that women’s cruel optimism with regard to relationships unnecessarily complicates the shared fulfilment of sexual needs, because they perpetually laden such encounters with impossible hopes. This is reasonably well-trod ground for romantic comedies, with He’s Just Not That Into You, for example, both sustaining and critiquing women’s cruel optimism surrounding relationships. But uncharacteristically, Jamie challenges the implication that only women are gullible enough to form their fantasies through film, arguing that the pedagogical significance of romantic comedies for women is matched by men’s sexual education through watching porn, and their resultant inability and unwillingness to fulfil women’s hopes, not only in terms of romance, but also in terms of fulfilling sex. She suggests that the disjunction in men’s and women’s investments in heterosexual sex result from different attachments to different objects—easy, fulfilling, exciting sex in which women’s pleasure inevitably follows from men pursuing theirs, as apparently depicted in porn, and romantic, intimate, fulfilling and relationship-oriented sex, as depicted in romantic films. This shared critique becomes the grounds on which Dylan and Jamie decide to reject these norms and add the “benefits” of sex to their friendship because they don’t “like [each other] like that,” and so are able to perform the “physical act [of sex]… like a game of tennis.” Instead of retaining their attachment to the “happy objects” of the romantic relationship that will fulfil them sexually, they seek to meet their “needs” for sex while avoiding “complications… emotions… and guilt” that they associate with sex within love-relationships as a result of mismatched expectations. This critique is extended into their initial sex scene, which explicitly challenges the heteronormative Hollywood depiction of “normal” heterosexual penis-in-vagina sex which is supposed to come naturally to both parties, through the man’s activity, while the woman generally remains passive. It also challenges the generic conventions of mainstream porn, which depict men as in control, and women as extremely easily orgasmic. This depiction, then, becomes a funny and self-aware pedagogical moment which draws attention to the space that can be found in giving up the object of heteronormativity. The first lies in the challenge to heteronormative gender roles. Jamie refuses normative femininity, telling Dylan, “Since we’re just friends, I don’t need to be insecure about my body.” She also refuses the normative characterisation of women’s sexuality as passive and receptive, listing her likes and dislikes in the expectation that they will be respected: “My nipples are sensitive, I don’t like dirty talk, and if I’d known this was going to happen, I would have shaved my legs this morning.” Dylan echoes her rejection of normative gender roles, refusing hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt), especially in its claim to physical control, when he responds with “My chin is ticklish, I sneeze sometimes after I come, and if I’d have known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have shaved my legs this morning.” Their friendship, then, allows them greater explicitness in their requests, refusals, demands and negotiations in the encounter, and in their appreciation and rejection of various sensations, body parts and behaviours (well beyond PIV sex) than they are permitted in the heteronormative sex they have with potential love-interests. This level of honesty and sexual agency, especially from Jamie but also from Dylan, counters heteronormative depictions of sex, and instead presents sex as an explicit negotiation. It also reveals the extent to which heteronormative dating rituals, depicted throughout the movie, frequently undermine rather than enhance communication because sex is situated as “coming naturally,” resulting in sex which is inherently compromising for all those involved, whatever their investments in the encounter. The critique of cruel optimism is well-developed and articulate in Friends with Kids, primarily because it is dialogue-heavy, and depicts some of the complex realities of parenting and relationships. The main characters, Jules and Jason, do not explicitly reject fantasies about heteronormative parenting, relationship and lifestyles, as Jamie and Dylan do. Indeed, such fantasies are implicitly recognised as unachieveable, but their focus is on avoiding the compulsory drudgery that seems to be associated with having children. They recognise the cruel optimism that leads people into conventional familial and parenting lives because their friends, the two couples of Missy and Ben, and Leslie and Alex, are already living evidence (for them, at least) of an attachment that undermines their well-being, in Berlant’s terms. Missy and Ben have a passionate history, but their relationship breaks down over the course of the film, supposedly under the pressures of “real life” (that is, life with kids). Leslie and Alex have two children, and are deeply in love, emotionally and physically exhausted, and argue very frequently. It is the difficult lives these couples live that shapes the protagonists’ decision to have a child together without being in a relationship with one another: Jason: Why don’t we just do it?… We love each other, we trust each other, we’re responsible, gainfully employed and totally not attracted to each other physically.Jules: Yeah, that’d be perfect. Beat the system.Jason: Right. We have the kid, share all the responsibility and just skip over the whole marriage and divorce nightmare. The challenge to the “happy object” of heteronormative family life is extremely explicit. When Jules and Jason announce their plan to Leslie and Alex, they refer to their friends’ situations as “tragic”, a “trap” and as ‘kill[ing] the romance.” And indeed, for at least a large portion of the movie, this pragmatic assessment and their solution to it does seem to provide them both with happiness: they both have romance with other people, while raising a child together. Leslie and Alex, however, provide a counterpoint to the challenge to cruel optimism that Jules and Jason embody. They are sympathetically depicted, with real warmth and honesty towards