| Since 2004, the legalization of gay marriage has been passionately debated in town halls, courtrooms, and the Legislature of Washington State. My dissertation complicates polarizing headlines pitting evangelicals versus gays. I investigate the cultural practices that infuse identity politics on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate to ask how the affect generated by this "culture war" conflict at the grassroots level supersedes "family values" platforms and demands for state recognition. While providing a fuller portrait of the theological and political convictions of conservative evangelicals and gay rights activists battling over "marriage equality," I analyze how innovations in visual and new media are shifting their mobilization tactics "on the ground." Throughout my dissertation, I query how and why marriage is privileged as the institutional site through which U.S. citizens can achieve equality, legitimacy, freedom, and protection today. Unlike most polemical, legal, and historical accounts of the U.S. "culture war" over "marriage equality," my study suggests that both sides of this conflict participate as co-constitutive "instruments and effects" of governance technologies shaping and shaped by neoliberal socio-economic transformations. My interdisciplinary project integrates ethnographic and cultural studies research to propose that shifts in mobilization strategies among church congregations and activist organizations reinforce and transgress "domestic" boundaries of the national and familial in ways irreducible to "for" or "against" polarizations. |
