Abstract

This article is based on interviews with a small number of cohabitants who are critical of conventional marriage. It examines some of the ways in which the distinction between heterosexual cohabitation and marriage is rendered in the New Zealand context. Culturally available distinctions, like that between cohabitation and marriage, are used in the production of resistant counterdiscourses. However, difference can be rewritten as deviance and in this form is central to the exercise of disciplinary power. Contextual shifts in the assertion of a cohabitational self and a marital self contribute to the blurring of the distinction, further exposing the dilemmas of resistance based on difference.