Desiring What the Law Desires: A Semiotic View on the Normalization of Homosexual Sexuality

Abstract

Critics of the same-sex rights discourse claim that recent struggles for sexual equality is fostering a process of normalization that exerts both heteronormative and homonormative effects. This article follows this clue and seeks to identify some of the factors and the channels of the "transformation of desire" which is currently affecting the homosexual imagery. By looking at some key judgments both in the U.S. and Europe, it explores how lesbians, gays, and bisexuals acquire socio-political visibility and how the latter impacts on them. By capitalizing on a semiotic view of law, the article explains how the access to the legal field has forced lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to frame the theme of homosexuality in conformity with a categorial grid typical of traditional kinship models.In the past decades, the law has served as a major instrument to bring about momentous changes in the legal and policy framework of most Western states. Courts have been at the forefront of these developments and have served as public venues where previously abject, excluded subjects have acquired political visibility and have sought legal protection and recognition. This is the case of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals

From gay liberation to marriage equality: A political lesson to be learnt

“…8. I discuss at length this judgment in Croce (2014a). In that context, I also draw on two lucid and largely consonant contributions, namely, Franke (2004) and Ruskola (2005).…”

“…Elsewhere I have offered a Bourdesian view of how negotiations within the legal field affect laypeople who have recourse to law to settle disputes (Croce, 2014a). I also sought to explain how the effects of the negotiations taking place in a limited domain with reference to precise facts and events, as it were, spill over and alter social perception (Croce, 2012).…”

Epistemic Injustice and Judicial Discourse on Transgender Rights in India: Uncovering Temporal Pluralism

“…Complainants fit not only their claims to fit the elements of the claim, but themselves and their lived experiences as well. Such behaviour, as Croce (2014) has summarized, leads not only the individual complainant to think like the court does but the community of identity as well, even outside the court room. Thus, through such avenues of normative control, gender diverse persons, in becoming judiciable, begin to socially desire what the law desires and, to detrimental effects (discussed later), imagines only what the law can imagine.…”

“…In other words, for like cases to be treated like, the litigant must be presented as like. As such, rights-creation may foster sameness within court despite increasing cultural diversification (Croce, 2014, p. 403). However, such effects are not limited to the courthouse.…”

Family (Law) Assemblages: New Modes of Being (Legal)

“…While it is true that the law is just one of the discursive systems that imagine, (re)present, structure, and contribute to the reproduction of society, 101 it is nonetheless a semiotic domain that particularly conditions and constrains the symbolic resources through which social meanings and social taxonomies are produced and reproduced. 102 In effect, the deep-rooted link between the pragmatic force of legal devices as carriers of juridico-political efficacy and the legal symbolic repertoire gives an edge to the meanings and taxonomies fostered by the law. This is why, as we discussed above by building on Bourdieu, law's discursive constructs more often than not benefit from an ontological glorification that turns them into realities.…”