in reifying the uniqueness of heterosexual relationships and parenthood.Lesbian and gay parenthood was the preeminent bone of contention over the three-yearslong debate because of Section number 5 of the draft bill, which would recognize the right of one partner to adopt the biological children of the other partner, thus supposedly introducing a view of the family independent of the two genders (Garbagnoli, 2014). As a result, the section of the bill on adoption rights was so controversial that it had to be deleted in order for the law to pass, thus continuing to alienate lesbians and gays from kinship (Weston, 1991) and reasserting the control of heteronormativity over Italian politics despite the fact that the country has partially filled the legislative gap on this matter. This article investigates the parliamentary debate on the recognition of same-sex couples and their children that took place in Italy during the period from Specifically, through a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2001(Fairclough , 2003 of the speeches of Parliamentarians who opposed the section of the bill concerning lesbian and gay parenthood, the study addresses the following research questions: What are the discursive strategies currently used by the hegemonic heteronormative power to maintain the exclusive heterosexual access to reproduction and kinship? Did the hegemonic model of gender intelligibility inform legislative processes relating to family life and, if so, how?By framing the analysis within a poststructuralist feminist framework, the paper sheds light on the practices of power-knowledge (Foucault, 1978) that have been deployed to reallocate reproduction and kinship within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990) once the parliamentary debate in Italy issued a challenge to the hegemonic heteronormative power. Moreover, this research offers a contribution to the understanding of how the conservative resistance to non-heterosexual families supports the institutionalization of sexualities and reproduction within the patriarchal order, which creates normative standards on the practices of motherhood (Hays, 1996;Rich, 1977) and, at