Sexualities Reading PDF

Duncan 2016, 1; Engstrom 2012, 1). The dominant form of this key ritual is the white wedding. If you imagine a “typical” wedding, perhaps one you have been to or seen in North American, British, or Australian TV shows or movies, you’re probably picturing a white wedding. This is the kind of lavish m...

Duncan 2016, 1; Engstrom 2012, 1). The dominant form of this key ritual is the white wedding. If you imagine a “typical” wedding, perhaps one you have been to or seen in North American, British, or Australian TV shows or movies, you’re probably picturing a white wedding. This is the kind of lavish marriage ceremony that is associated with romantic love, an elaborate white bridal gown, a structured ceremony involving a procession of the bride and the exchange of vows, gold rings, and a ceremonial kiss, and an extravagant, tiered wedding cake. Typically, it begins with a ritualized engagement proposal featuring a diamond ring and often ends with a luxurious honeymoon involving travel. This is the most celebrated, desired, and normative version of this important cultural event. To say this is normative is to say that this is the version of the wedding that is taken to be the model or standard by which other weddings are judged: “The white wedding has become the standard for the ritual of marriage” (Engstrom 2012, 1). The wedding is so significant as a ritual in North America that an entire season of the year, summer, is often understood as “wedding season” even though there is no coordination among individuals or by official structures (such as a recognized religious or statutory holiday during the summer) to organize this “season.” Rather, what makes summer the season of weddings is a combination of the sheer number of weddings that occur during those months – 65 per cent of weddings in Canada occur in the four months of summer from June to September (Patel 2014) – and the general cultural expectation that weddings occur in summer. Playing off these factors, the news and entertainment website BuzzFeed released a spoof video in the style of a horror movie trailer entitled “Wedding Season is Coming” (Ward et al. 2015). The video depicts a group of young adult friends coming to the frightening realization that wedding season is upon them and, one by one, everyone around them is getting married. Their panic mounts as this unrelenting “epidemic” begins to overtake them, and they are inundated with wedding invitations and expectations. One friend even finds himself seemingly at the whim of an irrepressible force that conspires to get him down on bended knee before his girlfriend, presenting her with a diamond ring that has mysteriously found its way into his hand. Faced with the possibility of a wedding proposal, she runs away, screaming in terror. As he writhes on the grass while screaming “no, no, no, this isn’t mine,” he experiences excruciating flashes of a vision of a wedding cake being cut. While most people are unlikely to experience wedding season with quite such an intense sense of impending doom, the video is effective at satirizing familiar experiences around weddings. A Sociological Approach toward the White Wedding Satire and sociology share a similar orientation to looking at ordinary aspects of social life that we might take for granted and paying unusual attention to them to consider them anew. As American sociologist Peter Berger (1963) describes, “the excitement of sociology” comes from taking a familiar situation or scene and being “brought up against an insight that radically questions everything one had previously assumed about 279 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY this familiar scene” (22). As a result, the “familiar now seems not quite so familiar any more” (Berger 1963, 22). In a comparable way, the satirical video presents common experiences of wedding season and makes them unfamiliar, even frightening. In the video, the many scenes of warm, sunny weather strongly suggest that the oncoming wedding season corresponds to summer – a season of the year that, because of its association with weddings, becomes replete with formal obligations and social expectations. This is the sense of wedding season that we see in etiquette and advice guides that provide tips on how to “survive” months of attending other people’s weddings (e.g., ACCC 2019; Singh 2013). “Wedding Season is Coming” also implicitly casts wedding season as a season of one’s life (as discussed by Rania Tfaily in chapter twelve): It depicts one’s own wedding as an irresistible (perhaps even unstoppable) life event, as if to suggest that, like seasons, having a wedding is an unavoidable, inevitable period through which everyone must eventually pass. In this way, the video can be interpreted to mean that wedding season is both the summer season and a season of life – both being inescapable periods of time. In addition to these two takes on what “wedding season” might mean, a third aspect of the wedding to which the video draws attention is the familiarity of its key elements. We see just the most minimal of features of a formal proposal, bridal outfit, and wedding cake, and yet we can easily recognize each of these and understand that they represent vital aspects of the wedding despite their caricature as unwelcome, sinister intrusions. “Wedding Season is Coming” leaves us with the sociological excitement (or terror) of defamiliarizing conventions, which we often think of as normal, proper, natural, or inevitable for weddings. And this is as far as the satirical video goes. But for Berger, thinking sociologically cannot