Weddings and pornography: The cultural performance of sex

Abstract

Weddings and pornography are cultural performances. This essay analyzes these performances, not as cultural opposites, but as mirror doubles, complementary and necessary to each other to solidify social organization through control of sex. Their complementarity emerges from the nexus of church, public performance, and state as both weddings and pornography make, fake, and break cultural insiders and outsiders, norms for sexual and social behavior, and frames of belief and play. This essay then examines the term “performance” as utilized by various camps in the pornography debates as a means to condemn, embrace, or erase sex in the material practices and discourses of pornography. Ultimately, sex is the sine qua non of both weddings and pornography, and its performance, whether socially sanctioned or culturally condemned, creates and maintains order through control of sex. Against this necessary backdrop of control, performance is always imbued with transformative possibilities, for it both maintains the cultural status quo and contains the potential for change.

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