Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality

Michael Yarbrough, Angela Jones, Joseph DeFilippis, Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Michael Yarbrough, Joseph DeFilippis, Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138557468
• eBook ISBN: 9781351365598
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After years of intense debate, same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in many countries around the globe. As same-sex marriage laws spread, Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality asks: What will queer families and relationships look like on the ground?

Building on a major conference held in 2016 entitled "After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship," this collection draws from critical and intersectional perspectives to explore this question. Comprising academic papers, edited transcripts of conference panels, and interviews with activists working on the ground, this collection presents some of the first works of empirical scholarship and first-hand observation to assess the realities of queer families and relationships after same-sex marriage. Including a number of chapters focused on married same-sex couples as well as several on other queer family types, the volume considers the following key questions: What are the material impacts of marriage for same-sex couples? Is the spread of same-sex marriage pushing LGBTQ people toward more "normalized" types of relationships that resemble heterosexual marriage? And finally, how is the spread of same-sex marriage shaping other queer relationships that do not fit the marriage model?

By presenting scholarly research and activist observations on these questions, this volume helps translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage debates into a framework for ongoing critical research in the after-marriage period.

PART I

The material impacts of same-sex marriage

1

LIVING LESBIAN RELATIONSHIPS IN MADRID

Queering life and families in times of straight living fossils¹

Luciana Moreira

Editors’ introduction:

Part I opens the volume by considering the material consequences of same-sex marriage laws for queer families. We begin with Luciana Moreira’s research among women in lesbian relationships in Madrid, which highlights the limits of law. In 2005 Spain became one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage, and its parenting policies also include same-sex couples. Yet Moreira’s interviews, conducted more than a decade after same-sex marriage was legalized, reveal that her interviewees still confront a quiet yet pervasive “slow violence” of homophobia and transphobia in families of origin, public spaces, and state and medical institutions. Moreira argues that this slow violence reflects the “straight mind” of heterocisnormative assumptions that persist today, beyond the reach of law. Moreira’s research thus highlights the limits of law as a tool for improving queer families’ circumstances.

Introduction: homo/transphobia as a form of slow violence

Sexual and gender dissidents have been silenced for centuries in Western societies, because they hold the potential to undermine patriarchal and heterosexist frameworks. Although some important changes have been achieved using human rights claims and legal processes in various countries, queer people are still struggling, often on a daily basis, against invisibility and hostility. Spain offers an interesting case for studying this contrast, as the country approved same-sex marriage and adoption in 2005 and continued to strengthen its queer family laws after that, and yet many Spaniards in queer families denounce a continuing and pervasive non-recognition at both private and institutional levels.

This chapter focuses on this contrast, drawing on interviews I did in 2015 and 2016 in Madrid with women in lesbian relationships. Based on those interviews, it can be seen that nowadays it is possible to openly live out lesbian relationships and to marry someone of the same sex. Those who wish to be mothers also have access to assisted reproductive techniques (ART) or adoption. However, the interviewees also shared dissatisfaction and experiences of disrespect, providing pointers to what still needs to change.

My biographical interviews in Madrid about lesbian coupledom and parenting revealed a more or less generalized feeling of non-recognition, both in the private sphere within families of origin, and in the public sphere in social and institutional spaces. The interviewees shared stories about accumulating non-recognition and hostility that caused them pain, which I analyze using Rob Nixon’s (2006–2007) concept of “slow violence.” Nixon develops the concept of slow violence to describe and understand “formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time” (p. 14), such as environmental problems whose repercussions for people’s lives do not involve any immediate drama. Problems characterized by slow violence have no media visibility and often affect a limited geography of people far from centers of power, whose lives are considered unimportant.²

While Nixon uses slow violence to understand environmental damages and their related health and nutrition problems, I find that it also resonates with the long and diffuse processes that hurt people who are considered less important in a capitalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist system. In this chapter, the concept of slow violence refers to the personal wounds caused by discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Just as in the case of gradual environmental destruction over years or decades, homo/transphobia acts slowly but continuously. Most homo/transphobic actions seem relatively insignificant if they are considered separately, and therefore they remain invisible. The media are not interested in small incidents. However, the continuous occurrence of these small incidents throughout the years on the one hand causes constant harm to people, and on the other constructs a broader structural problem of social homophobia and transphobia whose answer lies beyond legal solutions, but needs to be addressed somehow.