stop there. The sociologist must recognize and interpret particular, individual circumstances or events in relation to larger social, cultural, and historical conditions in which that particular situation is located. The sociologist needs, further, to engage in a process of “seeing through” the official, ordinary, conventional ways of making sense of the world to recognize that what we might think of as social reality has many layers of meaning, wherein the “discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole” (Berger 1963, 23). Thus, for Berger, there is a “debunking tendency” in sociology (38) – an approach that holds open the possibility that there are other ways to understand social life or social situations that might potentially be uncomfortable or troublesome, especially for the official ways of accounting for social life. This process of seeing through can be used along with the sociological imagination proposed by American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) to gain a fuller sociological perspective. (See also the introduction for discussions of Berger and Mills.) The sociological imagination involves the ability to recognize that individual experiences and larger social processes and historical forces mutually inform and mutually constitute each other. Thus, some problems an individual might experience – those that we can understand as social issues – though they may be extremely intimate and internal, may have their origins not in the personal flaws, actions, or ideas of the individual but rather in the specific conditions of that person’s larger social, cultural, and historical context. 280 SEASONAL SOCIOLOGY At the same time, the social world and historical circumstances can be better understood by recognizing the individuals and the experiences within society of the individuals who comprise a particular social world at a particular moment in time. In this chapter, I apply such a sociological orientation to look at some of the characteristics of the normative white wedding and discuss the larger conditions that help us to make sense of it. In considering the white wedding in this chapter, I pull together and draw upon academic wedding literature and theoretically analyze a variety of popular cultural sources in order to explore and understand the white wedding-industrial complex (a concept I will explain shortly). In addition to “Wedding Season is Coming,” popular sources include newspapers, magazines, and websites as well as movies and TV shows. My site of inquiry is primarily limited to the cultural mainstream of Canada, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Britain: These are Anglo-American societies that generally share histories of and engagements with the white wedding ritual, and they are the nations primarily covered in the wedding literature I have used. Culture and Socialization; Or, How General Ideas Become a Specific Event Learning from Culture How does any marrying couple come to know of, and be able to work through, all of the expectations and decisions required to design and execute such an important and elaborate ritual as the white wedding? While it is largely up to each individual couple (and especially the bride) to create their ritual almost as if from scratch, they are able and encouraged, even compelled, to draw from their culture to help guide this process. The couple learns from their culture. Culture, as British cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams (1989) described, is “a whole way of life” of a people (4). It includes the beliefs, ideas, images, behaviours, practices, symbols, language, and material things and places shared by a group and that help to define the group. Importantly, culture also includes norms and values. Norms are rules within society that guide how we are expected to be and act. A culture’s norms are based on its values, which are the collective standards that the culture uses to make judgments on morality (goodness), aesthetics (beauty), usefulness, desirability, and worthiness. With white weddings, although the couple ostensibly makes each of the multitude of decisions on their own (for example, which cutlery, songs, vows, napkins, venue, meals, and guests to select?), they draw on their culture in doing so. Culture is socially produced and socially shared: People participate in culture together. Each generation passes down culture to the next and is obliged to do so. A crucial way in which this cultural transmission occurs is through socialization. As discussed in this book’s introduction and in chapters three, ten, and twenty, socialization is the lifelong, active process of learning one’s culture and developing the skills and habits necessary for participating in that culture. 281 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY Aiding in the process of socialization are agents of socialization: the people and institutions that influence individuals as they learn how to fit into their culture. Family and peers – those individuals who are immediately in the couple’s lives – have both direct and indirect influence on the couple. Direct influences might include explicitly saying and showing what the couple should do, think, and feel (“you must invite your cousins”; “this is the happiest day of your life”). Indirect influences can include encouraging (or demanding) individuals, since childhood, to adopt the values of the culture as their own, such as developing a sense (or not) that marriage is a natural, desirable, and inevitable path in one’s life course. In addition to family and peers, education is also