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PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2014.
Stigma and Exclusion in Cross-Cultural Contexts Special Issue, guest edited by Annie Pohlman, Sol
Rojas-Lizana and Maryam Jamarani.
ISSN: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal
PORTAL is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia.
The ‘Ties that Bind Us’: The Hidden Knots of Gay Marriage
Bronwyn Winter, University of Sydney
Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each
other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I
support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative. (David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom, Keynote Speech at Conservative Party National Conference, Manchester, 5 October
2011).
Gay marriage has become a major transnational gay rights issue. It is considered a key
marker of equal citizenship between gay and straight individuals: a step forward in the
normalisation and thus de-stigmatisation of homosexuality. As Lisa Duggan has put it,
‘marriage equality has become the singularly representative issue for the mainstream
LGBT rights movement, often standing in for all the political aspirations of queer
people’ (Duggan 2011: 1). The proposition that legalisation of gay marriage represents
progress is assumed to be self-evident. Scholarship over the last two decades, however
(such as Polikoff 1993; Duggan 2003; Ahmed 2006; Puar 2006; Browne 2011;
Halberstam 2012), has challenged that assumption, and Puar in particular has noted that
this ‘progress’ is concurrent with other forms of exclusion. In this article I will further
explore these challenges in considering how states have used gay marriage to enhance
their social-justice credentials and popularity while leaving other social justice issues,
including some gay rights issues, unaddressed. I argue that gay marriage is a convenient
liberal smokescreen that, in reassuring progressive elites (straight and gay), deflects the
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PORTAL, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2014. 2
focus from neoliberal, so-called security and other discriminatory measures taken by
states that are far more worrying for homosexuals (and indeed, many others) in the
longer term. Further, I will examine the force of the religious right’s opposition to gay
marriage, which is unsurprising yet often startling in its vehemence. The force of this
opposition, however, simultaneously reinforces the progressive credentials of
governments adopting gay marriage and makes it difficult for anyone else who wishes
to be considered progressive to maintain a critique of the ‘marriage equality’ agenda. As
Michael Warner put it as early as 1999, in relation to the debate in the USA, ‘there is
something unfashionable, and perhaps untimely, about any questioning of gay marriage
as a goal in politics … At this point the only people arguing against gay marriage, it
seems, are those homophobic dinosaurs’ (Warner 1999: 120).
My main interest here is not with the individual motivations of lesbians and gay men
who wish to marry nor even with the egalitarian rationale of the pro-gay-marriage social
movement—although I will comment on the latter. It is the harnessing of the marriage
rights agenda by states that is my concern. I will also move away from the copiously
explored site of the USA to look at three other case study sites: Argentina, France and
Australia. Argentina is one of six countries outside Europe to recognise same-sex
marriage at the time of this writing. The others are: Canada (2005); South Africa
(2006); Brazil, Uruguay and New Zealand (2013). France is the second most recent of
ten European countries to legalise same-sex marriage (May 2013, a few days after
Brazil), the most recent being the United Kingdom (July 2013). Other European bills
are, at the time of this writing, under discussion in parliament in Andorra, Finland,
Germany (where the September, 2013 re-election of Angela Merkel is nonetheless
likely to delay legalisation), Ireland and Luxembourg. Outside Europe, Nepal and
Taiwan are considering legislation.
As for Australia, it was among the first countries in the world to formally recognise
same-sex relationships for immigration purposes (since 1982, with successive changes
in legislation since that time). Although the current ‘interdependency’ framework for
gay immigration purposes is distinct from that for married or de facto heterosexual
couples, it does signal both a popular and institutional recognition of gay couple
relationships. Notwithstanding current Federal opposition to gay marriage, opinion polls
cited by Australian Marriage Equality indicate that 75 percent of Australians consider it
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PORTAL, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2014. 3
only a matter of time before same sex marriage is legalised (AME website), no doubt all
the more because some Australian states already recognise civil partnerships in one
form or another.
These three countries are chosen, first, because they are culturally and geographically
quite distinct yet present significant similarities as concerns their political,
socioeconomic and legislative structures. They are all liberal capitalist democracies with
a white and Western or Western-focused ruling class. They all have or are developing
some sort of human rights framework within national or supranational legislation or
statutory bodies: the European Union (EU) Convention on Human Rights, 1950; the
Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) commitment to the formation of a
human rights body, 2013; and the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), set
up in 1986. Second, gay marriage legislation is either quite recent or still under
discussion (2010 in Argentina, 2013 in France and not yet legalised in Australia). Third,
opposition to gay marriage in all three countries has been ferocious. While the Catholic
church has been one of the main players in this opposition in all three cases, and while
the basic argument among the opposition has been a defence of the heterosexual-based
family unit, the types of alliances formed and the discursive construction of the
opposition has presented national specificities. Fourth, in all cases, advocacy of gay
marriage, by gay rights movements and the political class alike, has tapped into a
globalised LGBT rights discourse, mobilising the rhetoric of equality, inclusiveness and
human rights.
To date, the English-language scholarly literature has overwhelmingly focused on the
USA, sometimes in a ‘post-9/11’ frame, with some examination as well of Australia and
EU countries. There is little scholarly literature as yet on gay marriage debates in
Argentina and France, in either English, Spanish or French, but a great deal of
discussion in online media of various sorts. Most of the existing critiques revolve
around some version of the ideas of ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan 2003), that is,
assimilation of the ‘right’ homosexuals into a heterosexist societal structure, with
concurrent exclusion of less assimilable sexual Others, and ‘homonationalism’ (Puar
2006), the harnessing of a ‘gay rights’ agenda to Western nationalist and imperialist
ends (see also Polikoff 1993).