From this point of view, although homonormativity (Duggan, 2003) exists in Western societies, especially among gay men and to a lesser extent among lesbians, the intersection with sexual and gender identity of different categories such as social context, class, ethnicity, age, dis/ability, and so on brings people closer to or pushes them away from homonormative practices. In fact, despite some legal and social changes, heterosexuality lives on as a fossilized norm, and everything that goes beyond it may still be considered abject. These heterosexual assumptions, dissected by Wittig (1992) with her concept of the “straight mind,” remain living fossils today, as proved by the constant episodes of slow violence denounced by the interviewees in my research.

Thus, in this chapter I explore the effects of slow violence on lesbian couples in Madrid, Spain. After a brief note on my sample and methodology, I outline the legal and social context of a country where same-sex marriage has been legally possible since 2005. Then I provide several examples of slow violence suffered in both the private and public spheres by the interviewees, and point out where there is still need for change in daily life. I close by identifying the causes of slow violence in this specific context and analyzing the importance of informal networks and collective action in my interviewees’ lives.

Sample and methodology

In this chapter, I draw from the research I carried out in Madrid for the project “INTIMATE—Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe,” which is a five-year project involving qualitative studies of LGBT partnering, parenting, and friendship across Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Between April and June in the years 2015 and 2016, a sample of twenty in-depth biographical interviews was collected in Madrid on the topics of partnering and parenting using the Biographic–Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) designed by Tom Wengraf. In this chapter, I will explore eight interviews with women (seven cis and one trans) in lesbian relationships at the time of the interview, four of whom were legally married.

In BNIM interviews, the interviewer first asks a single narrative question, such as: “As you know, I am interested in lesbian relationships. Please tell me your story, all events and experiences that have been important to you personally.” The interviewer then listens to the interviewee, without interrupting her, for as long as she wishes to speak. The method’s basis is the idea that individual narratives express both conscious concerns and unconscious presuppositions and subjectivities. In the second part of the interview, the interviewer uses narrower, strategic questions to explore specific pieces of information. The data collected is validated by comparing it to other sources: for example, legal documents, documents from non-governmental organizations, and online newspapers.

Lesbian coupledom and the Spanish social and legal context

Spain’s twentieth century was full of political, social, and cultural turmoil. The end of the monarchy and the two republican periods that followed (from 1873 to 1874 and then again from 1931 to 1939) led to a civil war (1936–1939) between progressive forces and the right-wing ultra-conservatives led by Francisco Franco, who won the war and in 1939 established a dictatorship that would end only with his death in 1975.

State laws punishing sexual and gender dissidents were strongly reinforced during the dictatorship, when Franco ruled with the support of the Catholic Church. This alliance helped maintain and reinforce conservative conceptions of gender and sexuality. In 1933, during the pre-war republican period, the Vagrancy Law (Ley de vagos y maleantes) was implemented, imposing criminal penalties on vagrants and panderers (that is, sex workers). Homosexuals were added to the list in 1954. During the dictatorship this law was applied arbitrarily, with homosexuality used as a pretext to jail political dissidents opposing the dictatorship (Calvo & Trujillo, 2011). The prison terms increased in 1970 with the Social Danger and Rehabilitation Law (Ley sobre peligrosidad y rehabilitación social), which replaced the old Vagrancy Law. Occurring during a long political context of a total lack of civil liberties, these legal measures deepened the assumptions on which the straight mind (to use Wittig’s term) was based, as people did not understand or accept other possibilities of living beyond heterocissexual norms.

Just after the dictatorship ended, an initial wave of reforms began to relieve the prohibitions regarding non-normative sexual orientations. This wave began in 1979 with the decriminalization of same-sex relations, four years after the beginning of the transition to democracy, but the Social Danger and Rehabilitation Law would only be fully abolished in 1995 (Pichardo, 2011, p. 546). As of 1983, homosexuality was no longer considered a Public Scandal crime, and that item of the penal code was repealed in 1988 (Mérida Jiménez, 2013).

Some sections of society wanted the country to recover from its long absence of liberties as quickly as possible, and these reforms, prompted by discussions in Europe, were seen as a kind of purge of the conservative and religious recent past. From the beginning of the 1970s, social movements were crucial to ending criminalizing legislation and achieving legal equality (Pichardo, 2011; Santos, 2013; Trujillo Barbadillo, 2008). The end of the dictatorship and Spain’s joining of the Council of Europe in 1977 and the European Union (at that time called the European Community) in 1986 were also crucial for these changes. After a long period under a conservative regime, consolidating a young and fragile democracy was a priority. One way to ensure this was to accept the liberalizing social measures that came from these European institutions. But this was also a ground-up transformation, as sexual dissidents were getting organized even before the end of the dictatorship (Mérida Jiménez, 2013; Trujillo Barbadillo, 2008).