a key socializing agent. In the case of socialization into the role of white wedding bride and groom, expert sources act in this educational role. Individuals such as bridal gown salesclerks (Corrado 2002) or jewellers, photographers (Lewis 1998), religious leaders or other officiants, or wedding-oriented media, such as guidebooks, magazines, and websites, help to educate the couple in the various intricacies of the wedding structure and details. Media, and culture in general, are also agents of socialization. These contribute to the socialization of individuals into norms and expectations surrounding weddings by providing the ideas, images, and scripts, of what romance, proposals, weddings, and social roles (such as the groom role or the bride role) could and should look like and how they ought to be enacted. Individuals also socialize themselves. The couple draws on their own thoughts and experiences of having attended weddings and interacted with generalized social expectations about weddings. The Wedding- Industrial Complex In the contemporary Anglo-American world, many of these cultural elements have been mobilized into the wedding-industrial complex (a concept derived from the more common idea of the military-industrial complex; see also prison-industrial complex in chapter two) to produce a sense that the white wedding is just what normal people do and naturally want in order to get married and to be proper adults. The concept of the wedding-industrial complex refers to the deep entanglement of the wedding ritual and capitalist interests. This concept highlights the mobilization and deployment of an immense array of commercial interests and capitalist industries (Ingraham 1999; see also Boden 2003; Engstrom 2012; Freeman 2002; Howard 2006; Kingston 2004; and Wallace 2004). This relationship could be seen as mutually beneficial, in that industry supplies the needed provisions (goods, services, spaces) for the ritual and, in turn, profits from the ritual. However, it is problematic in that the relationship produces an increased reliance on the industry for cultural expertise and to define norms around weddings; moreover, motivated by profit seeking, the industry is driven to influence individuals’ and general cultural expectations toward ever-costlier weddings. For many cultural observers, the wedding has itself become an industry (Boden 2001, 1.2), “a machine fueled by the profit motive and lubricated by myth” (Kingston 2004, 33). 282 SEASONAL SOCIOLOGY The wedding-industrial complex includes the wedding industry – businesses that offer the goods, services, and people who are directly related to the wedding (and thus directly profiting from the wedding), such as wedding trade shows, bridal gown and formal wear shops, wedding planners, reception and ceremony venues, jewellers, stationers, bakeries, florists, liquor stores, and honeymoon destinations. This industry is worth $300 billion globally – including $55 billion in the United States (Bourque 2017) and $5 billion in Canada (Patel 2014). It reinforces its own importance through things like weddingplanning checklists or schedules, which provide a normative timeline of proper consumption. For example, according to a Brides wedding- planning checklist, in an “ideal” 12-month engagement, the bride should determine the wedding budget and select venues 12 months prior to the wedding, hire vendors 11 months prior, buy her wedding dress nine months prior, book the honeymoon five months prior, choose a cake four months prior, and so on (Kellogg, Price Olson, and Mooney DiGiovanna 2020). Nearly every major point on the timeline involves a major purchase. In other words, wedding planning is presented as a carefully orchestrated and properly timed series of consumption decisions. In addition to the wedding industry, the wedding- industrial complex also includes mass media and culture in general, which are mobilized to reflect the value, desirability, and appropriateness of the white wedding, to normalize the white wedding, and to support the wedding-industrial complex. These cultural elements help to forward and naturalize certain ideas, such as the notion that getting married is the normal, right, and only way to legitimate a romantic or sexual relationship; that the way to confirm true love is by having what is imagined to be a proper wedding; that getting married is the clearest demonstration of having achieved full and meaningful adulthood; and that the correct and desirable way to do all of this is through the particularly elaborate and costly white wedding. In Canada, the average cost of a wedding is between $30,000 (Patel 2014) and $50,000 (Wilford 2018). Media that does this work of reflecting, promoting, and normalizing values around weddings can include wedding industry media such as magazines, movies, books, websites, television shows about brides or weddings; however, even media that are not specifically geared toward weddings and culture generally also does this work. The wedding of British Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018 and Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011 are prime examples of this phenomenon, as these weddings became protracted media spectacles with widespread coverage in not only wedding-related media but also TV, internet, and print news, lifestyle reporting, and celebrity news, fashion magazines, gossip magazines, and more. The wedding-industrial complex is able to realize greater profit and power not only through increasing the elaborateness and complexity of this particular celebration, but also through normalizing the