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Before discussing my three country case studies in more detail, I will briefly, for the
purpose of contextualisation, situate gay marriage campaigns within the context of a
global LGBT rights agenda, and canvass some of the existing critiques of these
campaigns. The focus of this discussion is less on the national and transnational social
movements themselves than on the gradual institutionalisation of LGBT rights
discourse within the UN, as it is this UN-isation of LGBT rights that has provided the
political and discursive framework within which national governments have placed their
‘LGBT equality’ agendas. It is well beyond my brief here to retrace the entire history of
the global LGBT rights agenda (or indeed, of the shifts in nomenclature from ‘gay,’ to
‘gay and lesbian,’ to ‘lesbian and gay,’ to the inclusion of ‘bisexual,’ ‘transgender’ and
occasionally ‘intersex’ and even ‘queer’). Its beginnings can, however, roughly be
traced to the late 1970s, with the formation in 1978 of the International Gay Association
(which subsequently became the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and then,
following the ‘alphabet soup’ imperative of including all sexual orientations and
identities apart from heterosexual: the International Lesbian, Gay, bisexual, trans and
intersex Association). Among other things, ILGA was the first lesbian and gay NGO to
obtain special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC),
in 1993. Subsequent initiatives were the founding in 1990 in the USA of the
International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission and the IDAHO initiative:
International Day Against Homophobia, initiated in Québec as a national event in 2003,
and officially launched as IDAHO at the 2006 World Conference on LGBT Human
Rights, also in Montreal, organised in July to precede the Outgames.
The 2006 Montreal conference could be considered a culmination point in the global
mainstreaming of the global LGBT rights agenda that had been building over the
previous decade and, in particular as concerns us here, of the global gay marriage
campaign. At the time of the conference, gay marriage was already legal in four
countries, three of them in the EU: the Netherlands (2001), Belgium (2003), Spain
(2005) and Canada (2005). The so-called Montreal Declaration on LGBT human rights,
which had been written by the international organising group well prior to the
conference, was presented at the final plenary of the conference. It was also read by
Martina Navratilova and Mark Tewsbury at the ensuing opening ceremony of the
Montreal Outgames. The Declaration clearly articulated the gay marriage demand:
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LGBT people are not isolated individuals. We fall in love, and establish relationships and
families–however configured. For many of us, these relationships and families are the most
important parts of our lives. Unless they are legally recognized, our rights to equality and dignity
cannot be fully secured …
We therefore demand that all governments that have not yet done so reform family law in order to
reflect the growing diversity of family life,
- by opening-up legal marriage to same-sex couples,
- introducing similar partnership rights for all unmarried couples, and
- ensuring equal access for all to every option for parenthood. (Montreal Declaration 2006).
The Montreal Declaration informed the Yogyakarta Principles adopted that November
in Yogyakarta, Indonesia by a committee of human rights experts, chaired by the then
UN Human Rights Commissioner and keynote speaker at the Montreal conference,
Montreal native Louise Arbour. Principle 24 concerns ‘The Right to Found a Family’:
‘Everyone has the right to found a family, regardless of sexual orientation or gender
identity. Families exist in diverse forms. No family may be subjected to discrimination
on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender identity of any of its members’
(Yogyakarta Principles 2006). This sentence is followed by a number of dot-points that
articulate parenting and couple rights.
The Montreal Declaration and the Yogyakarta Principles remain firmly within the
framework of the family as codified within the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Not only do human rights include the right to marry and found a family, but the
UN Declaration also tells us that the family is ‘the natural and fundamental group unit
of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State’ (Article 16, para. 3). The
Yogyakarta Principles may include a nod to ‘diverse forms’ of family but the idea of
family itself, aligned to the heteropatriarchal nuclear-family model of modern capitalist
nation-states, is not at any time questioned.
The two documents were nonetheless considered a landmark in advancing the global
LGBT rights agenda, an agenda about which the reformist-assimilationist bases, and the
‘alphabet-soup’ grouping of all ‘alternative’ sexual and gender identities, have not been
seriously questioned either by the UN and other inter- or supra-national rights bodies,
democratic nation-states or gay rights organisations. This ‘homonormalisation’ did not,
however, prevent the Yogyakarta Principles from meeting with strong opposition from a
number of UN members when they were presented at the UN Human Rights Council on
26 March 2007, with the support of 54 member states. On 18 December 2008, a
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Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (a French and Dutch initiative),
and signed by 66 member states (including all EU countries), was presented by
Argentina to the UN General Assembly. The Declaration reaffirmed the principles of
the 1948 UN Declaration, including ‘the principle of non-discrimination which requires
that human rights apply equally to every human being regardless of sexual orientation
or gender identity’ (UN General Assembly 2008, article 3). A counter-declaration at the
initiative of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and read by Syria, was
presented the following day. Most recently, the UN Human Rights Council passed its
first resolution on ‘Human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity’ (Resolution
L.9 Rev.1, 16 June 2011).
The persistent opposition by most (albeit not all) Muslim countries to decriminalisation
of homosexuality has provided a new means for Western and pro-Western nations to
distinguish themselves as progressive in relation to the essentialised Islamic (terrorist)
other. In her analysis of ‘homonationalism,’ Jasbir Puar argues that in tying ‘the
recognition of homosexual subjects, both legally and representationally,’ to nationalist
and imperialist agendas, thus constructing a specific ‘biopolitical’ profile of the gay
citizen, Western homonormativist assimilation helps to reinforce the Othering of those
beings deemed unacceptable within these biopolitics (Puar 2006: 9 ff). The ‘Muslim
world’ becomes once again essentialised as a-historic, brutal and the anathema of
progress and modernity. Much as ‘women’s rights’ were used as a moral justification
for the ‘War on Terror’ in 2001 to 2003 (Delphy 2002; Winter 2002a; Winter 2006;
Eisenstein 2007), ‘gay rights,’ defined homonormatively, have become the new
indicator of Western moral superiority. We have gay marriage, gay businesses, gay TV
shows, while they have stonings, rapes and honour killings. For Puar, writing within a
US post-9/11 context, ‘they’ is the Muslim other, although the Othering does not stop
there.
