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- Title
Remaking the White Wedding? Same-Sex Wedding Photographs’ Challenge to Symbolic Heteronormativity.
- Authors
Kimport, Katrina
- Abstract
Recent scholarship has identified the modern wedding as a principal site for the construction of heteronormativity. This article examines whether and how the participation of same-sex couples in the wedding ritual can challenge this construction. Photographs from the 2004 San Francisco same-sex weddings were quantitatively content-coded for subjects’ gender presentation and for the extent to which the couple embodied the heteronormative wedding standard of one bride and one groom. I find that all the men in these photographs conformed to gender norms and thus no male couple conformed to the wedding standard. In contrast, approximately one-fifth of the women presented non-normative gender, and more than two-thirds of the formally dressed lesbian couples conformed to the wedding standard of a bride and a groom. In a close reading of four photographs, I argue that these images have the potential to challenge assumptions about normative sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the symbolic when understood in relation to the institution of marriage. Nonetheless, the enactment of weddings depicted in these images may also reify weddings as heteronormative by conforming to expectations about how individuals and couples present themselves when marrying. These findings point to the importance of distinguishing symbolic and enacted heteronormativity.
- Subjects
WEDDINGS; SAME-sex marriage; HETERONORMATIVITY; WEDDING photography; GAY men; LESBIANS
- Publication
Gender & Society, 2012, Vol 26, Issue 6, p874
- ISSN
0891-2432
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/0891243212449902