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- Title
MAKING HETERONORMATIVE RECONCILIATIONS: The Story of Romantic Love, Sexuality, and Gender in Mixed-Orientation Marriages.
- Authors
WOLKOMIR, MICHELLE
- Abstract
As a central organizing institution in society, marriage presents an idealized package for sociosexual relations that reproduces and intertwines gender power dynamics and heterosexual desire. This package is sustained, in part, by the ideology of romantic love—a set of beliefs that constructs only a particular configuration of sexual and gender practices as natural, normal, and right. Drawing on interviews with 45 people, this study examines how people negotiate marital relationships that do not fit into this normative configuration— mixed-orientation (e.g., straight and gay) marriages. Participants' resolutions to these situations, whether they divorced or created asexual or sexual nonmonogamous marriages, were heavily shaped by their belief in the ideology of romantic love, illustrating how heteronormative relations can be held in place by normalizing ideologies.
- Subjects
MARITAL relations; MIXED orientation marriage; HETERONORMATIVITY; SEXUAL orientation; MARRIED people; GENDER studies; HUMAN sexuality
- Publication
Gender & Society, 2009, Vol 23, Issue 4, p494
- ISSN
0891-2432
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/0891243209340033