{"id":1150,"date":"2025-02-17T17:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-02-17T17:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/?p=1150"},"modified":"2025-02-17T17:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-02-17T17:11:07","slug":"reinventing-rites-when-same-sex-couples-say-i-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/2025\/02\/17\/reinventing-rites-when-same-sex-couples-say-i-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Reinventing rites: when same-sex couples say \u2018I do\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK in 2014, how have couples negotiated, adapted or indeed transformed elements of a practice rooted in heteronormative meanings and traditions? In this LGBT+ History Month 2025<\/a> post, Dr Lorna Stevens<\/a> explains her research into wedding rituals. <\/em><\/p>\n

Rituals are formalised social practices laden with extraordinary, sacred meanings. They bring together the personal and the socio-cultural in an affirmation of social cohesiveness and belonging. Weddings are one such case \u2013 important, collective rituals that enable couples to show their commitment to one another.<\/p>\n

They typically involve certain fixed, recognisable elements: a spectacle, certain artefacts (rings, flowers, costumes), an aisle, a particular script that culminates in the exchange of solemn vows, an officiant who presides over the ceremony and, of course, an audience.<\/p>\n

As such, wedding rites are important forms of \u2018display work\u2019 that involve doing certain things in a certain order so that everyone there recognises what the rite is for. Given the deeply embedded assumptions about sex roles and gender, how might same sex-couples adapt or subvert traditional elements in their own wedding ceremonies?<\/p>\n

To answer this question, myself and Dr Elizabeth Mamali interviewed 18 same-sex couples about their experiences<\/a>. We asked them about their own special day, their motivation for having a marriage ceremony, which traditional elements they retained \u00a0and how they ensured that their guests recognised that this was a profound wedding rite \u2013 albeit different from the heterosexual norm.<\/p>\n

All the couples we interviewed perceived civil partnership as very different to marriage, and not held in the same esteem. There were also quite diverse experiences in relation to family acceptance, with many having had difficult experiences of coming out and even some being estranged from family. Having a wedding ceremony was thus an important ritual to signal to others that their union and commitment to one another was as important as that between a heterosexual couple.<\/p>\n

In our research, we identified four tactics of what we term \u2018reflexive display\u2019 engaged in by same-sex couples.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Strategic compliance<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This describes the use of traditional symbols and re-enactment of ritual scripts as significant means of legitimisation. For example, some of our participants \u2013 who were a male couple \u2013 decided to walk down the aisle in what was in every other respect an informal wedding ceremony:<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em><\/strong>What we really didn\u2019t want to do is have it too \u2018wedding-y\u2019. A lot of things associated to a wedding is what women do\u2026 [but] what we were really conscious of is people going, \u2018Why do they have their friends marrying them? They didn't walk down an aisle. Are they married? What is this? This wasn\u2019t very wedding-y.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Playful appropriation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This approach is where partners materially engage with \u2013 or at least make reference to \u2013 established and recognised rituals. This type of display work was especially prominent amongst female couples in our sample, who sought to appropriate certain gender norms in the lead up to their wedding.<\/p>\n

One couple, for instance, described their decision to have a \u2018stag do\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing was humour, it was basically funny, ironic. Because it was so not what we\u2019re about, so it was a very deliberate pastiche of a very male tradition.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Annexation tactics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

These can demonstrate how important ritual artefacts are for display work. One of our interviewees had been cut off from his deeply religious African-American relatives for more than a decade, and none of his relatives attended the wedding. In their absence, he and his husband memorialised his kin connections during the ceremony, by engaging in the \u2018jumping the broom<\/a>\u2019 ritual:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe same broom has been in my family for years, from my great grandmother to my mother, everybody jumped the same broom. But I was not going to be allowed to use that broom\u2026 So we got our own broom. We decorated it ourselves, we made it look real nice and did our own thing. We gave a card to everybody before the ceremony to explain what it was and why we were doing it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Conspicuous absence<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For some, a rejection of recognisable material elements in a wedding ritual was important. In contrast to those engaging in strategic compliance, some of our participants \u2013 particularly female couples \u2013 didn\u2019t want to engage in walking down the aisle:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my cousins\u2019 daughters, it was her first ever wedding, so when the family received the wedding invitation\u2026 and my mum\u2019s comment was, \u2018Oh well, she\u2019ll be disappointed because she expects the walking down the aisle bit.\u2019 We said, \u2018Really? If this is her first wedding maybe we can deconstruct the stereotypes a bit about what marriage is.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Together, these four display work positions show how the wedding rite can be done, undone or redone. Our study shows how same-sex partners negotiate identity, commitment and validation through their ceremony. Undoing and redoing normative traditions are equally powerful in this context.<\/p>\n

Lastly, we show how different forms of display work can inform and indeed transform the wedding rite itself. The wedding rituals of our participants are the same but different, recognisable but transformed into something new, unique and significant for the couple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK in 2014, how have couples negotiated, adapted or indeed transformed elements of a practice rooted in heteronormative meanings and traditions? In this LGBT+ History Month 2025 post, Dr Lorna Stevens explains...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1377,"featured_media":1151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[103,152,66],"tags":[18,17,16,231,356,306],"class_list":["post-1150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversity","category-equality","category-research","tag-equality","tag-gender","tag-gender-equality","tag-lgbt","tag-lgbt-history-month","tag-lgbtq"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/133\/2025\/02\/pexels-mikhail-nilov-8244891.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4Pj1-iy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1377"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}