Marriage equality in Australia: The ‘no’ vote and symbolic violence

Symbolic violence and its resistance

On 20 September 2017, graffiti was sighted on a Sydney train carriage that included swastikas and the phrase ‘vote no to faggots’ (Koziol, 2017). Other acts of homophobic violence occurred, including the assault of a teenage transgender women at a marriage-equality rally in Hobart, Tasmania, amid what was supposed to be a ‘civil’ debate regarding marriage equality in Australia (Koziol, 2017). At the time, Australians had been asked by the Commonwealth government, in a voluntary, non-binding postal ballot, whether they believed marriage equality should be enshrined in Commonwealth law. It may be argued that the ballot itself represented a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991), in so far as it is an exercise of symbolic power, ‘that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 164). Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic power and violence have been gainfully deployed elsewhere (Samuel, 2013) to explain collective identity development and normative issues among LGBTQI+ communities. In this article, I focus on the resistance to symbolic violence among a group of gay men, in particular, how they articulate the marriage-equality debate. Love, and love stories, emerge as central to this resistance.

The critical importance of the participants’ love stories is examined in this article. These love stories aided the participants in understanding their day-to-day experiences. Anthony Giddens’ (1991, 1992) ‘pure relationship’ is offered as one way of analysing the relationships within these stories. ‘Confluent love’ and ‘plastic sexuality’ (Giddens, 1992) described many of the participants’ experiences, especially as they reflected on their love stories. Giddens described confluent love as an ‘active, contingent love’ (1992: 61), the possibility of which replaces the romantic love notion of the ‘special person’ with the ‘special relationship’ (1992: 61). Plastic sexuality hinges on this confluent love, in so far as it may take ‘its place among other forms of self-exploration and moral construction’ (Giddens, 1992: 144). This reflexivity, in turn, affected participants’ questioning of who they were and how they should live (Giddens, 1992: 198, in Bittman and Pixley, 1997). The debate around marriage equality reached a crescendo in late 2017 in Australia. As campaigning for marriage equality was almost entirely based on the platform of equal love, it is important to closely examine how this debate might frame love and its narration. Reflections on contemporary debates around the significance of the return to state-sanctioned intimate relationships are also examined.

Love and the marriage-equality debate

While writing about ‘traditional marriage’, that is, marriage between a man and a woman, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) nonetheless reveal insights into the process of finding oneself in a partner – or a sense of completeness. In this process, the individual seeks to learn more about themself, ‘searching for the history of our life; we want to reconcile ourselves with hurts and disappointments, plan our goals and share our hopes’ (1995: 51). At the same time, however, they claim that ‘love is the opposite of instrumental and rational behaviour’ (Grossi, 2012: 495), as it can be ended at any one person’s behest. Romantic love therefore, as the basis of marriage, presents a tension. Marriage may however provide something that de facto status does not. Marriage may be symbolic of fuller inclusion as a citizen on the basis of equal love.

From the outset, it must be acknowledged that same-sex marriage does not have unqualified, universal support (Grossi, 2012: 488) among the gay and lesbian community. Even if it were possible to marshal a ‘gay and lesbian community’ as a unitary concept, misgivings regarding marriage appear on both practical and normative grounds. Michael Warner (1999a), for example, challenges the ‘picket fence’ version of same-sex relationships, arguing that these relationships need not be inscribed by those narratives. Similarly, Kane Race analyses the role of mobile hook-up technology in mediating new arrangements for sex and intimacy in ‘a time when marriage and monogamy are increasingly monopolising the public discourse of gay life’ (Race, 2015: 496). In many ways, coupledom itself has come to characterise the good, neoliberal citizen. As Diane Richardson (2018) has argued, regardless of hetero- or homosexual relations, it is the performance of coupledom that defines the individual through state recognition of the relationship. Empirical work has suggested that while, on one hand, gay men accept the binary of love and relationships, or love and sex, on the other, they may be ‘frustrated by them’ (Slavin, 2009: 93). The enmeshing of love and sex or sexual activity has long been problematic for queer theorists (Grossi, 2012: 498). At the same time however, participants in this study reject the familiar narrative that intimate relationships among gay men are predominantly about sexual activity. Data from the study suggested that participants wanted more than to ‘rummage around freely for the sake of getting off for 10 minutes’ (Kelvin, participant: an early 30s registered nurse).