Yet, the fact remains that the countries most fervently opposed to any sort of rights for
gay people are those where religion—Islam but also Christianity—and state are the
most heavily imbricated. Homosexuality is, for example, illegal in Christian-dominated
Uganda and Cameroon as well as in many Caribbean and Pacific-Island states that are
also Christian dominated. It remains illegal in 77 countries and is punishable by death in
five of these as well as in Muslim-controlled regions of Nigeria. On a national level, in
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2013 Nigeria became one of a number of countries to regress on gay and lesbian rights,
adopting on 30 May a law condemning any gay or lesbian couples who marry to
fourteen years in prison, with a ten-year sentence for gay and lesbian couples who
merely show affection in public. With this sort of brutal opposition, largely fuelled by
religious lobbies, it is not difficult to understand why gay marriage has become an
international cause célèbre and it becomes difficult to argue against it if one wishes to
be considered progressive.
It is, however, arguable, even demonstrable, that notwithstanding the vicious opposition
of governments such as that of Nigeria, marriage is not at the top of the agenda in
countries where even to exist as gay or lesbian is punishable by death, prison, corporal
punishment, fines and/or various other forms of legally sanctioned economic
discrimination and social ostracism. Yet our understandings of human rights are heavily
influenced by positivist thinking: according to such thinking, human rights are
incrementally obtained in a linear pathway of progress that inevitably moves forward
and upward. The legal recognition of gay marriage and family, as the Montreal
Declaration argues, has come to be seen as an essential (final?) step in ‘fully securing’
gay and lesbian ‘dignity and equality,’ and thus a marker of the ‘advanced’ state of
democracies. That gay marriage is not necessarily the most pressing matter in Uganda
or Saudi Arabia does not, for its advocates, mean that it does not represent the finality of
gay rights for citizens of those countries. According to such arguments, Uganda and
Saudi Arabia have simply not ‘advanced’ that far yet.
To set up gay marriage as the pinnacle of recognition of gay ‘dignity and equality,’ as
per Article 16 of the 1948 UN Declaration, is to frame ‘LGBT rights’ in a particular
way. I am not here arguing for culturally-relativist definitions of human rights (such as
the 1981 Islamic Declaration), as a counter to the presumed ‘Western hegemony’ of
human rights philosophy. I do believe it is possible to identify a common humanity and
fundamental needs of every human being, whatever particular approach one takes:
human rights, human capabilities (Nussbaum 2000) or so on. I am, however, suggesting
that what the authors of the 1948 Declaration decided were human rights is open to both
interpretation and contestation, as feminists have argued for many decades in relation to
the family, which is the primary site of the gendering of social relations. As such, it is
also the basis for explicit or tacit ideological, legal and cultural codification not only of
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what women are and what women’s place is in society, but also of the forms of
punishment women are to receive if they transgress. That most violence against women
happens within or in relation to a family context is noteworthy. I note in passing that
gay marriage has not and will not resolve the issue of domestic violence, and am
concerned at the naivety of the idea often advanced by gay marriage advocates that the
latter will somehow in itself subvert or transform the institution of marriage. I have to
date observed nothing and seen no research that bears out such an assumption.
These codes are so deeply ingrained in our cultures as to be considered natural (Winter
2002b). Gender, for example, is considered a ‘normal’ social division and basis for
social organisation, and to be properly gendered one has to exhibit certain physical and
psychological characteristics. The politics of transgender has largely been built on that
premise: that gender is a normal part of social relations, and if one has the misfortune to
be born into the ‘wrong’ gender, then this should be surgically changed. The idea that
social relations might be much improved, and ‘dignity and equality’ more wholly
realised, by doing away entirely with the concept of gender, has little currency in global
LGBT rights conversations.
Indeed, it appears to be inconceivable, so overwhelming is the necessity to have a
gender—on every identity document, every form one fills out, through every act of self-
identification—as is the necessity to be situated in relation to official coupledom.
Citizenship is in fact not only sexual but also marital—as David Cameron, cited at the
beginning of this article, clearly reminds us. To be married—for both heterosexuals and
homosexuals—is to better conform to what it is to be fully human, as encoded in the
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights among other documents. Families are at
the base of social fabric; they are protected by states through legislation and cultural
norms. To be part of a family is to more fully exist. To be part of a legally recognised
couple is to more fully exist. To procreate or to adopt children is to more fully exist. In
doing so, one conserves ‘the ties that bind us’ as a nation, as David Cameron reminds us.
The implicit flipside of this equation is that not to be married and procreate means that
one less fully exists, is socially, culturally and emotionally deprived and indeed deficient.
Will the unmarried and childless gay man or lesbian become the new pariah of a
homonormalised nation?
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As pointed out by Puar and by others such as Alexandra Chasin (2000), who analyses
the impact of capitalist consumerism on gay politics, the national ‘us’ is defined by
elites and their social, financial and cultural capital. As a core demand of the global
LGBT rights movement, gay marriage remains the province of liberal and largely
secularised capitalist democracies. As a sign of gay normalcy, it is also, in this global
neoliberal context, necessarily synonymous with cosmopolitanism. Assimilated gay
culture is one of the attributes of prosperous global cities. It is a selling point of inner-
city tourist culture, flourishing in Oxford Street or the Inner West in Sydney, Barrio
Norte or San Telmo in Buenos Aires or the Marais in Paris. It is noteworthy that in both
Argentina and France, the national and international media focus following the passage
of the gay marriage laws was on urban professional white men (for example: Pink News
2010; Le Monde 25 May 2013; Chrisafis 2013). To be gay and to be married is to have
access both to full citizenship of one’s country and to be an ambassador for that country,
or at least its cosmopolitan urban centres, as a desirable place to travel, live and do
business—and indeed, migrate. In immigration legislation in most countries,
immigrants married to a national have easier access to visas and shorter waiting periods
for work and residency permits than civil-union partners or those in non-formalised
couple relationships.
