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Popular Culture Review
Here, I viewed the first season of Gay Weddings and describe how the
ceremonies portrayed in the program illustrate accepted notions of marriage and
the wedding, while the couples featured in the show challenge those same
notions. By examining this specialized program, I hope to add to the current
literature regarding the mass media portrayal of weddings in general, of samesex weddings in particular, and how the expression of commitment between two
people both reflects and transcends the hegemony of sexual orientation
embedded in the concept of the wedding as cultural artifact in U.S. society
today.
Hegemony, Media, and the Wedding
The term “hegemony” finds its origins in the writings of Italian
philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who essentially used the concept to understand
and explain how those in power come to power by the consent of oppressed
communities: “Based on his revisions of the Marxist tradition, Gramsci
developed a criticism of the state as a hegemonic superstructure of power”
(Zompetti, 1997, p. 72). This “superstructure” of power, as Lears (1985) points
out, involves not a simple model based in a single, monolithic, and pre-devised
superstructure, but “a complex interaction of relatively autonomous spheres
(public and private; political, cultural, and economic) within a totality of
attitudes and practices” (p. 571). Dow (1990) refers to hegemony or hegemonic
processes as “the various means through which those who support the dominant
ideology in a culture are continually to reproduce that ideology in cultural
institutions and products while gaining the tacit approval of those whom the
ideology oppresses” (p. 262).
This acceptance serves as the end result of hegemony, as noted by
White (1992): “Social and cultural conflict is expressed as a struggle for
hegemony, a struggle over which ideas are recognized as the prevailing,
commonsense view for the majority of social participants” (p. 167). Eventually,
commonly held notions about life and how to live it become common sense, and
everyone automatically “knows” them: “ . . . the 'common sense’ of the social
order . . . may originate in the collective; but, if persistent, it is soon internalized
in the ‘taken for grantedness’ of the individual’s natural attitude” (Lewis, 1992,
p. 283).
Until recently, media’s treatment of the wedding has lacked scholarly
attention, save for a handful of studies that have examined the anti-feminist,
patriarchal, and heterosexist notions embodied in the wedding (Engstrom, 2003;
Geller, 2001; Ingraham, 1999). Research supports a picture of today’s “white
wedding” (Engstrom and Semic, 2003; Engstrom 2003; Ingraham, 1999) as
involving those elements that distinguish it as a stylized social event: formal
apparel (such as white wedding gown and tuxedo), the recitation of vows that
embody in some form religion and traditionally based wording, a public aspect
regarding venue (such as church or reception hall), attendants, and a reception