Imagining Generations and Social Change

This chapter explains the generational theory of Karl Mannheim and enumerates five challenges that scholars face when studying generational change. It shows how these changes have impeded social scientific research on generations and why research on Millennials, Generation X, and other broad cohorts is flawed from its first premises. To counteract the existing generational mythology, this chapter outlines what is required to produce social scientific studies of generational change. Recent scholarship on the “social generation” provides a theoretical and methodological opening for finally solving Mannheim’s “problem of generations.” Building on cross-disciplinary scholarship on the cognitive and cultural dimensions of the process of imagination, this chapter argues that the “social imagination” is the key concept that helps explain how public opinion about gay marriage changed.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.

Narratives of Attitude Change and Resistant Subcultures

This chapter analyzes the exceptional cases-the people who appear to contradict the predictions of generational theory with respect to their discourses and attitudes about gay marriage. Young conservatives who oppose gay marriage and old liberals who have always supported gay rights are parts of resistant subcultures that insulated them from generational change. Similarly, older liberals who changed their attitudes about gay marriage illuminate the process by which generational change can cause period effects. It is argued that these exceptions are compatible with generational theory because of the difference between the cohort and the generation.

The Evolution of Public Opinion about Gay Marriage

Using data from the General Social Survey and the Pew Research Center, this chapter analyzes the extent to which the change in American public opinion about gay marriage between 1988 and 2014 is due to age, cohort, and period effects. It also examines the extent to which people’s moral judgments, attitudes, and beliefs about homosexuality account for the change in public opinion over time. The analyses show that cohort and period have effects on support for gay marriage, independent of ideology, worldview, and other demographic variables, but they leave unanswered questions about how and why cohort and period affect public opinion as they do.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers the implications that the book has for the issue of gay marriage and for our understanding of generational change. First, it discusses the likely future of gay marriage, given the pattern of generational change documented in the book. Second, it describes three lessons that the book teaches about generational change, which can help debunk the existing generational mythology and foster renewed efforts to understand the reality of generations.

The Imaginary Marriage Consensus

This chapter examines how people’s attitudes about marriage shape their discourses about gay marriage. On one hand, supporters and opponents disagree fiercely about the legal definition of marriage and whether or not marriage requires an opposite-sex couple. On the other hand, people of all ages and ideologies share a commonsense understanding of what marriage means in practice. The surface-level disagreement about the legal denotation of marriage therefore rests on a deeper consensus about the social connotations of marriage, and the characteristics of that imaginary understanding of marriage ultimately legitimate the battle over gay marriage for both supporters and opponents alike. The legalization of gay marriage may therefore hasten the reinstitutionalization of marriage, not its deinstitutionalization.

The Imagination and Attribution of Homosexuality

This chapter asks whether people’s beliefs about what causes people to be lesbian or gay can explain attitudes about gay marriage and why public opinion changed. Analyzing the metaphors and analogies that people use to talk about gay marriage shows that it is the imagination, not the attribution, of homosexuality that can explain the cohort-related variation in attitudes and discourses. Young cohorts use metaphors and analogies that characterize homosexuality as identity more often and in ways that construct homosexuality as morally equivalent to heterosexuality. By contrast, older cohorts use metaphors and analogies that characterize homosexuality as behavior more often and in ways that construct homosexuality as deviant. The cohorts’ implicit imagination of homosexuality, as measured in metaphors and analogies, therefore shapes their explicit attitudes, beliefs, and opinions about gay marriage.

Young and Old in the Cross Fire of the Culture Wars

This chapter describes the main discourses articulated by young and old cohorts to talk about gay marriage and isolates the effect of cohort on discourse. Discourses are a product of cohort and ideology, such that the culture war discourses of support and opposition were produced primarily by young liberals and older conservatives. Young conservatives and older liberals produced “middle-ground” discourses that show the tension created by the polarized discourses: their ideology pushed them toward one position on gay marriage, while their age cohort pushed them toward the other. Controlled comparisons of the discourses of ideologically identical parents and children show that cohort affects discourse via the attitudes they express about lesbians and gays. This chapter shows that the dynamics of the culture war should be measured dialogically in communicative interaction, not monologically in public opinion surveys.

Contesting Homosexuality’s Imagination, 1945–2015

This chapter describes how homosexuality in the American imagination changed during the lifetimes of contemporary Americans. It traces the history of political battles over gay rights and the evolution of media representations of lesbians and gays from the end of World War II until the legalization of gay marriage in all fifty states. The interactions among lesbian and gay activists, opponents, members of prominent epistemic communities (psychiatrists and journalists), and producers in the culture industries caused the social imagination of homosexuality to shift twice. Americans growing up during different historical periods therefore came of age imagining homosexuality to mean different things.