Love is a Battlefield: The Performance and Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in North America

Abstract

This essay examines the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and the United States alongside its performative representation on stage in both countries. I argue, via Freeman, that marriage as an institution bestowing rights upon private individuals needs to be decoupled from the wedding ceremony, a ritual event that asks a participatory public to avow, or disavow, the form and force of its connections with each other, and with various state apparatuses in or against whose name those connections are made. In so doing, I move from J.L. Austin to Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, whose Love Art Laboratory project uses the wedding ceremony to initiate a different sort of repeating with respect to the Iraq War, whereby “I do” becomes “I do not.”