Marriage, Cohabitation, and Family Among Sexual and Gender Minorities in Post-Marriage Equality Canada

This dissertation explores how sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) interpret, experience, and make decisions about marriage, cohabitation, and family in Canada’s post-marriage equality context. Drawing on census, survey, and interview data across three chapters, I engage with theoretical debates regarding the implications of marriage equality for LGBTQ+ people’s household dynamics and cultural beliefs. Specifically, I investigate differences in intrahousehold specialization across institutional contexts among same-sex couples (SSCs) and different-sex couples (DSCs); how traditionalist beliefs are distributed along the lines of gender, sexuality, and marital status; and how cultural assimilation occurs on the ground among LGBTQ+ people in the wake of marriage equality. Taken together, this dissertation advances theoretical understandings of how marriage works and what marriage means at the intersection of gender and sexuality. In the first chapter, I use three waves of the Canadian Census (2006, 2016 and the 2011 National Household Survey) to examine how marriage-cohabitation gaps in intrahousehold labour and earnings inequalities vary across institutional contexts—Québec and the rest of Canada (ROC)—for SSCs and DSCs. Prior research suggests that marriage-cohabitation gaps are smaller in contexts where cohabitation is more prevalent but has overlooked how legal protections (at the contextual level) and gender composition (at the couple level) moderate this association. I hypothesize that these gaps will be larger in contexts where legal protections for cohabitors are less marriage-like. Results show that marriage-cohabitation gaps are generally larger in Québec than English Canada vis-à-vis earnings, but patterns are more heterogenous vis-à-vis labour supply, with only male couples showing support for the hypothesis. This chapter highlights the importance of considering both legal protections and gender composition in examining patterns of intrahousehold specialization. In my second chapter, I use the 2019 and 2021 waves of the Canadian Election Study to examine how “marriage gaps” in individual-level traditionalism vary by gender and sexual identity across three dimensions of personal culture that are foundational to the institution of marriage (political conservatism, support for traditional family values, and gender conformity). Extant scholarship has consistently found that married individuals exhibit more traditional attitudes and beliefs than their unmarried counterparts. However, the realization of marriage equality invites an important but underexplored question: will associations linking marriage to traditionalism also emerge among sexual minorities, the “new” institutional participants? Results show that while marriage gaps often emerge in predictable ways for heterosexuals, patterns among sexual minorities are more uneven—and on occasion, correspond to an inversion of the marriage gap. Notably, married gay men tend to be more politically conservative but less supportive of traditional family values compared to their unmarried peers. By highlighting these heterogeneities using population-level data, this chapter sheds new light on the belief systems of LGBTQ+ people in a post-marriage equality context. In the final chapter, I explore cultural understandings of marriage among LGBTQ+ individuals in post-marriage equality Canada. The cultural assimilation of LGBTQ+ individuals into the heterosexual mainstream has long been debated in the sexuality literature, particularly in relation to marriage equality. However, the concept of assimilation is often vaguely defined, typically treated as an outcome of cultural absorption rather than a complex process of cultural change and perseverance. Drawing on insights from the sociology of sexuality and the literature on immigrant assimilation and ethnic boundaries, I fill these gaps by delineating micro-level assimilatory processes among LGBTQ+ people in Canada. Through analyses of 100 in-depth interviews with participants from a wide range of birth cohorts (1945 to 1997), I identity three interpretive frameworks that participants deploy to understand marriage—civil-rights struggle, individualized, and anti-normalizing—that correspond to three distinct boundary-making strategies at the individual-level: equalization, blurring and contraction. Overall, my results show that despite the general shift towards a post-gay ethos among younger SGMs, pathways of assimilation are more heterogenous and nonlinear than what existing accounts—and conventional wisdom—suggest

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