License to Wed: What Legal Marriage Means to Same-Sex Couples

4. Marriage as Protest: The Political Dimensions of Marital Motivation

88 > 89 categories, values, and practices of heteronormative society [citation omitted] by enacting marriage outside the boundaries of state sanction .”1 The researchers found that 81 percent of those they surveyed cited political motives for marrying—an overwhelming number and far more than the percentage who cited these reasons in the current study (only 25 percent of the 1,469 couples I surveyed considered this set of motivations their primary reason for marrying).2 While also reporting that a “significant number” of couples additionally had concerns for the practical rights of marriage as well as romantic or personal reasons for marrying, the clear and unambiguous upshot of the study is that the Winter of Love was a political protest event, in its causes and effects, both for those who engineered it and those who participated. Similarly, in her 2011 book on sexual orientation and legal consciousness , legal scholar Rosie Harding explicitly references the San Francisco marriages as an example of what she terms “fracturing resistance.” Harding dissects the concepts of power and resistance in response to perceived shortcomings in Ewick and Silbey’s formulation of an “against the law” orientation of citizens to law—one that, they say, is typified by acts of resistance and avoidance. Harding, finding this model too simplistic and not particularly applicable in the lives of gay men and lesbians , further divides the “against the law” or resistant orientation into “stabilizing resistance,” “moderating resistance,” and “fracturing resistance .” The first is the most benign as it is essentially a form of resisting through being: simply by residing outside the heteronormative confines of sexuality, gay men and lesbians parenting or in relationships, or just by being out, resist the dominant power structure. Moderating resistance is different in that it attempts to lessen the degree of effects of the power structure through affirmative acts, even if they do not result in a change in this structure: a march or a protest—most explicitly public acts that register disagreement with the government but don’t necessarily change the source of disagreement in the immediate—qualify here. Finally, “fracturing resistance” actually disrupts or breaks the path of power—even if temporarily—often in the form of a riot or rebellion. Unlike the former two, this form of resistance necessitates a response of 90 > 91 the law,” in Ewick and Silbey’s terminology. Commonly, studies of legal consciousness denote as “oppositional” average citizens who either find their own ways to subvert or resist the law’s reach, or “lump” it, avoiding law altogether. Hull’s contribution to the literature shows us that this can also be done by not avoiding law but by explicitly enacting legality where it does not exist. Harding’s tripartite model of resistance also helps to reach beyond traditional conceptions of “against the law” and thus demonstrate the spectrum of ways in which LGBT citizens might enact resistance. Rather than fitting neatly into these preexisting models, couples interviewed for this book—especially in San Francisco where the city as a whole was resisting in a sense, but certainly also in Massachusetts —exhibited a way in which the act of marriage could be a political move of resistance to power, without necessarily being “resistant” to law. That these reasons were cited as reasons to legally marry at all may seem counterintuitive. One could hardly think of a greater intrusion than inviting the state into your romantic partnership. Admittedly, one might hear echoes of this if one were to interview those who made a conscious decision not to marry during the period when it was available . But for those who did choose to invite the state by pursuing a marriage license, the notion of positioning oneself against the law seems particularly unintuitive. And yet it happened, not only in San Francisco where the first set of marriages were widely considered a collective act of civil disobedience (or as one participant noted, more like civil obedience , since it was at the direction of the city and county government) but in Massachusetts as well; people who did not believe the law was their friend—and in some cases didn’t even believe in marriage as a priority —got married. Further, rather than positioning themselves against the law necessarily, many individuals and couples highlighted political or protest-based reasons for marrying that nevertheless did not resist or avoid the law but instead fully engaged it as an instrument of protest. However...