The New Religious Rite: A Symbolic Interactionist Case Study of Lesbian Commitment Rituals

Abstract

SUMMARY Despite the legal and religious establishment's denial of rights and recognition to same-gender couples, many lesbians and gay men are adapting and/or creating their own rituals to affirm their commitments to each other. This article uses participant observation of a black lesbian couple's shower and holy union ceremony to explore the multiple and competing meanings attached to the ritualistic symbols and narratives they incorporated. I seek to complicate the existing framework, in which rituals are held to produce feelings of belonging for participants and serve as vehicles for the social transformation of marginalized groups (e.g., Driver, 1991). By adapting and appropriating ritualistic elements often used in heterosexual weddings, I argue that this couple and their ritual coordinators succeeded in creating a sense of social order, “communitas” (Turner, 1969), and personal and social transformation for some participants. However, I also suggest that the achievement of these functions hinged on the creation of symbolic out-groups and the reproduction of social conventions around gender, the family, and the “appropriate” expression of sex in marriage, which diminished the experience of communitas and social transformation for other participants. Future research should focus on the competing expectations and interpretations participants bring to their experiences of rituals and the ways in which existing structures of power and authority may limit rituals' social functionality, creation of communitas, and revolutionary potential.