Conjugality

Abstract

The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights, and confers statuses of personhood to those who have access to them. Bride, regardless of the specific gendered status and personhood occupied within legal, social, and economic terms here, does not (only) refer to the constituted individual who lives or experiences a gendered and sexed position and location but, rather, refers to the ritual process itself that comes to produce a range of positions, scenes, desires, practices intensities, and, finally, confusions around which the expression of liberal subjecthood, or ethnic and national identity, might emerge.