Absent from this glowing scenario of the modern, egalitarian and cosmopolitan nation is
the fact that marriage operates to reinforce already-existing differentiation between
classes of immigrants. While gay marriage legislation and the improved immigration
opportunities it opens up are certainly not colour-coded in the letter of the law,
screening processes are nonetheless usually different depending on the country of origin
of the spouse. For example, those coming from the less wealthy countries of the so-
called Global South come under greater suspicion of having entered into marriages of
convenience. Also, in some cases, as has been noted in relation to France’s new law,
existing bilateral agreements concerning which country’s law is to be observed
concerning recognition of marriage can work against transnational couples (Trouillard
2013). Moreover, gay marriage does nothing to address the ongoing issue of asylum for
lesbians and gay men for whom liberal democracies are more often than not closely
guarded fortresses (Jansen & Spijkerboer 2011; Winter 2012). Even as these
democracies open their doors (just a crack) to gay asylum seekers, they reinforce both
the reification of the cultures and countries of origin as a-historic and backward, and the
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construction of a performative ‘gay’ identity aligned to a Western stereotypical model
(Luibhéid 2008; Millbank 2009). In fact, argues Sandip Roy, ‘legalizing same-sex
marriage may be less about gay rights and more about codifying an ideal of European
values—another brick in the wall of Fortress Europe before it’s too late’ (Roy 2005).
How, asks Ilgin Yorukoglu, writing about Turkish gay minorities in Germany, ‘do we
explain this double standard, one that encourages tolerance and invites gay tourists and
the “creative class” to the table on the one hand, while calling for stricter border
controls to curb immigration on the other?’ (Yorukoglu 2010: 435).
More broadly, as I suggested at the beginning of this article, actions by governments in
favour of gay marriage cost nothing; this is particularly the case for left-leaning
governments for which the religious right is not usually a key constituency. On the
contrary, in fact, support for gay marriage improves governments’ popularity among a
significant electoral demographic, and even right-wing governments who may be
assumed to be more attentive to religious hardliners have learned to play to popular
opinion, as we will see presently in the case of the new Abbott government in Australia.
Support for liberal-democratic social justice issues like gay marriage is also useful in
deflecting attention from other measures that are far less likely to advance gay, or
anyone’s, human rights, as we will see in looking at all three case studies.
Argentina
In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America, and the tenth in the world,
to legalise same-sex marriage. This move has resulted in the qualification of Argentina,
on numerous online media and encyclopedia sites, as the most ‘advanced’ Latin
American country as concerns gay rights. The Senate approved the law on 14 July, by
33 votes to 27, with three abstentions, after a fourteen-hour debate. The vote was
televised live and Peronist president Cristina Kirchner also signed off on the law on
national television on 22 July. According to an article in the British press, five hundred
marriages were celebrated between that date and 25 December (that number increased
to 6,000 by June 2012), and some three hundred suppliers were explicitly targeting the
gay marriage market. Gay (male?) spouses-to-be were reported to be much bigger
spenders than their heterosexual counterparts, by some 30 percent (Kelly 2012). A ‘gay
marriage’ tourism industry has even developed, oriented primarily around Buenos Aires,
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the ‘gay capital’ of South America, although some tourism websites also provide advice
on regional Argentinian destinations such as Rosario, Mendoza, Bariloche and Ushuaia.
Yet some commentators have noted that gay marriage, often framed, as I have
suggested above, as the culmination of progress on gay rights, has in Argentina lain
more at the beginning than at the end of the road. Discrimination and violence against
gay men and lesbians in regional Argentina—anywhere, in fact, outside the
cosmopolitan porteño culture of central Buenos Aires—continues virtually unimpeded,
and gay marriage has done little if anything to alter this. The extent of the problem was
brought home some months prior to the passage of the gay marriage law by a murder
case that has become a cause célèbre among LGBT rights activists in Argentina (Dillon
2011; Greenfield 2011). On 7 March 2010, 27-year old Natalia ‘Pepa’ Gaitán, a highly
visible and butch-looking lesbian living in the city of Córdoba, was murdered by her
girlfriend’s stepfather, Daniel Toledo, who objected to his stepdaughter leaving home to
leave with Gaitán (Greenfield 2011). A wave of local protest ensued, with graffiti and
posters denouncing this murder as a hate crime. As lawyer Natalia Milisenda put it: ‘this
is a case of gender violence, which is not recognised in public policies, but which
victimises many lesbian women, simply for the fact that they are women and that they
are freely exercising their sexuality’ (cited in Vinter 2010). Yet the court refused to
acknowledge that Gaitán was targeted as a lesbian and as a woman refusing to conform
to feminine stereotypes, and Toledo was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for
‘domestic violence’ (Greenfield 2011). The following year, the 8 March international
women’s day protest in Córdoba commemorated Gaitán’s murder, focusing on femicide
and other forms of violence against women including lesbians (Qualiafolk 2011).
Other forms of violence against women continue to be a grave problem in Argentina. A
few days after the gay marriage law was signed, there was a large demonstration in
Buenos Aires in favour of fully legalising abortion, which is subject to strict restrictions
under the 1921 Penal Code, still in force. The Code qualifies abortion as a ‘crime
against life,’ and allows it in only two exceptional cases: where there is immediate risk
to the mother’s life and in the case of rape of a mentally incompetent woman (that is,
developmentally disabled or mentally ill). In practice, however, even in these cases
some doctors will raise conscientious objections and refuse to perform the abortions.
One is led to ask why, in these two areas that are both related to the idea of sexual
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citizenship and sexual rights, and that have historically met with resistance for the same
reasons: ‘nature, morals and “common good”’ (Rawson 2012: 177, my translation),
there have been such diametrically opposing political outcomes. The outcomes are all
the more surprising because in other countries, the recognition of women’s sexual and
reproductive rights has preceded the recognition of gay relationships by many decades.
Milagros Belgrano Rawson suggests that this apparently paradoxical difference in
outcome is related to the ongoing refusal by the state to consider women as full sexual
citizens (Rawson 2012: 177 ff). Rawson also suggests that the greatest impact of illegal
abortion is on poor women, as richer women have access to safe but costly abortions in
Argentina (illegal) or overseas (legal).
