Marriage Discourses

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.

This book examines the (in)visibility of romantic love in the legal discourse surrounding modern Australian marriage. It looks at how romantic love has become a core part of modernity, and a dominant part of the Western marriage discourse, and considers how the ideologies of romantic love are (or are not) replicated in the legal meaning of marriage. This examination raises two key issues. If love has become central to people’s understanding of marriage, then it is important for the legitimacy of law that love is reflected in both the content and application of the law. More fundamentally, it requires us to reconsider how we understand law, and to ask whether it is engaged with emotions, or separate from them. Along the way this book also considers the meaning of love itself in contemporary society, and asks whether love is a radical force capable of breaking down conservative meanings embedded in institutions like marriage, or whether it simply mirrors them. This book will be of interest to everyone working on love, marriage and sexuality in the disciplines of law, sociology and philosophy.

How do people talk about marriage? Who gets to do the talking? When, why, where and how do these things change? From the experiences of women forced to marry as children to those of older women who never married, from investigations of cross-border marriage applications to Christian pastors’ sermons on divorce, from oppositional media discussions of same-sex marriage to pro-marriage equality protest signs: this collection presents research from across the globe addressing the often shifting, context-specific ways that we talk about marriage. Developed from the work of the UK-based Discourses of Marriage Research Group and a two-day conference drawing together scholars interested in talk of marriage and related topics, this interdisciplinary volume brings together linguists, psychologists, and film makers and draws on data from the UK, Germany, Taiwan, the US, Belgium, and Turkey. It is intended both as a survey of some contemporary trends in research on marriage and as a foundation for further research. The chapters in this book, except for chapters 1 and 7, were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. This volume comes with a new introduction.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.

Karen Tracy examines the identity-work of judges and attorneys in state supreme courts as they debated the legality of existing marriage laws. Exchanges in state appellate courts are juxtaposed with the talk that occurred between citizens and elected officials in legislative hearings considering whether to revise state marriage laws. The book's analysis spans ten years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 and ending in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the federal government's Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, and it particularly focuses on how social change was accomplished through and reflected in these law-making and law-interpreting discourses. Focal materials are the eight cases about same-sex marriage and civil unions that were argued in state supreme courts between 2005 and 2009, and six of a larger number of hearings that occurred in state judicial committees considering bills regarding who should be able to marry. Tracy concludes with analysis of the 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on DOMA, comparing it to the initial 1996 hearing and to the 2013 Supreme Court oral argument about it. The book shows that social change occurred as the public discourse that treated sexual orientation as a lifestyle was replaced with a public discourse of gays and lesbians as a legitimate category of citizen.

This book represents a new direction in the study of religion and marriage by using a postmodern theoretical framework focusing on gendered discourse and culture, to examine the meaning of sacred marriage within social contexts. Drawing upon data from in-depth interviews of couples in long-term, sacred marriages living in the American Midwest, together with an analysis of Christian marriage advice manuals, Sacred Marriages explores how couples use religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures to give their marriages meaning, and how those sacred meanings are used in their daily lives and the spaces that they embody. The study shows how religious and secular beliefs are combined to formulate cultural strategies for approaching the sacralization of marriage, and how religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures are ordered, depending on circumstances and social contexts. This often results in other relationships being subordinated in favour of the sacred bond believed to exist between husband and wife. The book argues that sacred marriage is a malleable concept, as people bend religious culture to form new and altered sacred marriages during emotional extremes. A thoughtful examination of long-term Christian marriages, this volume will appeal to scholars of religion and sociology with interests in marriage and the family.