Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today is the last guide in our series and it's with Claire Chambers talking about marriage.

Not the decision to get married but the relationship between the institution and the state. It will make you think about marriage in a whole new way.

Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books which is celebrating its 40th anniversary for the next few months with an unimprovable offer.

Get a year's subscription and a limited edition LRB tote bag for just 40 pounds by using the URL lrb.me forward slash birthday.

Maybe we can start by just talking about how in your mind would you characterize marriage as a political institution? What makes it political?

Well that's a great question because of course if we think about marriage particularly this time of year in the summer we might think about weddings first of all.

You might think about parties and celebrations and dresses and families and all that kind of lovely stuff.

I wouldn't want to criticize those nice aspects of the idea of what a wedding is. We're not here to kill a fan right?

We're not here to kill the fan. We're not here to suggest that you boycott the weddings you've been invited to this summer.

But of course weddings and marriages extend beyond the individual instance in some particular couple's life.

Political institution because it significantly involves the state and it significantly involves relationships of power and equality potentially vulnerability.

So what I'm thinking about the state and one of the key focuses of marriage and the way I think about it is the fact that it's an institution recognized by the state in a very formal sense.

So the state recognition of marriage is really the target of my critique. But then even beyond the state marriage has this very significant social meaning where it reacts to and shapes the relationships between people along sort of lines structured according to gender most significantly but also race and class.

So if you take those two sides of it there are two kind of power dynamics at work here. There's a relationship between the state and the couples whose relationships it sanctions.

And then there is the relation within the couple and with their children as well which is being sanctioned in a particular way.

In the history of marriage as an institution I think for a long time the relationship inside the marriage was where the real inequality seemed to lie.

The most radical inequality in Victorian marriage was a fundamentally unequal institution.

There was at least potentially a case for saying now that a significant amount of the inequality is because the state sanctioned certain relationships and not others.

So you just want to just talk us through that. Where do you see of those two? I mean there are lots of other ways of slicing and dicing this but of those two kinds of potential sites of inequality is it inside or is it in the relation between these kinds of couples and other kinds of relationships?

Well when I first started thinking about marriage from the political perspective I mean I kind of was aware of two critiques in the feminist literature in particular that really mirror what you've just been saying.

So one is the idea that marriage is sexist and that's what you're talking about those kind of inequalities within the marriage.

You can most clearly see as you point out in historical incarnations of the institution.

...