white wedding in culture in general. Adding to and Changing Culture, and the Limits Due to Hegemony The marrying couple learns from culture – but culture is also cumulative, and in producing and performing the ritual of the white wedding, the couple adds to it. This also means that culture is ever-changing. People, individually and collectively, may 283 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY strengthen, change, or discard the meaning, value, or purpose of any element of culture to suit new uses, interpretations, and social, cultural, and situational conditions. The couple contributes to culture by affirming, contesting, or rejecting what a wedding must look like, how a groom is required to act, what a bride’s responsibilities ought to be, what parents should do, and so forth. If they successfully pull together a wedding that is recognizable as a white wedding, then the couple helps to reproduce and strengthen the idea of the white wedding as a norm and adds to the collective image of what a wedding could and should be. If they successfully contest or reject conventions of a white wedding, then they help to challenge and possibly change the white wedding or even offer innovative ideas about the wedding ritual. However, even though culture is subject to change and transformation, there are still dominant norms, values, and structures in operation. Thus, for example, although cultural conventions and traditions around weddings might transform (and have indeed changed) over time, and individual weddings can be highly personalized, this ritual must still be understood in relation to the particular cultural and social context in which it is located and which gives meaning and significance to the event and to the couple’s relationship. As Emily Fairchild (2014, 364) notes, “a couple cannot simply make sense of the ceremony for themselves, but they are held accountable to the expectations of family and friends regarding what a wedding is, appropriate roles for men and women, and what the ritual elements mean.” Most importantly, the white wedding produces and reproduces some key dominant ideologies – that is, the norms, values, and ideas that form the status quo. These dominant ways of interpreting, interacting within, and organizing society are hegemonic. Hegemony is a concept that Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) developed to describe the way that the dominant (or ruling) class of people that holds power within society uses ideas and culture to try to maintain control of society and its people. Marxist scholars help us to recognize that society is structured to be unequal; that is, society is stratified. Stratification describes the organization of society according to a hierarchy of classes of people, which embeds inequality into the very structure and operation of society. For Marxists, it is clear that this inequality serves the interests of the ruling class, which benefits from having greater access to and control over resources, including material resources, power, prestige, and the advantages of living in society. This inequality oppresses what Gramsci (1971) called “the great masses of the population” (12). This subordinated class has inconsistent, less, or no access to these social goods. How does the ruling class maintain this inequality and hold on to its authority? For one thing, it is able to mobilize the coercive arms of the state, such as the police, prisons, and the military to force people to submit to its rule. However, Gramsci (1971) argued that, rather than relying on violence, the dominant group is able to maintain its ongoing rule by manipulating the rest of the population into consenting on an ongoing basis to their own subordination. The ruling class is able to make their ideas, values, and worldview into the dominant ideology – a system of beliefs that supports the dominant class in its rule and that justifies the inequality that maintains its domination. The exercise or threat of violence and the show of force is not as necessary when people willingly agree and even feel committed to the dominant ideology. 284 SEASONAL SOCIOLOGY This might seem a far-fetched idea to apply to weddings, which, even if you don’t really like them, probably generally seem like nice occasions. After all, weddings and the resulting marriages don’t appear to be a way in which inequality is maintained as an alternative to the explicit use of violence, right? And anyway, don’t most people like weddings (even if they don’t admit it)? Don’t people freely and eagerly choose to express their love through weddings? And, for the most part, aren’t people generally pretty happy and honoured to be able to celebrate their friends’ and family members’ achievement? These questions reveal the subtle way hegemony works. Dominant ideology can be said to be hegemonic when it is seen as the only normal, proper, and moral way to make sense of or organize the social world: Behaviours, attitudes, or values that serve the interest of the dominant class are seen to be simply natural or inevitable. “Seeing Through” Wedding Season Sociology involves a process of “seeing through” the facades of social structures. – Berger 1963, 31 Can we take up Berger’s challenge to discover other layers of social life, in order to “see through” the official hegemonic version of the white wedding and perceive it differently? How can we apply our sociological imagination to understand the relation between individual experiences and larger social forces? One question we might ask to start this work is: what – if any – dominant (“official”) ideologies