Not (Quite) a Horse and Carriage

Love and the State: Gay Marriage in Spain

“…There is therefore a need to cast a critical eye over the potential differential economic and social impacts of samesex marriage on lesbians, especially in the Spanish context, where so much emphasis is put on the family as a source of reciprocal care and economic support that underlines not only the welfare system but the whole organisation of the State. Similar research is taking place in Canada through the work of Susan Boyd and Claire Young (2003;, and in the UK through the work of Rosemary Auchmuty (2004), Nicola Barker (2006), Davina Cooper (2001) and Carl Stychin (2006), among others. These authors have pointed out the need for a deeper, intersectional analysis of the differential effects of marriage on disenfranchised individuals.…”

Same-Sex Marriages

“…This was evident in how the same-sex partners we spoke to view the marriage/civil partnership distinction (for socio-legal analyses see Barker, 2006;Harding, 2011;Stychin, 2006). The majority were untroubled with the legal distinction between marriage and civil partnership.…”

Queer(ed) Risks: Life Insurance, HIV/AIDS, and the ‘Gay Question’

“…Radical lesbian and gay theorists have explored for many years the disciplinary role legal recognition of same-sex partnerships plays in distinguishing between`good' and`bad' gay relationships, and indeed partnerships more generally, illustrated most clearly by recent debates over the struggle for same-sex marriage in the United States, 84 and the system of civil partnerships in the United Kingdom. 85 Risk classifications grounded in civil partnership and marriage 642 demonstrate the role that the formal recognition of conjugal relationships can play in crafting exclusionary binaries between assimilated`traditional' relationship formations and other non-normative ones, illustrating the compelling concern that gay equality can shore up socio-cultural heteronorms, which unfairly disadvantage certain sexually deviant populations. 86 Constructions of the risk of HIV infection implicate not only gay men but racial groups, most significantly sub-Saharan African immigrants.…”