The Right to a Privilege? Homonormativity and the Recognition of Same-Sex Couples in Europe

Abstract

The Council of Europe (CoE) and its judicial body, the European Court of Human Rights, are at the forefront of the debate for the redefinition of the notion of ‘family’ in relation to the inclusion of same-sex couples. The recent jurisprudence has demonstrated a change in the Court’s approach to the question of what counts as a family, by terms of Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This much-anticipated development, nonetheless, begs the question of how the ‘right to marry and found a family’ might prove to be a privilege rather than a right. This article tries to shed light on the contradictions underpinning the expansion of the concept of family in the context of the CoE, suggesting the existence of a conflation of both heteronormative and homonormative narratives of kinship in the construction of a notion of the ‘family’ that encompasses same-sex couples.

Governing Through Normality: Law and the Force of Sameness

“…Barker's point is that the pursuit of equal rights and responsibilities through marriage takes it for granted that legal 'rights and responsibilities' can really "provide 'the solution' to inequality" (Barker 2012, p. 169). In reality, as other studies seems to attest, what is being re-enforced is the seemingly natural connection between romantic love and marriage, which was typical of heterosexual coupledom, to the extent that respectability and acceptability can only be obtained through the lexicon of long-life, monogamous coupledom sanctified by marriage (Ammaturo 2014;ANONYM. ;Franke 2004;Ruskola 2005).…”

The nation‐family: Intimate encounters and genealogical perversion in Armenia

“…In biopolitical framings, family is the institution that maintains the nation's heterosexual reproduction (and now homosexual reproduction in some Euro‐American countries; Ammaturo ). It is through the family, its capacity for disciplining bodies and reproducing them as socially proper, that the nation reproduces itself (Foucault ).…”

An overnight success a decade in the making

“…72 Ammaturo erroneously commented that the European Court overturned its previous position on second-parent adoption only one year after the decision in Gas and Dubois. 73 Instead, it should be noted that the European Court applied the same type of reasoning in both Gas and Dubois and X and Others, which is that unmarried same-sex couples should be entitled to the same rights and benefits of unmarried different sex couples. The difference in the outcomes of the two decisions is justified by the fact that under the French law of the time unmarried different sex couples would not have been able to access second-parent adoptions just as an unmarried same-sex couple; while under the Austrian law of the time, an unmarried different sex couple would have accessed the second-parent adoption.…”