Producing expert capital: how opposing same-sex marriage experts dominate fields in the United States and France

Abstract

This paper examines experts who have testified before U.S. and French courts and legislatures on same-sex marriage and parenting debates between 1990 and 2013. Experts can provide special evidentiary weight to political arguments, which I call expert capital. For this reason, social movements and decision-makers on both sides of the debate solicit them. Yet, because of specific national conditions, this article shows that not all experts have the same capacity to use their respective academic and professional resources to impact policymaking in each country. Drawing on 71 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation in both the U.S. and France, it analyses how progressive and conservative experts have struggled for dominance in their fields. Results show that American progressive experts have achieved a degree of power in their fields as their conservative counterparts turn to resources outside the academic mainstream. In France, progressives have only recently begun to challenge conservatives' dominant position. I argue that these power balances, which are subject to change, are due to: 1) size and centralization of knowledge regimes; 2) disciplinary and university reactions to research on gender and sexuality; 3) academic and professional organization strength; 4) social acceptance of gay families; and, 5) the degree of division among allied experts. These findings have implications for research on social movements. They show that the capacity of experts to provide expert capital to their activist and decision-maker allies is constrained and enabled by factors specific to knowledge production fields that vary cross-nationally.

Lesbian and gay families in France: results from the DEVHOM study

“…While each of the articles contributes to this work in their own way – often reflecting the disciplinary and theoretical orientations of their authors – taken together, they contribute to the international research on lesbian and gay families. Relative to studies from other places, especially North America and northern Europe, work on French LGBTQ families (see, for example, Courduriès and Fine 2014; Descoutures 2010; Ducousso‐Lacaze 2014; Gratton 2008; Gross 2015; Naziri and Feld‐Elzon 2012) – which has grown in the last decade after years of marginalisation in the French academy (Garnier 2012; Perreau 2016; Stambolis‐Ruhstorfer 2020) – has not circulated widely outside francophone circles. By publishing in English in the International Social Science Journal,we hope to provide a wider range of scholars with access to research on the French context.…”