Kelvin may indeed be unconsciously surrendering to the public discourse to which Race (2015) refers. It may also be argued that Kelvin is referring to the experience of romantic love and its effects, wanting to share with someone a special, unique moment. As Lauren Berlant describes this experience: ‘love approximates a space to which people can return, becoming as different as they can be from themselves without being traumatically shattered; it is a scene of optimism of change, for transformational environment’ (2000: 448). The data from this study go some way in showing how the participants understood themselves and the world around them through their own love stories. This type of process is, for Berlant (2000), fundamental to understanding the significance of romantic love in scripts that do not conform to heterosexual ideals. She suggests that when ‘queering’ love, it is important not to teach ‘that we are all alike, and compelled to repeat our alikeness intelligibly, but . . . [to teach] some of what we have learned about love, under the surface, across the lines, around the scenes, informally’ (2000: 448). This depiction of love, especially ‘across the lines’, evinces a feeling of potential – that love itself can deliver freedoms in intimate relationships, ‘existing outside of established institutions’ (Grossi, 2012: 499).

Romantic love holds its own contradictions. Romantic love, after all, ‘may create the hell of mutual alienation [but] it also retains its primacy as an anti-alienating potential because it offers a way of expressing forms of pleasurable subjective transformation’ (Johnson, 2005: 83). In this risky world, romantic love can be an anchor, and something to be striven for and worked at (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995), in large part because it possesses the potential for personal transformation (Berlant, 2000; Johnson, 2005). Berlant celebrates the potential of love to provide freedoms and ‘rejects it as a means of establishing rules and barriers’ (Grossi, 2012: 499). Of course, romantic love has been the conveyor of freedoms, but also the source of a re-entrenchment of inequalities (Grossi, 2012). However Giddens’ (1991, 1992) emphasis on the democratic and agentic dimensions of love is echoed in Berlant’s (2000) identification of romantic love as a site of resistance to ‘traditional social structures’ (Grossi, 2012: 501).

Such resistance to traditional social structures, marriage for example, then becomes questionable if marriage is entwined with romantic love. This is one of the central debates related to marriage equality. Unlike some other jurisdictions, where legalistic and security issues were emphasised in the push for marriage equality (Einarsdottir, 2013), in Australia, ideals of romantic love became the centrepiece of the campaign. This is consistent with a shift in rights campaigning that focuses on the right to love as the new frontier to be challenged. Normative sexual citizenship is therefore situated not within who we love, but that we love. As Richardson (2018: 86) has suggested, under these circumstances it may ‘be better to speak of love citizens rather than sexual citizens’. If romantic love therefore forms the basis of marriage, then in this case, rather than providing resistance to traditional social structures, romantic love adds support to them. Indeed, theorists have variously described same-sex marriage as a ‘cop out’ (Baird and Rosenbaum, 1997: 11), yet another source of male domination (Saalfield, 1993) and an institution that may ‘colonize gays and lesbians’ (Green, 2013: 378), reproducing gender roles along heterosexual lines (Yep et al., 2003). I argue however, that some, perhaps many, gay men want to get married and that this is an integral part of their love stories. The ‘no’ vote, and the divisive and discriminatory language that it evoked, is a symbolic re-working of the violence that occurred on a cold June night in 1978 (the first gay and lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney), when gay men and their allies took to the streets to protest for equal love. After almost 40 years, history was repeating itself, and it is difficult to overestimate the harms this caused. In fact, one argument suggests that the postal ballot left LGBTQI+ Australians in a weaker position than before, relying further on the government for security and protection (Copland, 2018).

Methods

Participants were recruited using snowballing for a maximum purposive sample. All participants identified as gay men. The participants were aged between 29 and 55. All participants had completed secondary school and one participant was unemployed at the time of interview. There were two rounds of unstructured interviews with the same 10 participants. The unstructured interview enables discussion on sensitive topics and an observation of the ways in which individuals interact with one another (Ellis et al., 1997; Hopper, 1998). The narratives derived from these interviews were used to establish a sort of ‘baseline’ in the participants’ thinking about sex, love and intimacy more broadly. Thematic analysis was conducted on the transcripts from the interviews. This analysis provided an effective tool for engaging with the authenticity of the interviewees’ experiences (Glassner and Loughlin, 1987; Silverman, 1993), as well as engaging with broader debate about the utility of the humanities in examining social processes (Banks and Banks, 1998; Krieger, 1991; Stanley, 1993).

The themes that emerged from the interviews were analysed with the broader theoretical framework of Beck’s ‘do-it-yourself biography’ (2000: 166) in the foreground. Susan Krieger, in discussing social scientists’ use of auto/biography in their work, concludes that the readers of social research ‘have become increasingly dissatisfied with the tone of remote authority commonly used in the writing of social science’ (1991: 47). This may also apply to writing in which the participants themselves are not individualised. The demographic information was used to individualise the responses of the participants, and to provide context for their narratives. The contextualising of the participants’ experiences was based on the ‘understanding that participants in social life actively produce a context for what they do and that social researchers should not simply import their own ideas about what context is relevant in any situation’ (Silverman, 1993: 8).

