Ramona Faith Oswald - Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community

Lesbian Rites:
Symbolic Acts and the Power
of Community

Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 2003.

Lesbian Rites:
Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community

Ramona Faith Oswald, PhD
Editor

Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 2003.

First published by

The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580

This edition published 2013 by Routledge

Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 2003.

2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The development, preparation, and publication of this work has been undertaken with great care. However, the publisher, employees, editors, and agents of The Haworth Press and all imprints of The Haworth Press, Inc., including The Haworth Medical Press and The Pharmaceutical Products Press, are not responsible for any errors contained herein or for consequences that may ensue from use of materials or information contained in this work. Opinions expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily those of The Haworth Press, Inc. With regard to case studies, identities and circumstances of individuals discussed herein have been changed to protect confidentiality. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Marylouise E. Doyle

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lesbian rites: symbolic acts and the power of community/ Ramona Faith Oswald, editor.
p. cm.
Co-published simultaneously as Journal of lesbian studies, v. 7, no. 2, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56023-314-1 (hard: alk. paper) ISBN 1-56023-315-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Lesbianism. 2. Rites and ceremonies. I.Oswald, Ramona Faith. II. Journal of lesbian
studies.
HQ75.5 .L4453 2002
306.7663-dc21

2002154182

Lesbian Rites:
Symbolic Acts and the Power
of Community

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Ramona Faith Oswald, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Family Studies in the Department of Human Community Development at the University of Illinois. Her research examines queer family relationships especially through the lens of ritual, with attention to how community context shapes family dynamics. She has published in family, sociology, and psychology journals. Her work often has an applied component, for example you can find advice for heterosexual people planning weddings at www.staff.uiuc.edu/~roswald. Dr. Oswald is active within the National Council of Family Relations (NCFR), especially the Feminism and Family Studies Section and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Straight Alliance Focus Group, which she co-founded. She has received two awards from NCFR: The Jesse Bernard Award for feminist research, and the Anslem Strauss Award for qualitative methodology. She and her partner are the proud co-moms of a beautiful baby boy.

Though in the last century much has been written about the role of ritual in reproducing social order, an emerging literature considers the ways in which ritual can promote social change (Baumann, 1992). It is within this emergent area that the study of lesbians and ritual belongs. By marking the importance of lesbian life transitions, reworking ethnic and religious symbolism to be inclusive, and defining family membership on lesbian terms, lesbian rituals sanctify lesbian existence. Ritual objects imbued with meaning can lend physical form to the idea of lesbian importance, and ritual interactions can establish ways of relating that center lesbian experience.

In this volume you will find five different explorations of ritual that bring forth themes of lesbian-centered social change. The first, Deaths Midwife by Sharon Jaffe, is a narrative about the power of ritual to reconcile straight and gay, Christian and Pagan, in the face of dying. Ruth Rhiannon Barretts exploration of Dianic traditions provides a brief history of the importance of Goddess-worship to radical lesbian feminists, and uses those traditions to create life-course rituals. While Barrett and Jaffe define lesbians and lesbian community very concretely, Marla Brettschneider disrupts notions of a static lesbian self and instead reworks Judaism and anarchist politics to propose rituals of continuous becoming. Krista B. McQueeney then analyzes the paradoxes of a lesbian commitment ceremony held within a gay-affirmative African American congregation in the southern USA. Finally, Elizabeth A. Suter and I use exploratory survey data to examine how lesbians may use name changing as a strategy to claim family status.

Though it is tempting to think about ritual as a solely positive experience, there is nothing inherently good or bad about ritual. It is a powerful vehicle for reproducing or resisting social values and organization that can work for or against a particular groups interests (Baumann, 1992). The above-mentioned authors discuss the limits of ritual as part of their exploration. In addition, I have included two papers that examine how lesbians have been compromised, if not harmed, by the ritualization of heterosexism and homophobia. First, in her analysis of the community response to the feminist retreat known as Camp Sister Spirit, Kate Greene uses Mary Dalys seven patterns of sado-ritual syndrome to show how those opposed to the camp were organized to uphold heterosexual patriarchy through an obsession with purity that defined the camp as a refuge for immorality, a rapid contagion of hateful expression that became both normalized and denied, and a public response that framed issues in stereotyped and un-constructive terms. Second, I include my own investigation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) peoples experiences at heterosexual family weddings. Participants were pressured repeatedly to either diminish themselves or leave the ritual so that the heteronormative meaning of weddings and family membership would be upheld. The contrast between the first 5 papers and these 2 further illustrates the importance of lesbian-centered ritual practices.

This volume is, to the best of my knowledge, the first multidisciplinary compilation of scholarship addressing lesbians and ritual. The readings offer a diversity of perspectives on what it means to be lesbian, what it means to enact a ritual, what ritual is and is not able to accomplish, and how we should go about understanding lesbian ritual experiences. As editor, I worked to maintain the differences between authors. It is up to you, the reader, to debate and compare the perspectives presented by each. Together, they open the door to what I hope will be a vibrant and growing area of exploration.