Abstract
This article revisits the personal stories that younger male civil partners told about their sexual practices, in what most termed their ‘marriage’, to generate insights into the extent to which they succumbed to the dangers that critics of same-sex marriage foretold. It provides a baseline analysis against which the findings of future studies of both heterosexual and same-sex marriages and civil partnerships can be compared. The data we discuss are comprised of joint ( n = 25) and individual ( n = 50) interviews with couples. Participants’ stories about ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘exclusive’ sex can appear to support the predictions of some key critics. Participants tended to make commitments to sexual monogamy and link their sexual practices to deepening couple intimacy. However, viewed as stories of socioculturally shaped and biographically embedded sexual practices, they offer insights into the more complex relationships between civil partnership, marriage, sexual exclusivity and intimacy. On closer examination, they suggest it is not simply the case that civil partnership or same-sex marriage (and marriage more generally) ‘imposes’ heteronormative sexual conventions but that relational biographies are significant in shaping simultaneously conventional and deconstructive approaches to married sexuality. Partners in formalized same-sex relationships do not simply follow heterosexual norms. Rather, they juggle the often contradictory norms of mainstream and queer sexual cultures. Understanding the implications for marriage as an institution requires approaches to analysis that do not pose heterosexual marriage as the ‘straw man’ of queer analysis.
Highlights
Critics of same-sex marriage argued that the formalization of same-sex relationships through marriage or marriage-like legal arrangements would have negative consequences for same-sex relational cultures
Theorists like Warner, Duggan and Ruskola proposed that same-sex marriage would clean up a messy sexual public of unconventional intimate relationships, while neutralizing the egalitarian potential that glimmered within such inventive polymorphous bonds
To what extent do the personal narratives of formally committed younger same-sex partners evince a newfound sexual conservativism? Has marriage domesticated sexuality? What are the implications of same sex partners’ sexual practices for understanding the changing nature of the institution of marriage as a whole? The predictions around samesex marriage made by some queer critics in the late 1990s and early 2000s appear to be supported by some of the personal stories generated for our study
Summary
Critics of same-sex marriage argued that the formalization of same-sex relationships through marriage or marriage-like legal arrangements would have negative consequences for same-sex relational cultures. Viewed as socioculturally shaped and biographically embedded stories of practice, they offer insights into the more complex relationships between civil partnership, marriage, monogamy and intimacy. In analyzing these sexual stories, we suggest that it is not the case that marriage and marriage-like relationships impose heteronormative conventions but that relational biographies are significant in shaping simultaneously conventional and deconstructive approaches to married sexuality. Partners in formalized same-sex relationships do not follow heterosexual norms. Rather, they juggle the often contradictory norms of mainstream and queer sexual cultures. This has important implications for the conceptualization of contemporary marriage as an institution, which cannot be grasped where heterosexual marriage is the ‘straw’ man of queer analysis
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