Will Marriage Rights Bring Family Equality? Law, Lesbian Co-Mothers, and Strategies of Recognition in Taiwan

Abstract This article analyzes the tension between marriage and family rights in the context of Taiwan's marriage equality movement and the then-pending legalization of same-sex marriage following a 2017 Constitutional Court ruling. It focuses on the efforts of lesbian co-mothers to secure vital legal guarantees for the families they create through intentional childbearing. As pioneers who have formed families in a legal vacuum, these parents harbor deep hopes for what law will offer but simultaneously doubt that legal reforms will guarantee the rights and recognition they desire. For lesbian co-mothers, law and family are mutually constitutive practices oriented toward both the present and the future. Co-mothers make decisions about childbearing and family formation that take into account existing legal frameworks for family recognition, but their strategies for recognition also orient them toward future potentialities, posing the challenge of how to make decisions in the present without knowing for certain what might be legally possible in the future. The article concludes that lesbian co-mothers’ family strategies are productive as much as they are reactive; they not only diversify the norm but also potentially shift the very ground on which normativity is created.

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Unmarried cohabitation and its fertility in Ireland: Towards post-Catholic family dynamics?

Irish Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1177/0791603519865410 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 5-28

Author(s):

Benoît Laplante ◽

Teresa Castro-Martín ◽

Clara Cortina ◽

Ana Fostik

Keyword(s):

Family Formation ◽

Negative Relationship ◽

Late Development ◽

Irish Society ◽

Same Sex ◽

Family Policies ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Unmarried Cohabitation ◽

The Church ◽

Family Behaviour

Ireland was known for being conservative in family matters. The 2015 referendum that allowed same-sex marriage and the 2018 one that allowed abortion showed this is no longer true. This article aims at better understanding recent family change in Ireland by looking at changes in values on topics related with family behaviour and change in behaviour related with family formation–the rise of unmarried cohabitation, and childbearing within unmarried cohabitation–with a focus on the Catholic dogma and its role in the Irish society. We use data from the 2008 European Value Survey and from the five censuses conducted between 1991 and 2011. We find that the young have been moving away from the teachings of the Church on unmarried cohabitation, but that a few years before the 2018 referendum, they were still close to it on abortion. There is no clear negative relationship between cohabitation or fertility within cohabitation and education, but the use of cohabitation seems to vary according to education. The most enduring legacy of the Church doctrine seems to be the late development of family policies that make motherhood hard to reconcile with work and might explain why cohabiting women have few children.

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也談同性戀與婚姻

International Journal of Chinese & Comparative Philosophy of Medicine ◽

10.24112/ijccpm.161650 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 73-76

Author(s):

Fei WU

Keyword(s):

Same Sex ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Marriage And Family ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Greek Culture ◽

Digital Commons ◽

The Relationship

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.Xianglong Zhang’s position on same-sex marriage is tolerance with reservations. He contends that Confucianism does not affirm or deny homosexuality as ancient Greek culture or Christianity did, because it regards homosexuality and same-sex marriage as two completely separate issues. By distinguishing marriage from homosexuality, the Confucian view proposed by Zhang neither violates the freedom of homosexuals nor affects the order of marriage and family. It can provide a more sensible perspective for people to understand the relationship between homosexuality and marriage in today’s world.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 192 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

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Same-Sex Relationships

Inside the Castle ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691149820.003.0008 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Joanna L. Grossman ◽

Lawrence M. Friedman

Keyword(s):

Family Law ◽

Same Sex ◽

Marriage And Family ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

The Social ◽

The Family ◽

Traditional Marriage ◽

The Right ◽

Constitutional Analysis

This chapter describes what might be the last battleground over “traditional” marriage—same-sex marriage, and the social and legal revolution that brought us from an era in which it was never contemplated to one in which, depending on the state, it is either expressly authorized or expressly prohibited. Same-sex marriage has posed—and continues to pose—a challenge to traditional definitions of marriage and family. But, more importantly, the issue implies broader changes in family law—the increasing role of constitutional analysis; limits on the right of government to regulate the family; and the clash between the traditional family form and a new and wider menu of intimate and household arrangements, and all this against the background of the rise of a stronger form of individualism.