While it would be counterproductive and indeed absurd to consider the continuing
struggle of Argentinian women for freedom from violence and for full reproductive and
sexual rights as somehow in ‘competition’ with gay rights, it is nonetheless telling that a
relatively cosmetic issue, that of gay marriage, has been addressed while more
substantive and even legally-supported discriminations and violence against gay men
and all women, straight or lesbian, persist. Rawson has offered a second reason for this
‘rights’ discrepancy: a certain political opportunism by president Kirchner and her party
(Rawson 2012: 177 ff). Kirchner, like her late husband and former president Nestor,
was elected on, among other things, a human rights platform.
Moreover, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis Argentina’s inflation was running
at some 25 percent in 2010, its highest level since the devaluation of the peso in 2002,
and the government and president, in the lead up to elections the following year, were
dogged by allegations of corruption and defections from the right wing of their Peronist
ranks. Kirchner badly needed to score some political points and show the world that
Argentina could hold its own among richer, more ‘advanced’ democracies of the West.
Argentina’s Western aspirations are not only political and economic, they are also
cultural, with strong affinities with Europe (particularly France and Italy, perhaps more
so than Spain in some respects). Indeed, Argentina is often considered the ‘whitest’
country in Latin America, both statistically (an estimated 97 percent of the population is
of European origin: CIA statistics), and because of the (need to reaffirm) identity, image
and aspirations of middle-class porteños (inhabitants of Buenos Aires) (Joseph 2012).
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Argentina nonetheless remains a strongly Catholic country, even if many Argentinian
Catholics, like French Catholics, are more lapsed than practising. If Kirchner stopped
short of opposing the Church on abortion—on the contrary, she herself has clearly
declared on more than one occasion that she is against abortion—she did find herself at
loggerheads with the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, over gay
marriage. The relationship between Bergoglio and Kirchner had been tense for some
time, with Bergoglio going so far as to accuse Kirchner of ‘persecuting’ Argentinian
Catholics. The tension reached a peak at the time of legalisation of gay marriage, with
Bergoglio prominently at the head of demonstrations against the law, claiming gay
marriage was the work of the Devil.
Apart from gay marriage (and abortion) Bergoglio also took the Argentine government
to task over the issue of poverty in Argentina. (Such a stance is reminiscent of that taken
by George Pell in Sydney. Pell has always been a staunch defender of Australia’s poor,
but an equally staunch opponent of gay rights, so much so that he inspired the mocking
lead float in Sydney’s popular Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade in 2004, ‘St
Fairy’s,’ a parody on St Mary’s, Sydney’s Catholic cathedral.) The issue of poverty in
Argentina is all the more vexed because the methodology and measures used by the
official government statistics office, Indec, are wildly at variance with those used in a
parallel study by the Argentine Catholic University’s Observatory for Social Debt
(ODSA). Indec puts the 2012 poverty rate at some 6 percent of Argentina’s population
of 40 million, while ODSA puts it at around 26 percent (ODSA 2013, Mercopress 2013).
The poverty rate in Argentina can also be linked to race and origin: regional migration
(that is, from other South American countries) is the main source of Argentina’s low-
and unskilled labour force (often undocumented) and accounts for roughly three
quarters of all immigration.
The legalisation of gay marriage in Argentina is thus, notwithstanding the global
context, very much a local story. Its passage with much fanfare at a time when
Argentina was facing multiple political and economic difficulties, enabled the Argentine
state simultaneously to position itself as the vanguard of modernity, human rights and
‘sexual citizenship’ in Latin America and to gloss over some other, deeper problems,
such as the refusal of complete sexual citizenship to women more generally, alleged
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political corruption and ongoing poverty, in a country where some 40 percent of the
population is under 25.
France
If in Argentina the legalisation of gay marriage appears to be a form of opportunistic
grandstanding by a centre-left regime confronted with political and economic woes in
other areas, the politically and sometimes physically violent French gay marriage debate
has emerged, as French political debates often do, as a battle for the meaning of the
Republic and the prerogative to define it.
The ‘against’ campaign has been particularly strong, its main organisers being a
coalition called La Manif pour tous (Demonstration for all), so named as a counter-
slogan to the Mariage pour tous (Marriage for all) slogan of the pro-gay marriage
campaign, which was also the name commonly given to the bill to open marriage to
same-sex couples, that became law on 17 May 2013. The Manif pour tous, a coalition of
a number of organisations, although many of them exist in name only, claimed its 13
January 2013 demonstration against gay marriage to be the most significant
mobilisation of the right since 1984. In that year, parents, teachers and priests mobilised
against a proposal to increase government control of (mostly Catholic) private schools,
bringing about the downfall of the Mauroy government, the most progressive of the
Mitterrand years.
Although less than half the size of the 24 June 1984 demonstration, the 13 January one
was certainly large, with 800,000 or 340,000 participants (depending on whether one
believes the organisers’ figures or those of the police) (Hopquin & Laurent 2013). It
was certainly much larger than either the 16 December 2012 or 27 January 2013
demonstrations in favour of gay marriage, which indicates that the use of numbers of
people demonstrating as the primary measure of the success of a political movement is
ill-advised, given that Manif pour tous failed where Mariage pour tous succeeded.
The size of the Manif pour tous mobilisation is nonetheless indicative of the deep-seated
Catholic-based conservatism that continues to exert influence in France, which is
simultaneously the pioneer of Republican secularism and the ‘eldest daughter of the
Catholic Church’ (because of the 496 conversion of Clovis, King of the Franks and of
Gaul, who consequently became the Church’s first son). In keeping with these co-
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existing and sometimes warring, sometimes cooperating values, the imagery and
rhetoric used by the Manif pour tous, like those used by the French extreme right party
The National Front, combined these ‘two Frances’ into a message aimed at claiming the
moral high ground in the latest battle for the Republic.
The Manif pour tous expresses its opposition to gay marriage as follows:
The ‘Marriage for all’ bill radically overhauls the Civil code by systematically removing the words
‘husband,’ ‘wife,’ ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in favour of asexual and undifferentiated terms (notably
‘parents’). This bill thus intends to legally remove sexual difference and calls into question the
foundation of human identity: sexual difference and the filiation that results from it. (Manif pour
tous website 2013, my translation).
