Money, Sex and Power Week 20 2011-12

1. Money, Sex and PowerWeek 202011-12 Families of Choice

2. Outline • Definition of ‘families of choice’ • Changes supporting the emergence of families of choice/ non-heterosexuality based families, both wider changes and changing lifestyles within the lgbt communities • Why is the legal recognition of same sex partnerships contested? • Do we need to widen our understanding of human rights?

3. What are ‘families of choice’? • Term suggested by Kath Weston in book called Families We Choose, first published around 1991. • Weeks et al al 1999 also use to refer to non-heterosexuality-based affinity groups or what they also call ‘elective families’. • To talk of ‘families of choice’ is relatively new. Before the mid-1980s you couldn’t talk about gay or lesbian families because the limited construction of the family then prevailing (heterosexual, moral, safe) conflicted with the dominant constructions of lesbian and gay (as deviant, immoral and dangerous).

4. Aspects of changes supporting families of choice (the detraditionalisation of the family) • Transformations of intimacy • The formation of lesbian and gay families of choice • New reproductive technologies • Legal changes But also need to consider-- • Queer challenges to the extension of conjugal models to lgbt relationships

5. (1) Transformations in intimacy • the development of alternative life-styles and family practices. Heterosexuals no longer share a single or coherent form of family and those engaged in what David Morgan calls ‘family practices’ (ways of ‘doing’ family) are now so diverse that the difference between straight and gay living arrangements may be insignficant.

6. ‘transformations of intimacy’, ‘detraditionalisation of family’ • Phrases from sociological analysis by Anthony Giddens and Beck and Gersheim- Beck

7. The ‘pure relationship’ (Giddens) refers to • ‘a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it’.

8. (2) The formation of lesbian and gay families of choice • Not really new, but more more visible • Simon Watney- We should not imagine that there was ever ‘some absolute divide between the two domains of “gay life” and “the family”, as if gay men grew up, were educated, worked and lived our lives in total isolation from the rest of society’. (Watney 1987:10, cited by Weston, p. 22) • According to Giddens, it is easier for gays and lesbians to achieve ‘pure relationship’

9. Challenges of the lgbt family to conventional nuclear family roles and composition? • More egalitarian? (Dunne 1999, Gabb 2001) • More inclusive (Weston, c. 1991)

10. Radical disruption of the links between sex, love and reproduction (Gabe 2001)

11. (3)New reproductive technologies • Key technology of artificial insemination not new, although access to unknown donots is.

12. (4) Legal changes in the UK Support non-heterosexuality-based family rights driven by • Article 8 of the Human Rights Act of 1998, which is supposed to bring British law into line with rights enshrined in European conventions that guarantee everyone ‘the right to respect for his private and family like, his home and correspondence’ (Diduck 2001: 295) • Labour Government’s policy of supporting and encouraging stable families as a cornerstone for a stable society and well-balanced, well-socialised children. Now thinks that stability is not dependent on families being based on the ‘biological family’ established around blood relations. But ‘only those relationships that appear to be striving for stability are seen as meriting social and legal recognition. (Shipman and Smart 2007:2.1-2.3)

13. Campaigning by Stonewall • Successful in showing that recognition of LGBT relationships through civil partnerships essential to deal with then current injustices- denial of custody of children to the partner of a lesbian woman, difficulty of partners claiming inheritance or lease of council flat, next of kin cases of serious illness or accidents– all the situations in which the law was refusing to recognise partners’ responsibilities for and to each other.

14. Legal recognition of same sex partnerships • Opposed by some church groups, who see civil partnerships as a threat to the uniqueness of the marriage bond, between man and wife; • Who want sacredness of marriage to remain as the keystone of the family, not civil law. Fear civil partnerships will spread to heterosexual couples as a model of permanent unions.

15. Important changes in relation to • Adoption, through the Adoption and Children’s Act (2002), which gave lbg couples the same rights to adopt as other couples • Civil Partnership Act 2004, which came into effect in Autumn 2005

16. Queer questions • Are family-based queer life styles being recognised at the cost of further marginalising those who do not wish to adopt a family-based life style? There is the risk of reproducing normative notions of respectability from which gays, lesbians and bisexuals were previously all excluded, only now SOME, on certain grounds, get entry. • Shipman and Smart suggest it was not in fact a key demand by the lgb communities, except for Stonewall • Bringing gay and lesbian relationships under the aegis of the state/family law = increasing regulation

17. ‘Same-ing’ as a route to sexual citizenship does not do justice to the new forms of interdependence that have been evolving in the lgbt communities, e.g. inclusiveness, the destratificaiton of love. • Does this new family model sufficiently question the inequalities of family life raised by feminist theory? • See especially Weeks (2007) The World We Have Won for summary of the arguments (which he doesn’t agree with), Brandzel, A. (2005) ‘Queering Citizenship?: Same Sex Marriage and the State’ GQL 11, 2: 171-204; also Robson (1994), Smith (1997) and Auchmuty (2004)

18. Intimate citizenship (Plummer 2001) • Notion which covers ‘rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life-- who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one’s own body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person’. • This too has drawbacks- increase state regulation? Notion of citizenship inevitably distinguishes between citizens and others.

19. Research by Shipman and Smart (2007) and their other publications) • Based on interviews with couples who organised commitment ceremonies for themselves which they mostly refer to as weddings. Interviews were conducted before civil partnership law brought in. • Mostly the interviewees were quite aware of these wider debates but enunciate personal reasons, having to do with wider families, the discourse of ‘romantic love’ etc. These more important factors than equality and legal rights for those they interviewed. (See sources on final slide, including link to ‘listen again’ online to radio programme on the research.

20. Conclusions • It is true that the refusal of family rights to lesbians and gays caused injustice and hardship. GLBT communities therefore have supported new legislation, for this and other reasons. • But-- including gay and lesbian relationships in family law carries costs too. ‘Allowing’ gays and lesbians to model their relationships on heterosexual coupledom may be a mixed blessing. So there is also ambivalence, and in some cases hostility to these moves.