Marie Digoix - Same-Sex Families and Legal Recognition in Europe

The book series European Studies of Population (ESPO) aims at disseminating population research with special relevance for Europe. The series is multidisciplinary in character and includes both formal demographic analyses, as well as studies of the social, economic and other determinants and impacts of population trends. International comparison is of prime interest to ESPO, and both contemporary and historical perspectives may be applied. ESPO is open to methodological work and theoretical studies, as well as to studies that focus on the social and policy implications of demographic trends. The series includes monographs and edited volumes.

ESPO is published under the auspices of the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS).

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5940

The past decades have seen significant changes in the way non heterosexual sexualities are regulated in European countries. In a moment of ongoing transitions, the interdisciplinary research presented focuses on aspects related to homosexuals rights and the way LGBT individuals deal and perceive the impact that the presence (or absence) of laws has on their intimate lives.

The evolutions in family rights in European laws and the balance towards equal rights, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, are first detailed with an analysis of typical sequences found in a legal survey.

Demographic analyses enrich these aspects in dealing with registration and parenting. Statistical analyses of same-sex partnerships and same-sex marriages show frequencies of registration together with a focus on parenting linked to the partnership status.

In the next chapters, same-sex families are specifically studied in their daily life in France, Iceland and Italy through qualitative data. It investigates from a legal point of view and from a social perspective, what is at stake in the changing life of homosexuals in the field of parenting, what brings to everyday life the support of the law and what its absence implies.

The Postface opens towards the future of LGBT research.

The author is grateful to Patrick Festy and Kees Waaldijk who kindly gave useful comments of the first draft of this introduction.

Research on homosexuality in Europe has started to diversify. Until very recently, LGBT populations were mostly studied from a psychological or medical perspective, sometimes in feminist research. The homosexual couple began to interest social sciences researchers after the beginning of AIDS epidemics. The importance of lifestyles people lived in and died in the time of AIDS raised public awareness on the lack of rights. The first researches of Michael Pollak () focused on the gay couple giving a new definition of what the term could mean (differentiating sexuality from sociability). Jurists have also been interested in situations of injustice in which individuals were regarding citizenship. The interest for sexual minority rights began to rise in the academic world when recognition of same-sex unions legalisation started to be a universal claim in gay and lesbian struggles.