each other, even in the presence of their flaws, and this, as I will shortly show, becomes a way that the film holds open the possibility of the optimistic attachment to heteronormative relationship styles. But Leslie’s response to Jules and Jason’s plan to co-parent while not in a relationship together displays some of the characteristics of cruel optimism, as Berlant describes them. Alex understands Jules’s and Jason’s plan, summarising “you want to have a kid, but without all the shit that comes with marriage,” but Leslie is insulted. She argues that Jules’s and Jason’s plan is “an affront to us… to all normal people who struggle and make sacrifices and make commitments to make a relationship work, yes, it’s insulting! To us specifically and us in general… You don’t think it’s insulting to our way of life?” This appeal to a “way of life,” as a justification for struggling and making sacrifices reveals this way of life as a “continuity of the form of [attachment, which] provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world,” as Berlant puts it. Alex responds that “We don’t exactly have a way of life, babe… it’s a brave new world!” This exchange goes to the heart of the film’s later resolution of the question of cruel optimism. It leaves open the question, resolved by Jules and Jason, about whether the heteronormative marriage and parenting style is, in fact, a normative “way of life,” an object deemed “good,” which one makes sacrifices to remain attached to or aligned with; or whether heteronormativity is the simple product of romantic feeling, a “reality” denied by Jules’s and Jason’s supposed reliance on reason and pragmatics, at least until the climax of the film. Transgression to Normativity: Romantic Feeling as Real, not Optimistic In both films, despite these robust declarations of the awareness of the traps of “cruel optimism” as attached to heteronormative love relationships, the climax is true “rom-com,” with the unusual friendships inevitably becoming love-relationships. The apparent impossibility of arranging one’s life around what Foucault identifies as a “multiplicity of relationships” (204) beyond conventional institutions becomes clear in a number of key scenes. This impossibility arises because of the recalcitrance of romantic feeling, which is situated as challenging the “sensible” and apparently overly pragmatic solutions developed by the protagonists in response to their particular situations. Despite romantic feeling being situated as problematically encouraging people to attach to normative relationship forms that continually disappoint and require compromise, both films return to romantic feeling to suggest that if you love someone else enough, that feeling will ensure that the relationship never becomes a threat to well-being; it, in other words, is the sufficient grounds for an optimism that is not cruel. Disappointment, as manifested in the worn-down Missy and Ben in Friends with Kids, and in Jamie’s hapless romance with the apparently perfect but actually manipulative and self-absorbed Parker, becomes synonymous with an optimistic misrecognition of lust for love: cruel optimism resituated as the result of personal error rather than the inadequacy of the “good object” of heteronormative marriage relationships. In other words, romantic feeling (which these same films have robustly critiqued for its role in ensuring people accept normative relationship formations which threaten their well-being, rather than working towards alternatives that suit their needs), becomes the ground for the protagonists doing precisely that. In Friends with Benefits, it is Jamie’s unconventional mother, who has herself rejected normative relationship styles, who reminds Jamie of her attachment to the “happy object” of a conventional relationship, and warns her that her friendship with Dylan might prevent her from finding her fantasied love-relationship. This motherly advice, then, functions to remind Jamie of her original optimistic attachment, and situate her current friendship—for all of her enjoyment of it—as problematic. Dylan’s sister is instead amused that Dylan’s pragmatic commitment to his friends-with-benefits arrangement with Jamie blocks his recognition that he is already in a love-relationship, brought about by his feelings for Jamie. In Friends with Kids, it is Jules’s jealousy, a hallmark of conventional monogamous coupledom, of Jason’s current love interest that becomes her “clue” that she is already in love with Jason. Jason, of course, fulfilling the heteronormative stereotype of the emotionally insensitive man, hurts her repeatedly until he, too, waiting at a red traffic light that turns green, realises that he is in love with Jules and does a U-turn. In both films, the achievement of coupledom out of friendship is treated as a successful reconfiguration of heteronormative love-relationships, beyond normativity, and certainly beyond the dangers of a cruel optimism. Heteronormative love-relationships become no longer the problem. The problem is, instead, the protagonists’ fantasies about them, their desires for more and other styles of relationships, and, most of all, the privileging of creative, pragmatic reason over the inevitable reality of their romantic feelings. In Friends with Benefits, Jamie is told that she must give up her attachment to the white-knight fantasy, and instead discover the reality of being in love with her best friend. Dylan goes down on one knee, reconfiguring the proposal scene, playing on but reconfiguring the “happy object” to which Jamie is attached, and asks “Will you be my best friend again?” following this up with “Look, I can live without ever having sex with you again… It’d be really hard. I want my best friend back because I’m in love with her.” This implies that the cruel optimism involved in the attachment to heteronormative love-relationships, which the two have critiqued together, lies solely in their fantasies about them, and not in the structure of their relationship. This is apparently the case even though the final scene involves Jamie sacrificing, apparently happily, the dream of the horse-and-carriage romantic date as depicted in the end of the made-up film watched at the beginning of their “deal.” In Friends