Performing Gender Order: Cultural Meaning-Making in Humanist Wedding Ceremonies

The article examines how gender order and cultural meanings are negotiated in one type of alternative rite of passage, namely humanist (personalised, non-religious, usually provided by secularist associations) wedding ceremonies. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Poland between 2016 and 2021, the study shows that constructing a new ceremony is an interplay between tradition and innovation, as well as between resistance and rearticulation of culturally established scripts. The article deploys Raewyn Connell’s conceptualisation of gender as a social structure and uses material gathered during the research into humanist wedding ceremonies to illustrate and discuss the theory’s four dimensions (power relations; production and consumption; emotional relations; and the symbolic sphere). However, in this analysis Connell’s theory is revisited through the lens of the strong program in cultural sociology and its emphasis on the relative autonomy of culture. This results in the argument that symbols and meanings do not operate merely as one dimension among others but mediate and organise the remaining dimensions of gender order. Rather than treating culture as a discrete domain, the article demonstrates how culturally available symbolic forms render gender relations intelligible, legitimate and actionable in practice. Through this theoretical reframing, the article shows how gender order is simultaneously reproduced and renegotiated through meaning-making practices in a cultural domain often perceived as free from tradition.