are upheld in the white wedding? Does this ritual hide or produce inequalities? In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss two ideological structures that produce and maintain inequality: gender and heteronormativity. The Proposal Ritual The beginning of the white wedding ritual is the proposal. Although it is not part of the wedding-day ceremony, it is nevertheless an integral moment in the white wedding ritual – and one of the most crucial, setting everything else in motion. The official proposal is most recognizable when the man suddenly gets down on one knee, presents the woman with a velvet box in which a diamond ring is nestled and, naming the woman by her full legal name, utters in strangely clear, formal, and contractual language, “will you marry me?” The socially expected reaction to this bejewelled proposal is for the woman – who, despite her surprise, is otherwise quiet and motionless – to become overwhelmed by emotions of happiness and love, and, with tears in her eyes, to state unconditionally “yes,” holding out her finger so that he may place the ring on it. Any other response or reaction by the woman (such as a deferral, a negotiation, or a refusal) is considered awkward, humiliating, or heartbreaking for the man, particularly if he made the proposal a public spectacle. As neuroscientist Dean Burnett (2016) mused in 285 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY an article for the Guardian, “The question at the end of this [public proposal] is not just ‘Will you marry me?’; it could be seen as ‘Will you refuse to marry me and risk harsh judgement from all these strangers, who know nothing about you apart from the fact that you have a partner who just went to extreme efforts to impress you so obviously cares about you greatly, and will likely be utterly heartbroken and humiliated if you refuse?’” (n.p.). We see a bleak example of this in a story that made the rounds on social media in 2018: A man convinced the video-game company Insomniac Games to include his marriage proposal to his girlfriend in their new Spiderman video game. Before the game was released in September 2018, the woman had broken up with the man as, from her perspective, the relationship had been deteriorating over the course of months and years (Rouner 2018); but the proposal remained embedded in the game. The man’s one-sided version of the experience, embellished with damaging fabricated details and framed as a “heart-breaking” jilted-lover story (Rouner 2018), was circulated around social media. In reaction, the woman was “swamped” with so much harassment that “all of her social media accounts have been deleted” (Manavis 2018). The abuse over social media this woman received illustrates that cultural rituals are expected to follow particular patterns and coercive force can be unleashed when dominant expectations and norms are not upheld. One of these expectations is around gender. Hegemonic Gender Norms The engagement ritual exemplifies gender norms. Gender describes the expectations about masculinity and femininity that each of us regularly encounters and to which we are all expected to conform in our everyday ways of being, feeling, and doing. Dominant understandings of gender are based on a belief in a gender binary – the social belief and expectation that there are two, and only two, genders (men/boys and women/girls). These two genders are believed to be unambiguously distinct from and even opposed to each other. Each gender is believed to have characteristics (masculinity or femininity) and socially approved (some might say socially mandated) norms that are specific to that gender and that properly belong only to one or the other gender but not both. According to these dominant gender norms, there is very little consideration for other genders or even the possibility that other genders might exist, or that gender might not be a useful category at all. (For example, as Nicole Neverson points out in chapter ten, in sports, athletes and teams are divided most basically by gender – men’s or women’s sports – and then, after that, by skill level, age, or weight.) In the binary way of thinking about gender, men are expected to be masculine and women are expected to be feminine. So, if you are a man, you must embody masculinity, behave in masculine ways, and do and want masculine things. You must not be feminine or act, think, or desire in ways that are feminine. Although norms around gender appear as if they are natural and obvious, these expectations about how each gender should act and what each should value, emulate, or even think, feel, or desire are actually historically, culturally, group-, and situationally specific. Across history, across cultures, and across groups, there have been 286 SEASONAL SOCIOLOGY and are many ways of being gendered. Moreover, gender is something that individuals accomplish on a continual basis in specific situations, not something inherent to our bodies. Through interactions with each other and with social institutions and expectations, we learn about gender from our culture and what it means to be “properly” gendered. As individuals, we both intentionally and unintentionally uphold and conform to gender, or we don’t. Thus, there are many variations on gender, and a person’s way of being gendered may change from moment to moment or context to context. However, while there are many forms of masculinity and femininity and many ways of being masculine or feminine, as with other elements of culture, there are also normative forms, which are both dominant and most highly valued on a hierarchy