One of the most powerful tactics used by the Manif pour tous has been the Mariannes
pour tous. Marianne is the feminised symbol of the Republic, emerging from popular
culture among the French revolutionaries to become celebrated in statues, busts, coins
and stamps, and used discursively in a range of political debates (Winter 2009). She has
even become part of the official logo of the Republic (since 1999): her profile is
featured in reverse silhouette as the white stripe of the French blue-white-red flag.
Marianne’s metonymical force is difficult to underestimate. Today, (s)he who says
‘Marianne’ says ‘the Republic’: its values, its institutions, its political culture.
In the various demonstrations of the Manif pour tous, groups of Mariannes pour tous
have featured prominently. All young and long-haired, and mostly albeit not all white,
the Mariannes pour tous appear clothed in flowing white dresses with the red Phrygian
bonnets (that came to symbolise liberty at the time of the Revolution) decorated with
tricolour rosettes. They typically wear sashes reminiscent of beauty contests showing
the region they come from (Limousin, Brittany and so on), and hold aloft copies of the
French Civil Code, which the May 17 law amended. Following the adoption of the law,
they have demonstrated wearing gags to symbolise the ‘silencing of democracy.’ The
Mariannes pour tous also have a Facebook page.
In sporting the regalia of the Republic and carrying one of its key political and legal
symbols, the Civil code (dating from the Napoleonic era of codification of French law),
the Mariannes pour tous embody the Republic: both the importance of the centralised
state and the equally important rights and duties of citizens. Through their youthful
(reproduction-ready) femininity, wearing sashes that denote not Republican departments
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but pre-Republican regions, the Mariannes pour tous recall not the revolution but the
counterrevolution, the France profonde of local cultures and their identification with the
land and the Church, that stands in opposition to hegemonic Paris. Embodying this
mixed imagery, and standing behind, under or alongside the Manif pour tous banners
and placards showing an image of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, the
Mariannes pour tous reinforce the idea that the Republic is synonymous with the
heterosexual nuclear family, anchored in the deep traditions of French culture.
The opposition to gay marriage in France has also involved some violent incidents, the
most extreme of which being the 21 May 2013 suicide of extreme-right historian and
essayist Dominique Venner, who shot himself in front of the altar of the Notre Dame
Cathedral in Paris, an act witnessed by some 1,500 people. A few hours previously, he
had published a text on his blog calling on the Manif pour tous not to stop opposing gay
marriage but to extend their campaign to opposing an Islamic takeover of France
through immigration. To make this opposition count, wrote Venner, ‘new, spectacular
and symbolic gestures’ would be needed to ‘rock people out of their drowsiness, shake
up anesthetised consciences and awaken the memory of our origins’ (Venner 2013).
Venner’s action was certainly spectacular, and as Greens Deputy Noël Mamère put it in
his own blog a few days later, it ‘adds to the rising power of a grassroots fascism that is
corrupting much of the French right’ (Mamère 2013).
The force of the opposition to gay marriage in France, and the sort of symbolism and
rhetoric it has deployed, makes it very difficult to take a critical attitude towards the
French gay marriage campaign. Like other polarising debates such as that over the
Islamic headscarf since 1989, or the 2009 ‘national identity’ debate initiated by then
president Nicolas Sarkozy, the gay marriage debate has become imbricated with a
broader ideological battle for the Republic.
Yet, in looking at the carefully orchestrated 29 May broadcast of France’s first gay
marriage, it becomes clear whose Republic has won for the moment. The marriage,
between two youngish to middle aged white professional men (one a 40-year-old
business owner, one a 30-year-old public servant), took place in Montpellier, dubbed
France’s most gay-friendly city by gay e-zine Têtu, and was celebrated as are all
marriages in France, in the city hall. According to gay rights campaigners this marriage
had been in preparation for many months before the passage of the law, with both
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socialist party mayor of Montpellier, Hélène Mandroux, and the couple in question,
lobbying to have the first official marriage celebrated there (Thomas Fouquet-Lapar,
personal communication, 4 October 2013). The ceremony had easy-listening marriage
music to accompany it, being preceded by ‘L.O.V.E.,’ sung by Nat King Cole, and
followed by Frank Sinatra singing ‘Love and marriage go together like a horse and
carriage.’ Before marrying the couple, Mayor Mandroux, standing between a portrait of
president François Hollande and a bust of Marianne, gave a speech in which the
government’s version of the link between marriage and the republic was made clear. In
advocating respect for others and respect for differences, Mandroux reminded her large
audience that this respect is core to French values. By adopting the ‘marriage for all’
law, said Mandroux, France, the ‘country of human rights,’ advanced in its
modernisation, moving ever closer to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that
are the ‘fundamental values’ of the Republic. ‘It is through these values that guide us,
inspire us and that are beyond us, that we honour the greatness of politics and the
legitimacy of the mandate that is given us’ (‘us’ being the government) (Mandroux
2013, my translation). Mandroux added that in being able to ‘live their love in the light
of day’ through the institution of marriage, gay men and lesbians had now ‘gained
access to the same rights and the same duties’ as all other citizens (the idea of
citizenship in France involving both in relatively equal measure). The message that
Mandroux, perhaps unintentionally, conveyed in this last statement, is that access to full
citizenship necessarily goes together with (access to) marital status. Whatever
progressive aspirations Mandroux, Hollande, Christiane Taubira (Justice Minister and
author of the law) and French gay rights movements may have, the rhetoric employed
by Mandroux (as well as by Hollande, whom she cited) harnesses gay marriage to the
service of the Republican nation as firmly as the love horse is harnessed to the marital
carriage.