with Kids, Jules follows her emotional reaction to Jason’s romantic life to discover her romantic feelings for him, and from this, despite their creative rethinking of relationships and friendships earlier in the film, concludes that she must be seeking a conventional, heteronormative love-relationship with him. Jason has to overcome his nightmarish fantasies about nuclear familial life and his associated aversion to conventional love-relationships in order to recognise how profoundly he loves Jules. Again, the film implies that this feeling inevitably leads to a life that is surprisingly conventional. This conventionality is even attached to heterosexual sexual intimacy, the supposed “missing piece” which distinguished their friendship from a romantic relationship. They have avoided sex together throughout their lives except for the single occasion required to conceive their son Joel, as is made clear in the final words of the film: Please, please, just let me fuck the shit out of you right now. And if you're not convinced afterwards that I am into you in every possible way a person can be into another person, then I promise I will never try to kiss you, or fuck you, or impregnate you ever again, as long as I live. It also, as with Friends with Benefits, demonstrates the apparently authentic inhabitation of heteronormative relationships through the on-the-fly allusion to marriage vows (Dylan’s going down on one knee, Jason’s “as long as I live”) in a “new” context. In both cases, then, the transgressive and creative restructuring of their intimate lives becomes a step on a teleological journey towards heteronormativity, one which situates the protagonists as uniquely able to choose, with apparent freedom from both the seemingly coercive pedagogy of both entertainment and real life, and from the cruel optimism so frequently associated with it, the “happy object” of heteronormativity. Through their counternormative creativity, then, heteronormativity is given a new lease of life, apparently the natural and inevitable outcome of love. Conclusion This exploration of the recent films Friends with Kids and Friends with Benefits has elaborated the recent turn towards depicting “unconventional” relationship and friendship styles in romantic comedies. Both films provide a critique of the cruel optimism associated with heteronormative love relationships, especially in their institutionalised form. They go beyond earlier more cynical romantic comedies such as Annie Hall, however, in that the protagonists do not merely recognise the inadequacies, compromises, sacrifices and dissatisfaction produced by going along with the fantasised “good object” of conventional marriage. Instead, as if following Foucault, they get creative with their relationship styles, reallocating certain forms of relating and sharing conventionally associated solely with the romantic relationship—sex and parenting—to their friendships. In both cases, however, the creative mode of relating becomes a temporary matter. Whilst this could have been an Annie Hall-style challenge to the ideal of stability in relationships of all kinds, and a rethinking of the problematic equation which sees relationship worth in its longevity, it instead becomes an occasion to recuperate the cruel optimism associated with heteronormativity. The rejection of “cruel optimism” is finally depicted in both films as an overly pragmatic denial of feeling, and the “threats to well-being” which have been recognised in the critique of heteronormativity are re-situated as erroneous fantasy-nightmares: apparently the marriage-like relationship is not necessarily a threat to well-being, if you choose the right partner; and on the other hand, if you are too busy creatively fulfilling your needs, you might miss the right partner—a cruel cynicism of attachment to non-normativity, perhaps. In this way, the attachment to the critique becomes situated, in the denouement of both films—namely each man recognising that they do love the woman—as the site of “cruel optimism.” For both couples, it turns out that the transgressive deployment of friendship becomes inadequate for the fulfilment of their needs apparently because of their feelings for each other, though it is never entirely clear how this stands in the way. This reproduction of the “happy object” of a marriage-style relationship, then, is primarily situated as allowing the romantic attachment to simply be whatever it “really” is. Echoing throughout these films is a recurrent theme: the claim is that participating in conventional heteronormative arrangement of love-relationships and friendships because it is dominant could, indeed, be problematic in the way that Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism clarifies. As a pedagogical form, explicitly and self-reflexively noted by Jamie and Dylan, then, this storyline “test-drives” non-normativity only to discover heteronormativity at the heart of romantic feeling. Monogamy, heteronormativity, and profoundly normative modes of relating, here, are situated not as conformity, but as both the natural outcome of a man and a woman falling in love and a choice made from a place of knowing non-normativity and its apparent inability to fulfil desires. It thus becomes possible to choose heteronormativity because it works as an expression of the truth of romantic feeling; indeed, the implication becomes that heterornormativity is not the “good object” we are, in more and less forcible ways, aligned with and required to be attached to, but the coincidentally frequent outcome of choosing romantic feeling over other needs. The critique of cruel optimism and the depiction of non-normative styles of relating thus becomes an occasion for the reconstitution of a supposed “true” optimism, guaranteed by, in rom-com terms, finding “the one.” References Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. MG, 1997. Berlant, Lauren.“Cruel Optimism.” Differences 17.3 (2006): 20–36. Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19.6 (2005): 829–59. Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84, Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. 204–07. Friends with Benefits. Dir. Will Gluck, Will. Screen Gems, 2011. Friends with Kids. Dir. Jennifer Westfeldt. Roadside Attractions, 2012. Giroux, Henry. “Breaking into the Movies: Pedagogy and the Politics of Film.” JAC Online: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture & Politics 21.3 (2001): 583–98. —. “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: Making the Political More Pedagogical.” Policy Futures in Education 2.3 (2004): 494–503. He’s Just Not That Into You. Dir. Ken Kwapis. Newline Cinema, 2009. McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. New York: Colombia UP, 2007. Warner, Michael. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17.