The interviews were conducted according to the method of interactive interviewing: ‘an interpretive practice for getting an in-depth and intimate understanding of people’s experiences with emotionally-charged and sensitive topics’ (Ellis et al., 1997: 121). As the interviewer, I attended to my own feelings and experiences during the interviews to assess validity and bias (Hertz, 1995; Jorgenson, 1995; Laslett and Rapoport, 1975; Miller, 1996). As Shulamit Reinharz explains: ‘the self we create in the field is a product of the norms of the social setting and the ways in which the “research subjects” interact with the selves the researcher brings to the field’ (1997: 3). Consistent with the rationale stated above (Reinharz, 1997), I wanted to avoid positioning an overarching researcher’s self in the middle of every interview, which could influence the participants’ view of how they should respond. At the same time, the researcher’s self was sublimated in the initial stages of the interview process in order to avoid positioning it centrally.

Research ethics were granted by the University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee.

Findings

This study found that gay men want to have romantic relationships (Worth et al., 2002) despite the ‘normalisation’ which some theorists (Weeks, 1995; Yip, 1997) have suggested necessarily accompanies these relationships. Data from the study illustrate that the participants sought to make sense of themselves and the world around them through their love stories. Participants also expressed a range of attitudes toward marriage equality. Phillip for example, an affluent, inner-city professional in his 30s, said:

I quite like living on the fringe of society. . .. I don’t need to have acceptance from other heterosexual couples although I have a normal relationship like them, so that’s completely unimportant, as is the word marriage . . . unimportant to me, I don’t place much value on that. For me it’s really, I just want to have the same legal rights.

At the time of interview, Phillip had been in an intimate relationship with the same man for around three years. At that time also, Phillip’s de facto status meant that he did technically have the same legal rights as any other Australian with regard to his intimate partnership – except the right to marry. In some instances however, marriage was more powerfully protective than de facto status, for example, for couples who did not reside together or had not met the time requirement to qualify as de facto. In these instances, marriage conferred more rights, to superannuation death benefits, for example, than de facto status. ¹ There is no need to chronicle here the complex arrangements same-sex couples have had with the Australian state as it is done with great aplomb elsewhere (Bateman, 1992; Brennan et al., 2009; Grossi, 2012). The important point is that Phillip highlights that fact that marriage law itself had been discriminatory, not so much that he wanted to participate in the formal, state-recognised institution of marriage.

Marriage for gay couples has certainly smoothed the way in terms of the rights associated with being recognised by the state as a spouse. Rich and Matt, a middle-aged professional couple living in an extra-metropolitan suburb, who were married in the state of New South Wales before the Commonwealth legislation provided the protection of marriage equality, reflected upon this point of rights when thinking about what might happen to one of them if the other were to be gravely ill, or die. As Rich explains, Matt is not yet ‘out’ to his parents:

And I s’pose experiencing that [death in the family] face-on . . . I’ve always said to Matt I would never exclude his family to anything but I’ve also seen it first-hand where I could be excluded from going to the funeral. I could be excluded, you know, I could be taken to court to fight over property or whatever it might be. So for me it felt more comfortable for me having the power [of attorney] because, obviously, being with your partner for however long you’d been and sharing a life you wanna make those decisions hopefully with your family and your other loved ones but, if the circumstances don’t allow you to do that, then you’d most be the one that knows what he would have wanted. So we’ve put that in place as a bit of a back-up, security blanket. ’Cause you don’t know how people are gonna react under those circumstances.

For Rich, unlike Phillip, marriage was less about ‘claiming citizenship rights’ (Einarsdottir, 2013: 788) than it was about having the capacity to fulfil the wishes of his partner, which is surely one of the most important features of a romantically loving relationship. At the time of interview, marriage equality was still somewhere on the horizon for Matt and Rich. This did not matter, at least for them. Matt says:

Like we wanted to commit to each other so we didn’t really care that it’s not legal, to be totally honest. We knew that it was something special to us and we did what we wanted to do on that particular day.

For Matt and Rich, their marriage symbolises something more than recognition by the state. Rather, their marriage was a symbol of their love for one another.

Yet other participants characterised more general shifts in society as indicative of a need for marriage equality when love is at stake. Art, for example, an inner-city dweller who works in the creative field, related his thoughts in the following way:

And now, you know, I think we’ve come to this point where some – because gay stuff is so integrated into regular society, we do have now younger gay men who hold as conservative views about partnerships and relationships and sex as I used to associate with straight people, you know. . .. I think it’s probably society’s main [bent] is towards an idea of monogamy and faithfulness in a particular kind of relationship, and if gay people grow up and they don’t feel necessarily alienated from that culture, then why not adopt those same values?

