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Marriage and civil partnership offer access to legal and social privileges, in clear
contrast to the historical invisibility of same-sex couple relationships. This thesis
acknowledges the potential for legal recognition to assert the value of lesbian and
gay couple relationships and overcome the social stigma that has been attached to
homosexuality and to these couple relationships. In this context, the work that
couples perform in understanding, negotiating and asserting their new status is
explored as a micro-social battleground between historical stigma and newfound
recognition. The focus on the meanings that couples make around legal and social
recognition means that the study is grounded within an interpretivist framework,
and draws on qualitative research methods of data collection and analysis. In terms
of evaluating same-sex marriage and civil partnership, this thesis considers the
extent to which these policy innovations can be relied upon to eradicate or
ameliorate as powerful and enduring a concept as stigma.
Same-sex marriage and civil partnership provide opportunities for a focused and
original interpretation of Erving Goffman’s Stigma (1963), not simply as a classic
sociological text but also as providing a robust theoretical framework for a close
evaluation of policy. Goffman’s compelling analysis of stigma as the denial of full
social acceptance allows for a critical assessment of legal recognition, whether in
terms of policy discourses framed around social justice, or as providing insights into
the ways in which marriage and civil partnership are constantly negotiated,
contested or accepted within lesbian and gay couples’ social networks. Marriage
and civil partnership require lesbian and gay couples to claim legal and social
privilege, not simply as a one-off process at the culmination of the wedding or civil
partnership ceremony, but time and again in routine social interaction within their
close personal networks and beyond. The effects of these policies are therefore to
be observed not simply within the confines of the register office or marriage bureau,
but can be understood as an unending deployment and negotiation of status that is
constantly asserted through routine social interaction in innumerable contexts that
include family gatherings, water-cooler conversations in the workplace, small talk
between neighbours, or whenever lesbian and gay partners access public or
commercial services as legally recognised couples.
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