Self-Storying to (De)Construct Compulsory Heterosexuality: A Feminist Poststructural Autoethnography of a Self-Wedding Ritual
Abstract
Written from the perspective of a white-settler, obese, bisexual, middle class cisfemale
graduate student in Canada, the wedding ritual and bride are explored as sites of
ideal female/feminine formation of the subject. Compulsory heterosexuality is
implicated. “Single” and “married,” like “woman,” are constituted in discourses. The
author explores ways that she, as an unmarried and therefore “single” woman has been
positioned as personally deficient as single-ness is produced as an illegitimate and
undesirable position for female/feminine subjects to take up. This research uses an
autoethnographic methodological frame augmented by feminist poststructural
epistemology to open up, trouble, disrupt and interrupt the figuring of the bride in hopes
of (re)signification and new practices of the female and feminine self for the writer.
The writer privileges story in the forms of narrative, poetry, theatrical vignette
and photography; theoretical literature provides context and a methodological framework
and adds a supplemental layer of analysis. The story is told from various temporal
positions including past, present, and future, blurring the idea of chronological age.
Practices of self and the limits of agency and resistance to dominant discourses are
explored. Many accounts of a feminist self-wedding are presented to illustrate the
opportunities for resistance, disruption and deconstruction of sociohistoric subjects and
discourse, in this case, the heterosexual bride.