By the mid-2000s, thirty years after the end of the dictatorship, Spain was an almost unique example of a country with respect for lesbian and gay couples’ legal rights. It was the third country in the world to approve same-sex marriage (2005), and it legalized joint adoption at the same time. A 2006 law granted both single women and lesbian couples access to ART.³ However, even though sexual orientation was added as a non-discriminatory item, legislators and policymakers seemingly forgot that lesbian couples would want to establish their legal parenthood of babies born through ART. So in 2007 a provision giving the right of legal maternity to non-biological mothers was enacted—strangely, added to a new law focused on gender identity. Moreover, this right applied only if the lesbian couple was married;⁴ meanwhile, marriage was not required for heterosexual couples using ART to be legally recognized as parents.

Effectively, these laws only partially solved the problems lesbian families were experiencing, and it is possible for them to be used to go backwards when other legal changes raise issues that conflict with the views of the more conservative strata of society who maintain the straight mind. Although the law has made huge steps toward equity, its implementation does not lead conservatism to disappear. There is, therefore, strong social resistance to the laws adopted in Spain to establish and strengthen the rights of gender and sexual dissidents.

Lesbian identities and/or relationships and slow violence

In this section, I use the concept of slow violence to highlight the long-term psychological consequences of drop-by-drop discrimination in the lives of sexual and gender-dissident people. Their existence, identities, and lifestyles trigger certain reactions in fossilized “straight minds,” which produce a series of negative experiences for sexual and gender dissidents that add up to a situation of slow violence.

Santos (2012) proposes the concept of queer public sociology for scholars who address queer theory and queer activism in their scholarly work. Queer public sociology sees “discrimination [as] a collective product that stems from unequal power relations, instead of an individual problem. Therefore, the focus [in queer public sociology] is moved away from the (individual) victim to the structural system that enables and legitimises discrimination” (p. 250). At the same time, however, Santos insists on the necessity to echo in academic research the voices and demands that arise from social movements and collective action. To balance both of these principles, I use the concept of slow violence to interpret my interviews with members of lesbian couples in Madrid about partnering and parenting. My interviewees perceived many hostile attitudes within their families of origin and in public spaces, and also at an institutional level, where slow violence is sometimes inflicted by the very state that grants them equal rights. Their individual stories speak to an enduring structural condition of slow violence that makes their lives, both as individuals and as families, insecure.

A vivid example of slow violence within families of origin comes from Elisa.⁵ Elisa is an early-thirties pansexual cis woman who started dating women at the age of eighteen when she went to Madrid to study at university. Before this she had lived in a small village, where she could never face her sexuality. In her first year in Madrid, she started a relationship with an older woman. Her cousin, with whom she was living, tried to persuade her to end the relationship. When Elisa did not, her cousin kicked her out of her flat and told Elisa’s parents about the relationship. From that moment on, Elisa encountered very difficult moments of slow violence. She recalls:

I remember a trip to Berlin with my parents; we were drinking something and then my father shot the bullet: “You have made me suffer a lot.” And I asked: “But why?” He said, “You have made me suffer a lot. I’ve cried more because of you than because of my parents’ death.” My heart missed a beat. I thought, “You’re saying it, but you are not even thinking,” because it is a statement with a strong connotation. I have always tried to put myself in their shoes, to think where they come from, the education they had. I can even understand their first reaction, but then you cannot go on with the same speech. You have to accept me, and if you really love me and want to share my life and the things that happen to me, you cannot keep saying these things.⁶

Interview with Elisa, 2015

Aware of her parents’ conservative education during the period of dictatorship, Elisa decided take a pedagogical approach with them, trying to address their homophobic reactions through her presence and care. She described the culminating moment of a series of incidents of slow violence that hurt her, but also gave her the strength to write a letter to her parents in which she denounced the tension under which they had lived for years, with the intention of making them finally realize that they should care more and stop aiming accusations at her.

Another example is Irene’s story. Irene is a mid-forties trans woman and actress who defines herself as lesbian. She told me how she had interrupted her relationship with her mother because she could not bear her mother’s hostility every time they were together or spoke to one another. She shared the following episode:

My second sister has two children, and I love her little daughter—she looks a lot like me. She had them with a man who turned out to be a nice guy, in fact a great guy, and one day they decided to marry. It was after I started the hormonal treatment. My mother managed to arrange things so that I couldn’t go to the wedding. It is also my responsibility, I w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I The material impacts of same-sex marriage
• PART II Is marriage normalizing LGBTQ relationships?
• PART III The present and future of relational diversity
• Index