of gender. Hegemonic masculinity is a concept developed by gender theorist R.W. Connell to describe the currently most culturally dominant ideal way of being a man (Connell 1987, 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Hegemonic masculinity is at the pinnacle of the gender hierarchy and confers both material and immaterial privileges to those who are perceived as fulfilling this ideal. As an expression of dominant ideology, all men must strive to be hegemonically masculine even though most, by definition, cannot realize this ideal. The qualities of hegemonic masculinity shift according to prevailing cultural norms and values (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), but characteristics typically attributed to it in its current configuration include expectations that men should always be independent, aggressive, physically and emotionally strong and in control, meaningfully employed, and sexually dominant (Connell 1987; Kivel 2003). Within the current mainstream Canadian context, a hegemonically masculine man must be able-bodied, white, employed, and an adult, and not gay, a woman, or feminine. In contrast, the normative form of femininity, emphasized femininity, does not confer additional power to women who successfully embody this ideal. It is, instead, an accentuated form of femininity that women may adopt (intentionally or unintentionally) in order to try to navigate the structural and experiential disadvantages conferred upon women in general within a system of patriarchy. Expectations of this dominant form of femininity dictate that women should appear to be (or actually be) frail, nurturing, emotionally and socially supportive, agreeable, and available, enthusiastic, and accommodating to men’s desire. Negotiating Gender Norms and Individual Agency Let’s return to our imagined romantic couple – our man on bended knee and our woman happily weeping. How is the proposal scenario illustrative of norms around gender? It mobilizes dominant and heightened social expectations about masculinity and femininity. According to the gender binary, and hegemonic masculinity in particular, men are supposed to be in control, be self-directed, and to act with agency. Agency refers to the ability to act according to one’s thoughts and will – rather than according to inevitability or constraint – in order to produce a result in the world. In the proposal, we see it is the man who acts and is in control throughout. He plans the proposal, decides that it is going to happen (including when, how, and where), gets down on his 287 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY knee, and speaks the proposal. Illogically, this act of agency is based on doing what a man is expected to do, not necessarily what he might want to do. Some men may relish planning and performing the proposal. However, others may prefer to have a rational conversation with their partner about marriage or may be too shy or anxious to want to engage in such a stressful performance. Some men may be physically or cognitively unable to enact the “official” version of the proposal or to endure the lengthy and draining ordeal of the planning and execution of the wedding; others may be financially unable to fulfill expectations of the diamond ring and an elaborate ceremony. In line with impositions of emphasized femininity, the woman, in contrast, accommodates the proposal by being present but is not enabled, for the most part, to decide whether or how the proposal will happen. She can only react; that is, she is not able (or supposed) to be agentic. Yet even if she is genuinely overwrought with emotions (as she is supposed to be), she is nevertheless expected to facilitate, passively but enthusiastically, a successful proposal with grace and kindness. If a woman does not fulfill or challenges these norms, she can face negative social consequences, as, for example, we saw with the woman who did not accept the proposal embedded in the Spiderman videogame. The proposal reproduces cultural norms of gender by enacting and celebrating these expectations and thereby legitimating, strengthening, and reaffirming these norms as proper, worthy, and good. The enactment of the “official” proposal is informed by previous knowledge about cultural and social norms and values, but it also transmits and adds to these. We see similar enactments of gendered expectations throughout the white wedding; for example, in the “giving away” of the bride by her father or parents, or in the officiant giving permission to the groom that he “may kiss the bride,” or in the groom covering and “guiding” the bride’s hand as they cut the wedding cake together. In each instance, women are expected to passively comply and be physically and culturally done to, while men are expected to initiate, lead, and act. Heteronormativity One thing I hope you have been wondering (possibly even been getting annoyed about) in reading this is why I’ve described this all in terms of a relationship between a man and a woman. In Canada, same-sex couples have legally been able to get married since 2005 and we have seen increased and more positive portrayals of same-sex relationships, marriages, and even white weddings in popular culture (e.g., Cam and Mitch in Modern Family, 2014; Callie and Arizona in Grey’s Anatomy, 2011). Nevertheless, there continues to be a general cultural assumption and expectations that the white wedding ritual occurs as a marriage between a woman and a man, a bride and a groom, a white dress and a black tuxedo. As feminist theorist Judith Butler (1990) has influentially argued, our