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Marriage: Obligations, Benefits, and Access

Just Married ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691166483.003.0006 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Stephen Macedo

Keyword(s):

Same Sex ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Same Sex Couples ◽

Special Obligations ◽

The Future ◽

Opposite Sex ◽

The Many

This chapter examines the many “legal incidents” of marriage: the specific benefits, responsibilities, obligations, and protections that are associated with marriage by law. While critics focus on the special privileges or benefits that spouses acquire in marriage, those are balanced by special obligations. The chapter suggests that the whole package seems reasonably appropriate for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. It also considers the ways in which marriage seems to promote the good of spouses, children, and society, along with the class divide that now characterizes marriage and parenting. It argues that this class divide, not same-sex marriage, is the great challenge for the future.

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Why They Did Not Identify as Gay or Bisexual

10.18574/nyu/9781479801091.003.0005 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 126-140

Author(s):

Tony Silva

Keyword(s):

Gay Men ◽

Family Formation ◽

Legal Rights ◽

Same Sex ◽

Dominant Group ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Legal Equality

The men interviewed identified as straight largely because of their embeddedness in straight culture and desire to remain a part of a socially dominant group. Most felt that gay men were too feminine, urban, or incompatible with conventional marriage or family formation. Nonetheless, a majority supported equal legal rights, including same-sex marriage. Yet many also expressed various types and degrees of homophobia, some subtle and some more obvious. In this sense the men interviewed were like the majority of straight people, who support many forms of legal equality but not always informal rights. The men interviewed identified as straight not only because of homophobia, any more than most straight men identify as straight only because of homophobia. Homophobia was only one of many reasons for their straight identification. Relatedly, most of the men interviewed knew that bisexuality was a possible identity but did not adopt that identity for themselves in large part for three reasons. First, they considered it incompatible with having a woman partner. Second, they had no interest in romantically partnering with a man. And third, they thought identifying as bisexual would threaten their other relationships.

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The future is queer kids: Queering the homonormative temporalities of same-sex marriage

Politics ◽

10.1177/0263395719872595 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 265-280

Author(s):

Callum Stewart

Keyword(s):

Spatial Relations ◽

Same Sex ◽

Temporal Perspective ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

The Public ◽

The Future ◽

And Gender

Same-sex marriage is emblematic of a crisis of vision in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender non-binary, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) politics, according to some queer theorists. Through the concept of homonormativity, Duggan insightfully criticizes same-sex marriage politics as spatially privatizing and depoliticizing queer difference. Brown argues, however, that Duggan herself reifies homonormativity. He calls for theorists to imagine the queer potential in non-fixed spatial relations. Given Duggan and Brown’s focus on spatiality, this article approaches queer imaginations beyond homonormativity from a temporal perspective: I ask what transformational potential same-sex marriage holds to queer heteronormative and homonormative temporalities. I argue that same-sex marriage may not only queer the public/private dichotomy, but also subvert the heteronormative temporality of straight time. Straight time produces identities, spaces, and times as fixed, pre-political, and timeless, and is constructed against queer time in which identities, spaces, and times are non-fixed, political, and sociohistorically constructed. By theorizing straight/queer time as politically produced through the reproductive relation between adulthood and Childhood, I repoliticize the temporalities of homonormative and queer imaginaries and recognize children as queer citizens of a queer future. Same-sex marriage may therefore produce two previously untheorized images of queer potential: the Child queered by their parents, and the Child queered by their sexuality.

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After Obergefell: On Marriage and Belonging in Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding

Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823283712.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 131-144

Author(s):

Sarah Song

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Gay Rights ◽

Court Ruling ◽

Same Sex ◽

Supreme Court Ruling ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Civil Unions ◽

Same Sex Couples ◽

Temporal And Spatial ◽

The Law

The 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges was a historic day for gay rights as well as for the institution of marriage. The Court's decision led many of the states that introduced marriage equality prior to Obergefell to eliminate civil unions on the grounds that same-sex couples could now get married. A reading of Carson McCullers's novel The Member of the Wedding in the context of Obergefell reveals the shadow marriage casts over nonmarital affinities and relationships. McCuller's protagonist, Frankie, desires not to join the wedding as a member but to disrupt it. Through Frankie's wedding fantasies, McCullers illuminates forms of belonging that are ostensibly outside the law and that move across temporal and spatial boundaries, unseating marriage as the measure of all relationships.

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The hate that dare not speak its name?

Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict ◽

10.1075/jlac.3.1.03lov ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 57-86 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Robbie Love ◽

Paul Baker

Keyword(s):

Minority Groups ◽

Social Acceptability ◽

Anal Sex ◽

Same Sex ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Age Of Consent ◽

The Future

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.

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