Will neuroscience revolutionize forensic practice and our legal institutions? In the debate about the legal implications of brain research, free will and the neural bases of antisocial or criminal behavior are of central importance. By analyzing frequently quoted examples for the unconscious determinants of behavior and antisocial personality changes caused by brain lesions in a wider psychological and social context, the paper argues for a cautious middle position: Evidence for an impending normative "neuro-revolution" is scarce and neuroscience may instead gradually improve legal practice in the long run, particularly where normative questions directly pertain to brain-related questions. In the conclusion the paper raises concerns that applying neuroscience methods about an individual's responsibility or dangerousness is premature at the present time and carries serious individual and societal risks. Putting findings from brain research in wider contexts renders them empirically investigable in a way that does not neglect psychological and social aspects of human mind and behavior. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neuroscience, broadly speaking the endeavor of understanding nerve system functioning and its relation to perception, feeling, thinking, and behavior, is one of the leading fields in contemporary research. However, in order to determine the legal implications of neuroscience it is necessary in the first place to reflect on what it means to carry out an experiment with human subjects, particularly to transfer a finding from a laboratory setting to the real life world of people. This reflection will be done in the first part of this article. In its second part, this article explains basic methodological and experimental issues of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) research, particularly the nature of the data that are generated with this technique which is considered the most important to investigate human brain function nowadays. The concluding section relates these issues to legally salient questions of neuroscience research.

Introduction Marriage constitutes a surprisingly dense site in contemporary cultural logics. The fantasies about romance, commitment and relationships, proliferating across a range of media contexts (see Cadwallader and Heise in this issue), often obscure the way that marriage is used politically to discipline and administrate the population. Indeed, as Baird maps (this volume), the movement for same-sex marriage in Australia has turned from the analysis of marriage as a means for distributing material rights and responsibilities, toward the focus on feelings, commitment and love, perhaps best encapsulated in GetUp!’s video depiction of an unfolding relationship toward its fulfilment in marriage, as discussed by Richardson-Self (this volume). This turn towards the “beauty” of love often situates critiques of marriage as killing others’ joy. As Sara Ahmed has pointed out, however, killjoys remain important in challenging injustice, and this editorial seeks to do precisely that. This editorial, then, seeks to offer a Foucauldian framework for understanding the contemporary significance of marriage, primarily within Australia, but with resonances for other contexts. In it, we explore the way that marriage continues to be used as a means of administering populations, enhancing some forms of life—through easy access to material rights—and denying, obscuring and making so difficult as to destroy other forms of life. The first section lays out Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, emphasising the role of marriage within it. The second section seeks to examine particular kinds of life—that is, particular kinds of people—which are denied access to marriage, drawing out the significance of this denial for the possibilities of ordinary life. The third section builds on this, demonstrating that a wide variety of relationship forms that people currently live in, and which are key for sustaining the life of individuals, relationships, communities and even the state, are also routinely denied access to the material goods which are strictly limited to marriage. In this way, we seek to demonstrate not only that marriage is used as a key means of inequitably distributing material rights, but that it plays a role in carving away those forms of life that the state deems to be extraneous, problematic, morbid, deathly. Marital Life: Biopower’s Stake in Marriage Foucault (Society) sought to demonstrate the political shifts that occurred around the early 1800s which asserted power over life itself. Biopower—the power over life—was enabled through two intertwined functions. The first, which he called biopolitical, focused on the administration of the life of the population, seeking to strengthen and enhance it through techniques as wide-ranging as labour laws, public hygiene, and the regulation of heredity. The second, called anatomopolitical, focused on the disciplining of individuals, primarily through knowledges and institutions from medicine and psychiatry to principles of taxation. This discipline was peculiarly effective partly because it deployed the notion of power as oppressing natural desires to produce those desires as the individual’s own, and liberation as the expression of those desires (Society 249-256). As Foucault argued, circulating between these two intertwined elements of biopower was “the norm,” and a proliferation of knowledges and institutions engaging with questions of health and pathology, sexuality and race, and bodies and disability. This enabled what Foucault calls a “caesura” or “fragmentation” of the population