Réjane Sénac

Global Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

This book provides a comparative, neo-institutionalist approach to the different factors impacting state adoption of—or refusal to adopt—same-sex marriage laws. The now twenty-one countries where lesbians and gay men can legally marry include recent or longstanding democracies, republics and parliamentary monarchies, and unitary and federal states. They all reflect different positions with respect to religion and the cultural foundations of the nation. Countries opposed to such legalization, and those having taken measures in recent years to legally reinforce the heterosexual fundaments of marriage, present a similar diversity. This diversity, in a globalized context where the idea of same-sex marriage has become integral to claims for LGBTI equality and indeed LGBTI human rights, gives rise to the following question: which factors contribute to institutionalizing same-sex marriage? The analytical framework used for exploring these factors in this book is neo-institutionalism. Through three neo-institutionalist lenses—historical, sociological and discursive—contributors investigate two aspects of the processes of adoption or opposition of equal recognition of same-sex partnerships. Firstly, they reveal how claims by LGBTIQ movements are being framed politically and brought to parliamentary politics. Secondly, they explore the ways in which same-sex marriage becomes institutionalized (or resisted) through legal and societal norms and practices. Although it adopts neo-institutionalism as its main theoretical framework, the book incorporates a broad range of perspectives, including scholarship on social movements, LGBTI rights, heterosexuality and social norms, and gender and politics. (Publishers abstract)

France and the Netherlands: Toward Convergence?

In a twenty-first century characterized by distrust, questioning resistance to implementation of non-discrimination law involves analyzing contemporary expressions of one of the main conceptual principles of liberal democracy: political and legal equality.

Same-Sex Marriage in France and Spain: Comparing Resistance in a Centralized Secular Republic and the Dynamics of Change in a “Quasi-Federal” Constitutional Monarchy

By passing legislation giving same-sex couples the right to marry in 2005, Spain became the third country in the world to grant equal marriage rights at national level, regardless of sexual orientation. In 2013, France became only the 14th country to do so. In order to test the hypothesis of a contrast between an assumed rupture with the political legacy for Spanish democracy and an attachment of the French Republic to an idealized inheritance, an analysis of public discourse—in particular, parliamentary debates—is cross-referenced in the French and Spanish institutional contexts. The French socialist government presents same-sex marriage law as being in historical continuity with the ideals of the Republic, defining marriage as a republican institution embodying equality and secularization, while the Spanish socialist government has used marriage as a source of political polarization and proof of modernity.