Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 2 | Page 38

34 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