Suchergebnisse

This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show that people can and do draw on traditional Hindu ideas about love (as the product of attachments formed in former lives), rebirth (attachments persist from one birth to another) and marriage (which is supposed to outlast one lifetime) to legitimize socially disapproved unions, both cross-sex and same-sex. Right-wing Hindu forces today mistakenly argue that the idea of same-sex love and marriage, and indeed of marriage based on love itself, are Western imports. In fact, same-sex marriages were reported from rural areas and small towns long before the Indian LGBT movement took cognizance of the issue. When families accept them, female couples are generally able to stay together but when families violently oppose them, often with the collusion of local police, couples may be forced to separate or driven to suicide, even though law courts have uniformly upheld the right of consenting adults to live together. Modern Hindu teachers and priests are divided on the question of the validity and desirability of same-sex marriage; a doctrinal debate is now developing.

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.

The availability of same-sex weddings poses a number of personal and political dilemmas for couples who decide that they wish to go through a ceremony of recognition or civil partnership. In this article I argue that British couples are acutely aware of the political ramifications of their decisions and I focus attention on the interplay between the personal and political in decisions that couples make on the types of ceremony they want. For example, some couples want very prominent, high profile weddings while others insist that same-sex couples do not need to display their relationships in public ceremonies because this merely emulates heterosexual practices. These issues are explored through qualitative interviews with same-sex couples which collected stories on 54 same-sex ceremonies held in the UK. © SAGE Publications, Inc. 2008.

Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreover, relative to the question of impact, the initial protest sparked other forms of political action that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California. Our results offer powerful evidence that culture can be consequential not only internally, with implications for participant solidarity and identity, but for political change and further action as well. We conclude by discussing the specifics of our case and the broader implications for social movement scholars.

The decision reverses a terrible previous decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Supreme Court's ruling that a website designer cannot be compelled to create websites for same-sex weddings may impact cases regarding states' attempts to regulate social media companies.
The post How the Supreme Court's Decision About Same-Sex Wedding Websites May Affect Social Media Regulations, Part I appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Four aspects of the Supreme Court's ruling in 303 Creative suggest that the ruling will similarly protect online platforms' First Amendment right not to speak in future cases regarding social media.
The post How the Supreme Court's Decision About Same-Sex Wedding Websites May Affect Social Media Regulations, Part II appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

A Boston church burned during "a homosexual marriage" and there were no survivors.

So holds a federal court.

The opening up of civil marriage to same-sex couples in the Netherlands in 2001 and the existing legal recognition of conscientious objections among civil servants had created the legal and political possibility of marriage registrars with conscientious objections against conducting same-sex weddings. Through a critical discourse analysis of selected examples from printed, online and televised media between 2007 and 2014, this article shows how this registrar was constructed as a 'social problem' that stayed on the political agenda for several years, but also as a particular fictive character that reinforced oppositions of Christians vs. homosexuals in terms of discrimination. Moreover, this article argues that, although the issue was framed in terms of certain (primarily secular) rights, the subtext of some contributions also pointed to the importance of (quasi)religious rites in the civil wedding ceremony, in which the civil marriage registrar played a pivotal role.

Critical heterosexuality studies demonstrate the role of the traditional, white wedding in the reproduction of heteronormativity and gender and contribute to a social order that privileges white, middle-class, heterosexual married couples over other relationships. However, social science research points to the ways that same-sex weddings offer a site of resistance to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. We analyze in-depth interviews with women in straight and same-sex marriages. We find that women in straight marriages are more likely to embrace the traditional, white wedding than those in same-sex marriages. Women planning same-sex weddings think deeply about their wedding ceremonies as they relate to heteronormativity. Some participants reject traditional weddings as excessively costly and wasteful. We argue that although weddings are often sites for the celebration of consumerism, traditional gender, and heterosexuality, they can also be sites of resistance that challenge these same social norms.

While activists have the public in mind when engaging in framing activity throughout a long policy struggle, ballot measure campaigns create a context in which the public and policymakers are closely related audiences. Lacking the formal deliberative mechanisms present in other institutional venues, voters as policymakers rely almost entirely on information, framing, and cues from groups involved in direct legislation. California is the only state where voters approved two different measures prohibiting same-sex marriage: Proposition 22 in 2000 and Proposition 8 in 2008. Thus, it offers a useful case study for studying activist groups' messaging and framing in the context of policymaking via ballot measures. This paper relies on campaign materials from Proposition 22 and Proposition 8 to examine whether or not activists learn from and alter their messaging strategies based on prior campaigns and changed legal and political contexts.