gender essentialism

One thing I found in planning my own wedding, and in being semi-privy to other queer weddings, was that the very fact of queerness and/or same-sex-ness sort of short circuited everyone's conscious and unconscious cultural assumptions. It's almost as though since the expectation of adhering to a traditional template wasn't there in the first place, it opened the playing field to a real sense of freedom of expression, experimentation, and individuality. YAY!