مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - ‘The Secret behind the Mask’ Wedding and Gender Inequalitiy

Abstract :

Regardless of religion, race and class in every society, many people are getting married and glorify their marriage with a wedding. Although a wedding is the symbol of the couple’s love and commitment to each other, it is at the same time an important tradition which ritualizes patriarchal and heterosexual gender relations which create gender inequality. It is difficult to see how wedding rituals construct this inequality because people are socialized to traditional gender roles and many institutions provide gendered messages. Therefore, most of the time, we do not ask questions such as why women cannot propose to men, why men need to obtain permission to get married from the women’s father but not from the mother, why everyone’ eyes focus on the bride but not on the groom, why we are talking about the bride’s wedding dress but not about the dress of the groom. Weddings have a powerful course of events which reinforce gender ideologies and hold women and men responsible for their gender performances. Weddings, which construct women as feminine and men as masculine subjects, become a powerful way to secure the dominant patriarchal social order. In this context, the aim of this paper is to try to cast a light on weddings as gendered rituals.