into two, in the name of enhancing life. On the one hand was life, the “superrace” (Society 61), those whose lives and well-being must be prioritised and nurtured. On the other hand were the “subrace,” (Society 61), those associated with death, who, according to Foucault, could be subject to “not... simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on” (Society 256). This fragmentation of the population, then, which Foucault names racism (in a slightly misleading way, since he is talking about the structural fragmentation of a population in the way described above, which includes racism but also goes beyond it) enables the creation of techniques of biopower designed to enhance and support life as a general principle, rather than simply at an individual level. Although this logic and language is most familiar from Nazism, Foucault argues that the fragmentation of the population enabled and informed a vast array of technologies for managing life which continue in a variety of contexts by sustaining some lives through the granting of rights and benefits, and undermining other lives through denying those rights and benefits. One of these technologies is marriage. Married couples—and sometimes those in marriage-like same-sex relationships (such as in Australia, see Attorney-General’s Department)—can access the following benefits (depending on country): tax breaks, shared and thus cheaper living costs, cheaper insurance, cheaper or any access to health cover, recognition as “next-of-kin,” simplified immigration processes, cheaper inheritance, protection from investigation in criminal proceedings, enhanced social security, compensation in the case of the wrongful death of a partner and automatic or highly simplified recognition of parent-child relationships. Importantly, these are not benefits arising from the needs of married couples per se (ie they do not compensate for some form of pre-existing disadvantage). Rather, they are rights which smooth the way for those participating in easily-manageable coupledom, and discriminate against those who cannot or will not adhere to its requirements. It is used to administer populations through delimiting personal relationships between people, managing the distribution of social goods, the continuation of the population, and the disciplining of individuals through the creation of normative familial life. In this sense, marriage rights are designed for reproduction in two senses: in the sense of offspring, and in the continuing of normative and normalised individual ways of life, as Rose clearly argues: The government of freedom, here, may be analysed in terms of the deployment of technologies of responsibilization. The home was to be transformed into a purified, cleansed, moralized domestic space. It was to undertake the moral training of its children. It was to domesticate and familiarize the dangerous passions of adults, tearing them away from public vice, the gin palace and the gambling hall, imposing a duty of responsibility to each other, to home, and to children, and a wish to better their own condition. The family, from then on, has a key role in strategies for government through freedom. It links public objectives for the good health and good order of the social body with the desire of individuals for personal health and well-being. A ‘private’ ethic of good health and morality can thus be articulated on to a ‘public’ ethic of social order and public hygiene, yet without destroying the autonomy of the family—indeed, by promising to enhance it (75). The biopolitical management of life, then, had and still has, a peculiar stake in the institution of marriage. This is partly about reproduction, as Rose demonstrates above, but this is not merely about the reproduction of biological offspring through managing who can bear children and where and when. It is also bound to the reproduction of styles of life and culture (see Costa, this volume). In this context, the choice to get married, or even to simply be in a socially approved dyad (depending on the situation), cannot be disjoined from this biopolitical administration. Understanding these privileges as supporting, sustaining and approving only of very select forms of relationship does two things: first, it helps to ground a politics concerned with how these inequalities are sustained, and second, it makes clear what is frequently concealed by the romantic feeling, the fun, the fantasy, the drama and the consumerism—all coded as profoundly individual, and as manifesting the uniqueness of the individual couple—which remain so key to the representations of marriage. As queer critique has shown for a long time, there are far more forms of kinship beyond the legally recognised and socially approved dyad, forms that proliferate both within and outside queer contexts, and these remain unrecognised (Butler; Warner; Foucault Friendship; Beyond Marriage Working Group). It is not simply that these are being jettisoned from the queer imaginary as it is taken over by the nice, clean-cut boys-next-door who help make same-sex marriage palatable (GetUp!; Sams), but that as a result of this abandonment, same-sex marriage has come to be constituted as the ‘last frontier’ to be overcome by queer communities. As a result, the material consequences of exclusion from marriage for the immense variety of queer (and not only queer!) relationships are obscured. