Social Rites of Marriage

Abstract

The legal consequences for same-sex couples who have married — and for couples who will do so after the historic Obergefell v. Hodges decision — are numerous and profound. As legal rhetoric and scholarly research on marriage suggest, however, the social dimension of marriage — apart from its concrete legal benefits — is deeply significant. Despite what we understand about the law’s impact on people’s lives and people’s influence on legal institutions, scholars know surprisingly little about the ways in which same-sex couples socially experience legal marriage. This is all the more pressing, since marriage equality is now a reality in all U.S. states.

This analysis, part of an exploratory study that examines the intersection of law and the social domain in the context of same-sex marriage, begins to fill a critical gap in socio-legal literatures on marriage and formal recognition of same-sex relationships. We discuss here early themes emerging in this research, based on qualitative interviews and surveys with married same-sex couples, part of a project that provides one of the first scholarly overviews post-Obergefell of negotiation of gender norms in same-sex marriage in daily life.

Modes of self-presentation (like relationship terms and last name practices), which comprise the focus of this paper, provide a window onto the interplay of legal status, social norms, concepts of tradition, and gender. They also reveal a diverse picture of transitions to formal legal recognition in the context of longstanding, and continued, discrimination against LGBTQ communities. We situate early findings in relation to deeper questions about relationships between marriage, hierarchy, and gender, as well as about intersections of legal and social recognition.

Keywords: Marriage Equality, Social Norms, Same-Sex Marriage, Socio-Legal, Gender, Legal Recognition, Social Recognition