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Article Excerpt
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 nonpolitical 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, we can detect the importance of aesthetic practice in general, and a queer, critical aesthetic practice in particular, and how that practice might alter the ways we understand marriage and the subjects who produce and are produced by it. I will argue that the aesthetic effects of the Fluxwedding are both its accomplishment and the source of its near-dismissal. Using Lyotard's notion of the sublime experience, I will suggest that the Fluxwedding accomplishes a more significant threat to the systems of differentiation that beget oppression, than do oppositional, exclusively political, same-sex marriage ceremonies.
The Debate
Marriage provides a public forum about a most private matter. The two sides in this political debate are deeply entrenched. The Fluxwedding doesn't run counter to opponents' or advocates' reasoning. Instead, because it multiplies understandings of marriage, the ceremony invites us to see the drawbacks and benefits of marriage (as expected in oppositional debate), but it also questions and transforms our conceptions of marriage. Dwelling on the political also helps us see the similarities in the two sides of the debate. Both advocates and opponents of same sex unions agree that marriage has an important constitutive role in American culture today. And both advocates and opponents neglect aesthetic or cultural practices in their arguments.
Paula Ettlebrick, "traditional leftist," and legislative counsel to the Empire State Pride Agenda, worries that same-sex marriage will erode a radical agenda. Ettlebrick outlines queer identity, at once broadly and specifically:
Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so. It is an identity, a culture with many variations. It is a way of dealing with the world by diminishing the constraints of gender roles that have for so long kept women and gay people oppressed and invisible. Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society. (120)
Not all queer citizens spend their hours shopping for Hers and Hers bath towels on Gay.com with their Martina Navratilova-sponsored VISA cards; nor are they all soldiers in the gender revolution. Yet, there is an attraction to Ettlebrick's utopic prescription. I will use that prescription, not to question if queers should marry, as she intends, but as a guide to how queers should marry.
Ettlebrick refers to the most common version of marriage for both heterosexuals and aspiring same-sex couples. She argues:
Marriage will not liberate us as lesbians and gay men. In fact, it will constrain us, make us more invisible, force our assimilation into the mainstream, and undermine the goals of gay liberation. Second, attaining the right to marry will not transform our society from one that makes narrow, but dramatic, distinctions between those who are married and those who are not married to one that respects and encourages choice of relationships and family diversity. Marriage runs contrary to two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture and the validation of many forms of relationships. (119-120)
Accurate, yes, but Ettlebrick mistakes the definite for the indefinite: hers is a version of marriage, not the version of marriage. While many couples, queer and straight, find comfort in this traditional version of arranging relationships, some couples, queer and straight, do not. The Fluxwedding, I will argue, anticipates and answers Ettlebrick's second claim (validation of many forms of relationships), though not on the same terms, and in a way that is not immediately politically useful.
Ettlebrick uses a Procrustean notion of couplehood in order to make broader arguments against it. Yet couplehood is not necessarily mainstream; there are many ways to be a couple, just as there are many ways to get and be married. It just so happens that most couples, and most rituals of couplehood--straight and gay--approximate the same norms. But Ettlebrick overargues. Marriage is not the necessary and sufficient condition for a couple's mediocrity. Ettlebrick's overreach preempts the Fluxwedding's challenge to mediocrity. Yet, just when Ettlebrick insists most strongly about the constraints of marriage, she is optimistic about marriage's transformative power:
By looking to our sameness and de-emphasizing our differences, we do not even place ourselves in a position of power that would allow us to transform marriage from an institution that emphasizes property and state regulation of relationships to an institution that recognizes one of many types of valid and respected relationships. (121)
Ettlebrick desires and refuses her desire at the same time: she imagines a different sort of ceremony and married life, but...
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