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who are precluded from the apparent happiness of marriage (Ahmed 204) because of who they are, or their styles of relating, are usually situated discursively as responsible for their own unhappiness. As Pendleton and Serisier demonstrate in their paper, a key example is the “immiserated queer,” whose rejection of discipline and a normative way of life in their “promiscuous under-world” apparently leads inevitably to unhappiness. As Lauren Berlant puts it, People are schooled to recognize as worthwhile only those desires that take shape within the institutions and narratives that bolster convention and traditions of propriety. They learn, further, to be afraid of the consequences when their desire attaches to too many objects or to objects deemed “bad”: whether they find themselves longing for persons of an illegitimate or merely inconvenient-to- comfort sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, or religion, or marital status (44). This “schooling” is anatamopolitical disciplining, and it encourages individuals to invest in the biopolitical institution of marriage. In this way, the turn towards marriage itself in contemporary same-sex marriage movements, rather than sustaining the critique of the asymmetrical way that biopower sustains some lives and not others, cannot be understood as neutral. Identifying Right As Foucault argues, “racism” is the “biological-type caesura... [that] will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races” (Society 255). What he means by this is because life is identified here as biological, the fragmentation of the population into the subracial and the superracial is usually identified as arising from natural biological difference, one in which the death of the subracial strengthens biological life overall: Racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: ‘The more inferior species died out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.’ The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier; healthier and purer.’ (Society 255) This means that the caesura that identifies those people who should be excluded, for example from accessing marriage, appears (through authorised forms of knowledge like science, and psychiatry and psychology) to fall along the lines of natural differences used to recognise particular identities. The history of knowledge about homosexuality, and the continuing though discredited attempts to find “gay genes” or “gay brains,” reveal that the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from marriage has been parsed through the naturalisation of the superiority of heterosexuality and the deeming of homosexuality as a biological, if “unnatural,” difference. Other differences parsed in this way are, as will be demonstrated in this section, function to preclude racialised others, and people described as trans*, disabled, asexual and intersexed. In many ways, our contemporary negotiations with race and marriage are leftovers from colonialism. In colonial contexts, as Ann Laura Stoler articulates, the regulation of sexual and domestic relationships, especially through the granting and withholding of marriage, enabled racial hierarchies to be produced and sustained. Ensuring the maintenance of the “home traditions” of the colonisers through only permitting certain groups of people access to marriage, usually on the basis of familial heritage, provided techniques for managing a resistant colonised population. This history continues in contemporary Australian neocolonialism. Aboriginal forms of union, which differ from marriage and can involve more than two partners, have been and in many cases continue to be, precluded from recognition and access to social goods like social security (Australian Law Reform Commission). Immigration is one of the most explicit sites of the exclusion of certain people from the population. Even partnership visas require the announcement of “Arab background,” and the evidencing of “exclusivity” in relationships. The reaction against polygamy in Australia is thoroughly shaped by racialised discourse, often Islamophobic, and invisibilising Aboriginal kinship arrangements: Everyone should be on notice that the law in Australia is that marriage is between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others… It's based on the culture of our community and polygamous relationships are entirely inconsistent with that culture and indeed with the law. (Robert McClelland, cited in “Minister Warns Muslim Polygamists”) Indeed, the anxiety about the Muslim population in Australia is expressed in a range of other ways, but predominantly in relation to marriage and reproduction, demonstrating the role of marriage in the racist regulation of the population. The claim that there is a population crisis created by aging Baby Boomers rarely if ever makes reference to the frequently very low numbers of refugees accepted into Australia (United Nations High Commission for Refugees). The coexistence in Australian politics, and in the person of marriage advocate, MP Kevin Andrews, of calls for an increase in reproduction (Andrews) alongside anxieties about the growth in the Muslim population in Australia (“Growth of Muslim Population a Problem: MP.”), demonstrates the xenophobia and racism often obscured by the use of marriage in regulating who is part of the population. Yet those recognised explicitly as of another race are not the only ones whose place in the population is carefully delimited by this racialised “fragmentation” of the population. Other forms of naturalised difference are regulated in this way. People with disabilities have their participation in relationships, sex, marriage and reproduction limited in a variety of ways. Women with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, are frequently subject to sterilisation (Women with Disabilities Australia). Many people are disabled in accessing contraceptives, sex, and even marriage, demonstrating that full rights rely on able-bodiedness (McRuer; Wilkerson; Shakespeare; Finger). This is also reflected in the continued exclusion of people with disabilities from migration to Australia, even in the context of marriage, enabled by the exclusion of immigration laws from the Disability Discrimination Act (Panichi). Intersexed people diagnosed with a “disorder of sexual development,” often struggle for recognition within the limited terms of “one man and one woman” permitted to marry (Organisation Intersex International Australia Annulment). This is a problem that would not go away with many of the proposed amendments to the marriage act in the name of “marriage equality” (Organisation Intersex International Australia Senate). The introduction of new passport requirements may also create difficulties for intersex people who change their legal designation to “X,” given that this may make it impossible for them to be considered either a “man” or “woman” for purposes of accessing marriage. Trans* people have also been excluded from the institution of marriage, in different ways at different times. Historically, heterosexual