Australia
What, then, of Australia, which as noted above was a world leader in recognising same-
sex relationships for the purpose of migration, and yet is the only of the three case study
countries in this article to resist recognition of gay marriage? In the first gay
immigration test case in 1982, lawyer Betty Hounslow based her arguments on an
interpretation of the ‘compassionate and humanitarian’ provisions in the then
immigration law. It was also around that test case that the Gay and Lesbian Immigration
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Task Force (GLITF) was founded in Sydney, and started both lobbying for changes in
the law and providing legal advice and support for gay and lesbian binational couples.
Notwithstanding the efforts of the GLITF and others to have laws introduced that
reflected the reality and diversity of lesbian and gay couples, the procedures that the
Australian state incrementally developed from that time (first special category
‘interdependency’ visa 1991, equal status with de factos from 2009) were firmly aligned
with ‘organis[ing] sexuality around the heteronormative institutions of intimacy and the
family’ (Yue 2008: 239-40). The ‘proof’ of cohabitation and relationship authenticity
that was demanded consisted essentially of financial and legal documentation: joint
bank accounts, rent receipts and so on, so that gay couples were forced into a marital
merging that they otherwise may not have wished. Moreover, successive iterations of
the procedures have increasingly required justification of periods of cohabitation outside
Australia before applying for migration of the non-Australian national.
These immigration provisions, along with the strong gay cosmopolitanism of
Australia’s major cities (the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival being one of
the country’s major tourist income earners) nonetheless positioned Australia as one of
the world’s more gay-friendly countries. One might have expected, in a country where
‘homonormativity’ seemed to be everywhere—in gay urban culture, businesses, in
television shows and film, among prominent gay citizens such as Greens leader Bob
Brown, High Court judge Michael Kirby, the reverend Dorothy McRae McMahon and a
range of entertainers and writers, not to mention ‘allies’ such as politician Clover Moore
(Mayor of Sydney at the time of this writing)—that gay marriage would naturally
follow. Then along came John Howard.
The Howard government, in power in Australia for a little under twelve years between
1996 and 2007, is often viewed as the most right wing in Australia’s history, although
there is disagreement over whether Howard sat to the right of Liberal Party founder and
Howard role model Robert Menzies, or simply followed in the latter’s footsteps,
adapting his politics to a different era. Among the many acts for which the Howard
government is remembered is then Attorney General Philip Ruddock’s Marriage
Amendment Act (2004). That law amended the 1961 Marriage Act, which had not
actually defined marriage, as follows:
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Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered
into for life (Article 5 [1]).
Certain unions are not marriages. A union solemnised in a foreign country between: (a) a man and
another man; or (b) a woman and another woman; must not be recognised as a marriage in
Australia (Article 88EA).
Gay marriage had not been the major issue for LGBT rights campaigns in Australia at
that time, certainly not to the extent that it was in some other countries, but the Marriage
Amendment Act, that clearly reinscribed sexual citizenship as heterosexual citizenship,
was the proverbial red rag to a bull. It prompted the formation of Australian Marriage
Equality (AME), founded the same year by activists from left wing political parties, the
Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and other groups. AME launched a national campaign
for gay marriage the following year and has not let up since. The campaign has been
supported by the Greens, trade unions, and various other groups and individuals not
previously known for their attachment to marriage. It seems in retrospect that the surest
way to get Australian gay men and lesbians interested in gay marriage was to explicitly
forbid it. The Australian gay and lesbian, or LGBT movement, now appears to be firmly
part of the global gay marriage campaign, and those of us who, like Yue in relation to
gay immigration, raise concerns about homonormativity, are relegated to the all-but-
silent margins. Even staunch lesbian feminists who have previously been marriage
resisters rather than marriage advocates have difficulty in appearing as killjoys if other
lesbians demonstrably want to get married, as evidenced by many conversations I have
had with activists over the years. As women, after all, we have too frequently come up
against prohibitions to wish to impose them on others. Many Australian feminists thus,
bizarrely, find themselves demonstrating for gay marriage—or have difficulty in
maintaining their broader critique of marriage as it is perceived to be ‘anti-’ gay rights.
A second red rag was added by Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister. One
might have thought that Gillard, who comes from the Left faction of the Australian
Labor Party (ALP) would have been fully in support of a measure deemed progressive
in the logic of ‘small-l’ liberalism that informs our Western democracies. One might
also have thought that the recent New Zealand legalisation, and the fact that Gillard’s
friend and one of her main political lieutenants, Finance Minister Penny Wong, is not
only an out lesbian living in a couple but also has a child with her partner, would sway
Gillard. Not so: Gillard resolutely continued to oppose gay marriage, and the position of
an ALP conscience vote and a Liberal-National ‘No’ vote during her term ensured that
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gay marriage could not possibly become legal in Australia. A bill put by ALP
backbencher Stephen Jones in September 2012 was crushingly defeated in the House of
Representatives by 98 votes to 42. Yet it may simply have been that Gillard, who lives,
unmarried, with her partner Tim Mathieson, was not in favour of marriage tout court.
Her position may thus be less conservative than may have been assumed.
Bizarrely, it is the new right-wing government in Australia that may end up showing
itself more amenable to considering gay marriage. Prime Minister Tony Abbott,
sensitive to opinion polls, has declared himself open to a conscience vote in his party to
replace the former blanket opposition. Yet in December 2013, the Federal Government
succeeded in its constitutional challenge to the Australian Capital Territory’s gay
marriage law, which was thus overturned by the High Court, returning hundreds of
Canberran gay couples, who had married immediately the law was passed, to an
unmarried state after only a few days of wedded bliss. At that time Abbott remained
cagey on whether he would follow through on a national conscience vote (Murphy
2013), but has since turned his attention to matters more clearly in line with Liberal-
National heartland values: the introduction of a new raft of ‘security’ legislation and
negotiations with Cambodia, one of the world’s most corrupt countries, on outsourcing
detention of asylum seekers.
