Gay Marriage Social Movement Theories

1.

                I plan to discuss comic frame and identify why this movement fits within that particular frame. I think that the most obvious form of this is seen in many of the signs that were brought to protest at Supreme Court in favor of marriage equality. I plan on going through various examples of signs that fit within a comic frame and analyze what exactly it is that they’re doing to make any who oppose them look foolish. I may or may not contrast these signs with the anti-gay signs that those who opposed marriage equality were holding in the same space. The purpose of this contrast is that I think that some of the opposing signs were also making an attempt at fitting within the comic frame, I just don’t think they did it very well. I can bolster my discussion with information from the reading by Cheree, GANDHI AND THE COMIC FRAME: "AS BELLUM PURIFICANDUM."

2.

I’m still deciding whether or not this would be too much of a stretch, but I would like to use Karshner’s Thought, Utterance, Power: Toward a Rhetoric of Magic to discuss some of the arguments that certain Justices made. For example, Justice Roberts said that “Unlike criminal laws banning contraceptives and sodomy, the marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to live together, to engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit. No one is ‘condemned to live in loneliness’ by the laws challenged in these cases—no one.” However, words have power, and can shape the views of the masses. Gay couples may not be condemned to live in loneliness, but would they/we not be condemned to live as “less than” straight couples? Because “married” is something of value in our society, so in the way which that word has value, couldn’t a relationship that lacks it represent one of less value? This also serves as a segue into the discussion of ideography.

3.

I will be analyzing the word “marriage” as an ideograph with protest signs and the constitutional definitions of marriage before and after the Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality (DOMA VS constitutional Marriage Equality) in mind. In the case of the protest signs, I’ll be looking at any in favor of gay rights from the protest outside supreme court that feature the term “homo.” I’ll be discussing how that functions as reclamation and, in the instance of signs such as the “mo homo” one from my previous post, how “no homo” was kind of reclaimed specifically.