‘Why is our love an issue?’: same-sex marriage and the racial politics of the ordinary

Troubling Traditional and Conventional Families? Formalised Same-Sex Couples and ‘The Ordinary’

“…In discussing civil partnership ceremonies, others have equated the desire ‘to be ordinary’ with the desire to ‘be heterosexual’ (Peel and Harding, 2004: 45). Also discussing same-sex marriage, others still argue that the pursuit of the ordinary fits well notions of citizenship that hold whiteness as an aspirational ideal (Lenon, 2011). As a political aspiration, lesbian, gay, and bisexual claims to ordinariness are often understood as an aspect of the ‘new homonormativity’, which Duggan (2002) describes as a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them by promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.…”

“Driving wedges” and “hijacking” Pride

“…Rather than meaningfully engaging with the intersections of systems of oppression, the racial analogy "authorizes a political rhetoric of colorblindness that refuses to recognize the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation continue to be articulated and constituted in relation to one another in the ongoing struggles for equality and social belonging" (Bérubé 2001, 241-45, Eng 2010. The invocation of the American civil rights movement upholds the notion that racism exists primarily outside of Canada, and more to the point, beyond the world's most multicultural city (Lenon 2011, 361, Dryden 2015. As a result, the commonplace "deployment of this analogy productively constructs sexuality and race as separately occurring conditions, with gay bodies then understood as white and black bodies understood as heterosexual.…”

Homophobia and Homonationalism: LGBTQ Law Reform in Canada

“…Schotten retrieves the political context of Duggan's original intervention, pointing out that Duggan used the term homonormative to describe the political stance of right wing gay men in the United States such as columnist Andrew Sullivan who put forward the view that same-sex couples were the same as straights, except for their sexuality, and that they were part of the privatized consumer culture of US life. Lenon (2005Lenon ( , 2011 applies this critique to the same-sex marriage movement in Canada, highlighting its highly racialized presentation, both in terms of the dominance of White same-sex couples in the litigation and in terms of the deployment of the symbolism of the US civil rights movement as an analog for the equality struggles of same-sex couples. While, as Schotten points out, Berlant and Warner (1998) argued that the term homonormative was an impossibility as homosexual life could never be normative in a straight society and while Duggan developed the term homonormativity specifically to refer to the political claims of gay conservatives in US politics, in the years since, homonormativity has emerged as a shorthand for queer assimilation.…”

“…Discussions of homonationalism have emphasized the ways in which mainstream LGBTQ politics has linked the pursuit of rights to the celebration of national tolerance in contrast to the racialized other, especially Muslims in the wake of the war on terror (Puar, 2007). Other work has emphasized the racialized nature of mainstream LGBTQ political and legal activism in cases such as Canada's, including the overwhelming dominance of Whites in the movement and the ways in which the movement appropriated the rhetoric of US civil rights in the pursuit of marriage equality (Lenon, 2005(Lenon, , 2011. In the North American context, a number of scholars have recently considered the impact of settler colonialism for the politics of queer movements, exploring the ways in which queer movements have perpetuated the legacies and ongoing practices of colonialism (Morgensen, 2010;Smith, 2010).…”