To Honor and Obey: Hegemonic Negotiation in Contemporary Marriage Politic

This longitudinal and empirical study of the field of marriage politics prioritizes discourse in understanding the influence of hegemony on movement framing. I do so by evaluating how a specific construct -- the hegemonic marriage ethic -- contours framing decisions of three social movements: the traditional marriage movement (TMM), the Marriage Movement (MM), and the marriage equality movement (MEM). My research combines feminist discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods to evaluate four corpora -- The Washington Post headlines (1985-2007), interviews with leaders of 19 social movement organizations (SMOs), extensive movement organization documents, and a reference corpus constructed from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) spanning the years 1990-2012 (Davies 2008-).;Three main theoretical tenets guide my research: 1) feminist and queer critiques of marriage identify hetero-patriarchal foundations of the hegemonic marriage ethic; 2) the theory of cultural hegemony highlights the importance of a discursive focus; and 3) social movement framing theory provides scope conditions for assessing how shifts or changes in hegemonic constructions become relevant for framing decision-making.;My research theorizes negotiation as a tool for movements to discursively engage hegemony. The concept of negotiation counters often over-simplified depictions of social movements' mindless hegemonic acceptance or rejection. In this empirical marriage case, the dialogic nature of framing necessitates interdiscursive framing strategies for dealing with the problem or promise of hegemony. I also argue that better understanding of how movements negotiate the hegemonic marriage ethic reveals significant implications for issues of sexual citizenship.