ABSTRACT
The reason that marriage still constitutes gender difference is that the political statuses "husband" and "wife" are not as identical as they appear. Marriage constitutes men's control over women's labor when it gives "husbands" custody rights that biological fathers per se lack. When married to a woman, a man is always the legal father of children he conceives with her, and often the presumptive father of any child she bears. This form suggests that mothers are just there, by nature, and it is the legal convention of marriage that constitutes fathers. It is the prerogative of the state to distinguish, and hence to constitute, the difference between what is profane children as "illegitimate" and what is sacred. When a political society takes charge of maternity, it performs associations between the maternal and the natural, not because kinship systems are necessary, but rather because they serve certain purposes that seem necessary but on closer inspection are not.
