A Becoming Queer Aesthetic

A young man ran up to us to enthuse over the event, saying, "It was the wedding of the future," meaning, I supposed, the form of it, not (necessarily) the political aspect.

—Jill Johnston 220

Isn't that the ultimate homeland security? Standing up and defending marriage?

—Senator Rick Santorum

The Fluxwedding (1993) held in Odense, Denmark confounded, delighted and sometimes terrified those in attendance. The day began with a brief, legal City Hall ceremony between lesbian author Jill Johnston and her partner Ingrid Nyeboe. But wedding conventions were then undermined, as Fluxus artist Geoff Hendricks presided over what followed. The Fluxwedding party performed a Fluxprocession, marching down a walking street (closed to motor vehicles) in Odense. Two boom boxes competed, one playing the overture to Lohengrin, the other the story of Bambi in Danish. A Great Dane led the procession while art students handed out chrysanthemums. And the Wedding Dress, a blue, thirty-person monstrosity, navigated its way back to the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik (school and museum), where the event was continued amidst Hendricks' retrospective, "Day Into Night." After the Fluxceremony, the couple entered Hendricks' 1979 Sky Car, a VW Bug painted like the sky, tossed their bouquets to the crowd and, as the car stood still, Hendricks jangled tin cans at the back bumper.

While Fluxus artists invented new ways to marry, U.S. politicians legislated against same sex marriage. In July 2004, U.S. Senate Republicans proposed the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which would have changed the Constitution to outlaw same sex marriages. Senator Santorum (R-PA) equated defending marriage with homeland security, while National Public Radio commentator Connie Rice (second cousin to Condoleeza) called the Republican use of same sex marriage "a weapon of mass distraction." My aim in this essay is to wrangle queer weddings from politics and examine the promise of formal effects in wedding ceremonies. Since 1996, when then-President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a few states have challenged the federal law, and gay men and lesbians have lined up at their City Halls, eager to take advantage of their state-sanctioned right to marry. Their actions are pragmatic: the rights and benefits conferred upon the married exceed the unmarried. But in the haste to oppose DOMA and FMA, we overlook what might hold the most promise in challenging the law's logic, namely something we might call the aesthetic.

Legislation hindering same sex marriage exerts considerable social and political power. Yet such a legal force obscures the non-political aspects of queer marriage, which can be considerable sources of another sort of power. Before and after DOMA's passage, gays and lesbians ceremoniously acknowledged their unions, albeit without news cameras or legalization. What is remarkable about the majority of these ceremonies is how unremarkable they are: gay and lesbian marriage ceremonies are largely indistinguishable from their heterosexual counterparts.

Why do gays and lesbians so often marry in the same way as heterosexuals? Why is any complicated aesthetic, let alone a queer aesthetic, absent from the majority of weddings? An aesthetic of the sublime, rather than the beautiful, has the potential to disorient the exclusively political imperatives of same sex weddings. I will argue that, in the rush to make a political stand, and quickly be married, opportunities for aesthetic effects are missed in the ritual of becoming married. If there is a queer aesthetic, it is not evident in these rush-to-status ceremonies. A queer aesthetic might be evident in the Fluxwedding, suggesting how a queer marriage ceremony might differ from traditional weddings, and from tradition-miming homosexual weddings. The Fluxwedding's effects are difficult to incorporate into the political aims of either advocates or opponents of same sex marriage. Such a resistance to utility might explain why this queer wedding has been almost entirely overlooked in writing about same-sex marriage.

In this essay I highlight the similarities between what appear to be opposing positions in the same-sex marriage debate, and attend to one overlooked aspect of that debate: the ritual practice of becoming married. By seeing the possibilities of performance...