Art’s invocation of the image of ‘alienation’ is telling. It suggests that because of the mainstreaming of ‘gay stuff’, it is possible for gay men not to feel alienated from the traditional love stories of romance, marriage, family and so forth. Kelvin, an inner-city health care worker in his late 20s, speaks about the same sense of tradition when analysing how these relationships may form in an idealistic world: ‘If, in the idealistic world, we’re all straight, we find a partner, we settle down, we make a family and what-not. And I think for a lot of gay men, they want that.’

Despite concerns that marriage equality may hide gay men behind white picket fences (Duggan, 2002), therefore no longer presenting a challenge to heteronormativity, in Kelvin’s narrative at least, this may be exactly what some gay men want. I argue that love, and specifically romantic love, is central to these participants’ understandings of marriage equality, even when marriage equality also has implications for the individuals’ relationship with the state.

Discussion

In the debates around marriage equality in Australia, recognition of the union by the state on legal grounds paled in comparison with the argument for the equal recognition of love. As previously discussed, the platform upon which marriage-equality arguments rested was ‘equal love’ (Grossi, 2012), in comparison with other jurisdictions in which security as citizens was emphasised (Einarsdottir, 2013). In a break from what Mary Bernstein and Nancy Naples (2010) identified as an Australian tendency to seek recognition of ‘de facto’ relationships, by 2017, momentum had so built, that the Commonwealth government’s hand was forced – a postal vote was held, and the majority of respondents said it was time to legislate for marriage equality. It is perhaps because many activists saw these ‘de facto’ arrangements as a ‘second-class form of relationship recognition’ (Bernstein and Naples, 2010: 132) that momentum peaked as it did in November 2017. More importantly though, marriage equality symbolised for many one more step towards full and equal citizenship for gay men and women to be embraced in (large parts of) Australian society. The marriage-equality debate in Australia took some ugly turns. Symbolic (and real!) violence characterised the ways in which many of the opponents of marriage equality engaged in the debate. Diverse sexualities were stigmatised by groups who sought to maintain the ‘sanctity’ of marriage as a strictly heterosexual expression of love. The ballot itself was an exercise of symbolic power: it may be that the parliamentarians were unaware of the power differential existing between them and the advocates for equal love. Indeed, symbolically, the ballot was in part about sexual diversity and citizenship.

Full inclusion within a society, the rights to which one is granted or denied, clearly may be influenced by sexuality (Evans, 1993; Richardson, 2000). Even in a society such as Australia’s, in which sexuality does not have an impact upon citizenship, at least ostensibly, marriage equality may for some provide another way of achieving ‘legitimate status as full members of communities’ (Bernstein and Naples 2101: 133). Marriage may not be for everyone, but at least under this pluralist framework, the choice to marry is there, whether it be for symbolic or practical reasons, or both (Johnson, 2013). Further, if we think about same-sex marriage in this way, we can allay concerns that these marriages privilege traditionally heteronormatively constructed relationships (Butler, 2002) and that they represent a site of governmentality (Brook, 2002). Rather, as Carol Johnson has so persuasively argued in the Australian context, this ‘symbolic contestation’ (Johnson, 2013: 243) can serve to undermine normalisation instead of reinforcing it (Johnson, 2013: 243). Finally, this contestation goes some way towards calming anxiety about what constitutes ‘normal’ (Warner, 1999a) in an age when same-sex marriage and monogamy seem to be ‘monopolising’ stories about the lives of gay men (Race, 2015: 496).

Romantic love may not always last in the way that it began. People change, intimacies melt away and dissolve and relationships may no longer deliver the rewards that they once did. I think, however, that romantic love continues to be very important to many gay men – the participants in this study have demonstrated this. Romantic love is important precisely because it resists rationality (in most instances!). It requires a complete opening of oneself to scrutiny from the other in an epoch when the integrity and security of the individual is of paramount importance. Marriage may be an expression of this love, but I argue that, for some gay men, it is not the only one. Among queer theorists, a level of discomfort is often expressed with same-sex marriage – that it in fact replicates institutions against which the queer movement has protested for so long. These theorists suggest that same-sex marriage may subvert the freedoms associated with hook-up sex, for example, that originated with bath-house culture, by overlaying this culture with a layer of obligation that negates hard-fought battles for sexual liberation. At the same time, however, marriage, for some gay men, may provide an even deeper connection to their lover, in addition to various protections from the state. My broader argument contends that the experience linking freedoms and personal fulfilment was romantic love. Outside of the context of institutional relationships, as Giddens (1991, 1992) has suggested, personal fulfilment is found in relationships of which trust forms an enormous part, and this trust is both impelled by, and impels, intimacy. For many gay men, marriage may form part of this trust. This does not necessarily imply sexual monogamy, as Giddens (1991, 1992) has also suggested. Rather, the relationship exists on the basis of trust, and the rewards that are negotiated and delivered. As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) have argued, this love, trust and intimacy needs to be worked at, something which the participants in this study were eager to do.