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This article represents the reflexive journey of one of six couples that launched a Constitutional Challenge to the definition of marriage. An account of our motivation for marriage deconstructs the experience from two disparate, yet shared, spaces. Using reflection and documentation, we explore multiple truths and realities of what the case, and the ‘right to marry’, meant to us: then, and now – 10 years later. In recounting our story, we expose the embodiment of risk taken by sexual minorities when engaging in activism and claiming heteronormative public spaces. Each with our own epistemological foundation, we explore the pitfalls and possibilities of marriage activism and consider its role as a space of queer liberation. Illustrating how the struggle for equal marriage is situated in the messy notion of what it means to be queer, we posit two narratives as a means of challenging dominant discourse. To research marriage as an objective ‘reality’ is to desexualize and depersonalize queer identity; an autoethnographic account claims the subjective sexual identity and facilitates a discussion of the nuances and complexities of queer lives and choices. Given the vitriolic marriage debate, documenting and deconstructing our experience is an important element of queer history and praxis. Using reflexivity to explore our individual and collective perspectives and reflect upon how those experiences were shaped through intersection with family, friends, each other, community and society allows us to claim our insider positionality and challenge queer/straight binaries, force conversations about these binaries, and demonstrate how the personal is political.

In the context of service restructuring that has gravely impacted quality of life for social workers and the people with whom they work, this paper considers the ways that social work education can better support social justice-based social work practices in urban communities in Canada. The paper’s authors attended a fall 2013 Ryerson University forum that brought together critical social work educators and community-based activist social workers struggling to bring social justice-based practices to their work within restructured social services. Examples of social service restructuring include cuts to services, labour intensification, and increased managerialism, processes known as neoliberalism that have shifted discourses away from quality of life toward a focus on economic markers and efficiencies. The purpose of our forum was to explore ways in which social work curricula and pedagogical practices can be challenged and redefined in order to better support those efforts by social workers to resist such processes and to enhance social worker and client quality of life. Our paper presents the findings of this forum, including the presentation and discussion of a series of recommendations to reconfigure social work education so that it is more congruent with the needs of social justice-based practice in social work.

Many competing and contradictory ideologies and theoretical perspectives have converged and diverged to influence and shape a complex and disparate LGBTQ cultural identity. Indeed, LGBTQ organizing around equality rights issues, particularly marriage, incurs a critique from inside “the movement” that is as heated and rancorous as that of the external debate. The visibility of gays and lesbians has increased dramatically during the equal marriage debate as those marrying have been both publicly vilified and hailed as heroes. The implications of same-sex marriage for the LGBTQ community are significant as its members face changing social roles. Moreover, as these couples chart new ground, they are without the signposts that surround heterosexual couples. The goal of this paper is to explore, from a critical theoretical lens, how we understand the nature and possibility of same-sex marriage and deconstruct the binaries associated with it.

PurposeFollowing the landmark 2003 Ontario Court of Appeal decision legalizing same‐sex marriage, some same‐sex couples sought to formalize their unions through legal marriage. The purpose of this paper is to explore the personal and political reflections of recently married same‐sex couples on the meaning of their marriages for themselves, their partners, their community as well as the implications for progressive social change in the broader social world.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnographic approach was employed to semi‐structured in‐depth qualitative interviews with six lesbian and gay couples.FindingsAn emerging thesis is that, while seeking access to a most conventional and conformist institution, same‐sex couples inadvertently become “cutting edge” couples as they make public their declarations of love and commitment and model new and challenging notions of marriage.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper provides a snapshot of a small number of interviews that took place approximately 11 months after the Ontario Court of Appeal decision.Practical implicationsLaw should take into account the importance of social and legal recognition of marriage for all. The heteronormativity of marriage is thus challenged from within, to make these types of marriages truly cutting edge.Originality/valueThe paper provides evidence of the personal and political reflections of people who had the choice to get married and did, at a time when this was seen as really cutting edge. Few personal accounts exist which provide a picture of the continued importance of marriage to human beings.