trans* folk faced invasive legal questioning in court. Amongst other private matters, how “successful” genital modification surgeries were, through a comparison with cissexual genitals, was considered a legitimate question for the law, demonstrating that the capacity to have heterosexual sex (understood as penis-in-vagina) was an implicit requirement of marriage (Sharpe 92). For some trans* folk, a choice must be made between accessing marriage and altering their legal sex, meaning that some aspect of their lives remains unrecognised. For others, the capacity to access marriage is dependent upon alteration of legal sex, which in many states requires sterilisation (ABC), once again demonstrating the biopolitical assignment of “subracial” status to trans* people. Passport policies were changed recently to make alteration of legal sex easier for trans* people, but this is limited to those who can provide a letter from a doctor “certifying that you have had, or are receiving, appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition to a new gender” (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). For those trans* folks who do not adhere either to the medical narrative of transgender transition (from one sex to another), or whose identity is not simply “male” or “female,” these laws remain exclusionary (Spade). Asexuality as an identity category helps to elucidate some of what might be at stake in the insistence not only that marriage be about heterosexual reproduction, but about sexual relationships at all. Asexual people self-define in a range of ways, but most common is the thread that they are not sexually attracted to people, though they may be drawn to them in other ways. This challenges to common sense about how people and relationships work also demonstrate that the requirement that one be in a sexual, romantic relationship in order to access the benefits attached to marriage may be impossible or even violating for some people. It draws attention to the affective and sexual expectations that marriage as a category, and the hierarchy of relationships it grounds, and the role that these play in maintaining biopolitical norms (Scherrer). Relating Right As the example of asexuality makes particularly clear, the exclusions of certain people from accessing the institution of marriage can occur also through the exclusions of particular ways of relating: identities and forms of relating intersect in significant ways, especially according to the knowledge of biopower. These various forms of relating can be difficult to recognise because they are rarely narrated or legitimated, as Berlant describes above. We would like to explore a range of them to demonstrate the variety of relationships and non-relationships which are deemed to lie outside the realm of the privilege form of union. There are, of course, more ways of relating which are not named here, particularly those associated with non-Western cultures. While our description, then, seeks to undo some of the invisibilising influence of the contemporary public imaginary of marriage, it also replicates it in some ways. Various forms of non-monogamy have proliferated in the West, especially, or perhaps simply more explicitly, over the past 50 or so years. Infidelity is a very common contemporary practice, though accurate statistics are obviously difficult to access. Alterations to the Family Law Act now allow the recognition of both formalised marriages and de facto relationships, especially during break-ups (Hewitt). This means that the party outside the legitimated marriage (the “other woman,” as the figure is heternormatively known) and their children are protected in the event of a break-up. This brings an even more interesting dynamic to the biopolitical administration of relationships, because it favours deceit and the betrayal of the official requirements of marriage over negotiated, agreed and more-or-less formalised non-monogamous relationships. The variety of non-monogamous relationships is expansive (Haritaworn, Lin, and Klesse; Klesse; Albury; Heckert; Barker and Langdridge; Barker). Some fall into the following established categories: There are open relationships where one or both “primary” partners might, depending on arrangements, have romantic dates, make-out sessions, sex and/or on-going relationships with others, sometimes identified as “secondary.” There are polyamorous (many-loving) singles, couples, triads, quads and tribes, where different kinds of significant relationships, including but not only sexual, co-exist. These arrangements can extend to polyfidelitous tribes, where a number of people commit to only having sex within the tribe as a way of enhancing community and safer sex. The non-monogamous relationships described so far issue from a predominantly (though very far from solely) white, Western, middle-class community, often with libertarian, queer and/or anarchist commitments, as Rambukkana observes. These communities rarely connect with or explicitly discuss those forms of non-monogamy which are associated with religious or cultural groups, such as polygamy in some Aboriginal Australian communities, amongst Mormon sects and in some Islamic communities, sometimes because of concerns about sexism, misplaced or otherwise, and sometimes because of an inability to negotiate with their own implicit racism and privilege. People in the relationships described above often appear in institutional terms to either be couples (sometimes married) or single, for two main reasons: first, because other forms of relationship are not recognised, for example, on forms that ask about marital or relationship status; and second, because there are numerous risks associated with coming out as involved in non-monogamous practices including, in some places, possible but uncertain risks to child custody, immigration rights, or housing (Easton and Hardy 43). In this way, the expectation of dyadic relationship formations means that poly and other non-monogamous folk—their numbers, their position in the community, their role in sustaining community or each other—are obscured, and difficult to access. This also makes it difficult to counter the narrative that situates monogamous relationships as the site of happiness. The