widely held social norms about gender and sexuality are assumed to be directly connected, along with sex, in what she calls the heterosexual matrix. This matrix is a set of interrelated assumptions and expectations that we use to make sense of “genders, bodies, and desires” (Butler 1990, 151). This model describes the common set of assumptions that 288 SEASONAL SOCIOLOGY is applied in social life to “make sense” of bodies. Specifically, there is a general expectation that all people are gendered; not only are they gendered, but their gender is directly linked to and evidence of their sex, which is understood as a binary biological category – either male or female. This gender binary is organized on a hierarchy where masculinity is not only understood as being opposed to, but also more valued than, femininity. This opposition and valuation is based on compulsory heterosexuality (Butler 1990). Compulsory heterosexuality is a concept originally developed by feminist author Adrienne Rich (1980) to describe the primary social expectation that everyone is (or should be) heterosexual and that society should operate with heterosexuality as the only normal and morally acceptable sexuality. As Butler argues, gender only makes sense when you already assume that, and act as if, everyone is naturally heterosexual because the idea of heterosexuality is understood as the sexual attraction to and coming together of opposite sexes. Compulsory heterosexuality also describes the way that such normative expectations become institutionalized – that is, embedded within the very operation of society – regulating “those kept within its boundaries as well as marginalizing and sanctioning those outside them” (Jackson 2006, 105). The white wedding is ultimately a ritual of heteronormativity: it privileges the dominance of heterosexuality and affirms its coherence, as well as the gender binary that heterosexuality constructs (Bartholomay 2018; Berlant and Warner 1998), and, in doing so, it reinforces compulsory heterosexuality as a norm and heteronormativity as a value. Thus, whereas heterosexual white weddings might be thought of derisively as “cookie cutter” – that is, tediously conventional and conforming strictly to norms – gay and lesbian weddings always require at least a minimal degree of diverging from dominant cultural expectations. (For example, who proposes? Who wears what? Which partner gets “given away” or walked down the aisle – or do both? Who kisses whom?) Heterosexual couples may question these conventions and personalize the details but gay and lesbian couples must decide how they will fit themselves into a ritual that is fundamentally premised on excluding them. As wedding scholar Ewa Glapka (2014) summarizes, “wedding conventions erase homosexuality from the culture and reproduce entrenched gender binaries” (55). The white wedding not only takes heterosexuality and gender binaries for granted, thus participating in heteronormativity, but it likewise helps to make these seem both normal and worthy of celebration. Conclusion The white wedding is arguably our single most important social ritual in contemporary North American society. It is one of the few rituals that is broadly recognizable, widely celebrated within mass media and culture generally, and, with its simple basic structure, promises to be available to be taken up by anyone regardless of specific identity or affiliation. This version of the wedding is often seen as the ideal, most complete, most correct, and most traditional expression of the wedding ritual. In other words, it is the dominant, normative form. As a social ritual, the white wedding is also an event that expresses cultural 289 THE WHITE WEDDING AS A CULTURAL RITUAL OF HETERONORMATIVITY ideals and helps define a particular set of values, aesthetics, norms, and ideas as important, desirable, right, and good. More than this, it not only reflects society’s dominant ideals, but it helps to define and even justify them; for example, the white wedding also expresses and reproduces heteronormativity and problematic, constraining gender norms. The video “Wedding Season is Coming,” with which I began this chapter, ends with one of the friends standing in a darkened room looking at herself in a mirror. Bedecked with a white veil and a small bouquet of flowers, she eerily sings “Here Comes the Bride,” turns to look directly in the camera and asks, “Will you marry me? Will you?” The suggestion is that none of us can escape wedding season – either spending the entire summer season at weddings or, at some point, finding ourselves passing through the wedding season of life. The inevitability with which this is presented effectively illustrates the compelling but not always recognized workings of socialization. If we consider wedding season with our sociological imagination and try to see through the familiar story, we can ask some strange questions. For example, if summer is wedding season, and weddings largely work to reproduce the hegemonic cultural expectations into which we are socialized, then is summer, by virtue of the ubiquity and normativity of weddings, a season given over to preserving, championing, and reproducing hegemonic cultural ideals? If we remember that weddings are culturally interpreted to demonstrate true love, commitment, and adulthood, the significance of the wedding’s hegemonic status becomes even clearer in its exclusion and harmful judgment: If you must wed to be an adult, then how are those who cannot wed or will not wed positioned within the social world we collectively and actively produce and reproduce?