And to attend, as we have been here, to the role of witness in constituting the space of the speech-act [of marriage]: where does that get us but to the topic of marriage itself as theater --marriage as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world (a heterosexual couple secure in their right to hold hands in the street), continually reorienting around itself the surrounding relations of visibility and spectatorship, of the tacit and the explicit, of the possibility or impossibility of a given person's articulating a given enunciatory position? Marriage isn't always hell, but it is true that le mariage, c'est les autres; like a play, marriage exists in and for the eyes of others.
Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, “Introduction“