lack of institutional recognition of those involved in these varying forms of relationships in many ways is what enables them to happen at all, since the conditions placed on that recognition may be terms those involved are not willing to accept, or even to pretend to accept in order to access material benefits—for example, by promising to “exclude all others” from the relationship, or to be together “until death do us part.” (See Fordham, this volume, for a further discussion of the contemporary content of marriage vows). But it also means that many of the material benefits of dyad unions must be given up or unfairly divided amongst partners, and there is little protection offered those involved in these relationships, especially if or when they break down. The biopolitical exclusion of these particular kinds of non-monogamous relationships (unlike the marriage + the other woman cheating model) from these regulatory benefits demonstrates the state’s commitment to very limited notions of union. Intimate friendships, including cohabiting, is often associated with youth, especially university students. Yet as the population ages in Australia, older people are turning toward living together, and supporting each other. Often described with reference to Golden Girls—a TV series from the 80s and 90s, in which four elderly women co-habit—these relationships may often be platonic, and can also be the most significant relationship in a person’s life. The capacity for such elderly close friends to be able to share, for example, health insurance, would help to protect them against the losses they face with the death of spouses (which, given the benefits of marriage, extend far beyond bereavement and into heavily practical, material matters). There has been increasing consideration of the possibilities of remaining single throughout one’s whole life, sometimes associated with the increased demands in neoliberalism that workers be flexible about their location, and sometimes with an array of other freedoms (Klinenberg). Bella DePaulo has written about the unique challenges faced by single people, including the financial difficulties of remaining single for one’s whole life, and the social stigma regularly attached to singledom. Singles are excluded from numerous material benefits associated with marriages: insurance, for example, is often more expensive for single people, while the savings associated with couples and families are passed on to consumers. Conclusion The account of marriage provided here has sought to put the frequent appeals to emotion, romance and the prettiness (or otherwise!) of weddings to one side, to examine the role that marriage plays in the contemporary State. It is a technology of biopower that enables the discriminatory distribution of rights and benefits in ways that sustain only particular kinds of people in particular kinds of relationships, those which function to reproduce a stable population and thus a stable, unified, normalised State. The extraordinary investment in marriage, then, as displayed across various forms of media, and in the “Marriage Equality” movement in Australia, helps to maintain the idea that this institution is primarily about love and romance, and not about the racist fragmentation of the population, and the denial of basic life-supporting rights and benefits to those who do not adhere to a variety of norms. But the variety and number of people, identities, races and relationship styles who are excluded from the benefits attached to marriage, whether through an inability or a lack of desire to marry, also demonstrates the politics of the Australian Marriage Equality movement, for all of its claims to be “working for equal rights for all Australians.” The claim that “marriage is about love and commitment, not about your partner’s gender,” becomes, in this context, a fantasy, one which feeds into the anatamopolitical disciplining of desire, and covers over the biopolitical use of marriage to discriminate against some people, and against some ways of relating. As this editorial demonstrates, and the rest of this issue will go on to explore, love and care and intimacy (see Potts, this volume), which sustain so many lives, including those the state neglects, are not the sole purview of married couples, despite the frequent claims that they are. Thus, giving only some access to the benefits and rights associated with marriage remains a way of supporting some lives, and denying others the rights and benefits that will make their lives liveable. The appearance of marriage as a source and site of love and care and intimacy ought not to obscure the ways that it is used to deny support to particular ways of being in the world with others.AcknowledgmentsWe begin by acknowledging the sovereignty of the Kaurna people and the Eora people, the First Nations people upon whose land we live or have lived, in Adelaide and Sydney respectively. We would like to thank all of our wonderful anonymous reviewers, who cheerfully faced down tight turnarounds to support the development of the papers you read here. 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Recent theoretical developments in the feminist conceptualization of embodiment have radically reworked the ways that the body can be thought. In many respects, this challenges the understanding not only of the body as medicine deploys it, but also our understandings of suffering, illness, and pathology. I argue that (un)expected suffering is a particular difficulty in clinical settings, both in the form of suffering that is expected but not experienced by patients, and in suffering that is experienced but not expected. These theoretical developments offer ways of approaching suffering and vulnerability that could enhance clinical practice. This paper takes up Merleau-Ponty's investigations of bodily being-in-the-world, inflected by feminist adaptations of his work, to argue that these developments can provide an alternative approach to how we understand vulnerability, pathology, and suffering, which enables both a more ethical engagement with the unique experiences of the suffering other, and a politics better able to recognize and thereby negotiate with (un)expected suffering.

Moonwalking with Einstein