In Australia, then, perhaps more than elsewhere, the campaign for gay marriage largely
took the form from the outset of ‘how dare you say we can’t,’ perhaps rather more than
‘we really, really want this in order to be considered full citizens.’ Nonetheless,
Australian Marriage Equality cites polls that place support for gay marriage in Australia
at 64 percent, with the proportion rising to 81 percent among 18-24 year olds (AME
website), and AME national convenor Rodney Croome anticipates mass gay marriage
travel to neighbouring New Zealand (cited in Packham 2013). This will surely be as
good for the New Zealand tourism industry as it has been for the porteño one in
Argentina. AME also frames marriage equality as being ‘about extending the privileges
already enjoyed by the majority to an excluded minority’ (AME website). Yet in
Australia, getting married can lead to new forms of underprivilege, such as loss of
financial autonomy, contrary to what is the case in France for example.
In 2008, the ALP government under the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd brought in
reforms to grant same sex couples de facto partner status. This measure, trumpeted as
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progressive, and despite some family-oriented benefits such as childcare rebates, in fact
impacted negatively on many welfare entitlements such as pension payments and
unemployment benefits, meaning that same-sex couples, who may have been living for
years as legally and financially single, stood to lose out considerably under a new
obligation to register their relationships with government welfare agency Centrelink.
Under Australian law, their relationship status, including means-testing of partner
income, impacts on their entitlement to welfare payments such as age pension and
unemployment benefits in exactly the same way as marriage would. Older women,
whose income over the course of their lifetime had typically been lower than that of
men, were rendered particularly vulnerable. This measure also impacted culturally, as
many older gay men and lesbians remained closeted and feared forced ‘outing’ by the
new measures. In mid-2009, the Welfare Rights Centre, which has engaged in advocacy
for affected populations, reported receiving roughly ten calls a day from gay men and
lesbians, many of them older, concerned about the impact of these changes (Welfare
Rights CEO Maree O’Halloran, cited in Peatling 2009).
Those callers have reason to be concerned, particularly if they are women. The 2012
Poverty in Australia report of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) shows
that poverty in Australia, as defined under very austere OECD terms, has not gone down
in the period from 2003 to 2010, but risen slightly, and that roughly 12 percent of
Australians are living below the poverty line, with the proportion of women being
higher at 13.5 percent. Those on unemployment benefits and age pensions are
particularly vulnerable, as are those living in expensive cities such as Sydney (now rated
the third most expensive in the world; it is also home to one fifth of Australia’s
population). ‘Recognition’ of same sex partnerships as outlined above can only
exacerbate the problem for those populations. It is one of the more unusual
circumstances in the global debate about gay marriage, in which ‘homonormalisation’
can in fact increase other forms of stigmatisation, not for others, but for the very same
people. The saying ‘Be careful what you wish for’ comes to mind.
Recognition of gay marriage has also recently been put forward in Australia as
important for attracting skilled migration (even though de facto couples are now
recognised as discussed above). Brian Grieg, former Senator with the now defunct
centrist party The Australian Democrats and West Australian convenor of Australian
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Marriage Equality, commented in May 2013 that there was a pressing need for skilled
migrants, but that married gay professionals from Western countries (Grieg referred
only to English-speaking countries), whose marriages are not recognised here, are likely
to go elsewhere instead. Grieg argues that the long term impact on Australia’s economy
would be devastating, and even goes so far as to anticipate that among the growing
chorus of voices worldwide calling for gay marriage ‘it will be employers and big
business that will become among the loudest’ (Grieg 2013). Just as Mayor Mandroux
firmly coopted gay marriage as an instrument of reassertion of French Republican
values, Grieg has clearly framed gay marriage as being first and foremost about the Big
(or at least high-income professional) End of Town.
In a country that has since the beginning of the Howard years, and well into the Rudd
then Gillard years, grappled with the incessant and growing demonisation of asylum
seekers in particular and Muslims in general, or indeed anyone else who is other than
white, professional and heterosexual (or modelled in that image), arguments such as
Grieg’s can appear at best clumsy and at worst, to be homonationalism (or
homocapitalism) of the worst kind. This impression is only reinforced by consideration
of the poverty statistics presented by ACOSS. It would seem that there are far more
pressing issues of social and economic justice in Australia, including for our gay and
lesbian populations, than gay marriage. Indeed, in a council community consultation
forum in early May 2013, in my local Sydney area of Marrickville, a number of
participants raised the problem of homelessness and poverty among many of Sydney’s
homosexuals, from young people having had to leave the family home to the elderly,
unemployed and mentally ill. Concern was also raised, in what is ostensibly one of the
most multicultural areas of the city, about the framing of all gays as white Anglo and all
non-white-Anglo as somehow separate from the gay community, as almost by definition
locked into traditions that cannot accommodate homosexuality. As Sandip Roy, who is
of Indian origin, put it, many are consequently left ‘unsure where [they] belong,
suspended between [their] skin and [their] sexuality’ (Roy 2005).
Perhaps we are not as cosmopolitan as we think.
Conclusion
The campaigns for gay marriage, and the rhetoric with which governments—and their
oppositions—embrace or refuse it, highlight the importance of marriageability for
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acceptance into the national community and for recognition as fully human. The non-
marriageable, according to Australian Marriage Equality, are considered ‘second class
citizens,’ deprived of the ‘protection by society and the state’ that the United Nations
advocates for formally recognised family units.
Gay marriage campaigns have thus been framed as in the interest of gay men and
lesbians, in providing an ‘in’ to this marital citizenship. Ultimately, however, marriage
does not protect individuals or family members anywhere near as much as it protects the
state. Marriage and family are regulators of social relations, creating structures in which
it is in fact impossible for individuals to become the free and equal citizens that the lofty
rhetoric of democracies tells us we should be. More importantly, marriage and the
family are the primary vehicles of socioeconomic and cultural reproduction in the
nation’s image.
The least threatening thing to our heteropatriarchal white-Western capitalist states that
gay rights activists can do, then, is to demand to marry and have families. As Shannon
Gilreath has put it, if it values ‘only that which is paradigmatically straight,’ the gay
movement will have ‘uncritically compromised its moral independence’ (Gilreath 2011:
229 and 232). As a result, we will all have become bound anew by the ‘ties’ of a
heterosexist nation, and stigmatised anew if we seek to undo them.
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