Leckey - After legal equality: family, sex, kinship

After Legal Equality

Groups seeking legal equality often take a victory as the end of the line. Once judgment is granted or a law is passed, coalitions disband and life goes on in a new state of equality. Policy makers too may assume that a troublesome file is now closed. This collection arises from the urgent sense that law reforms driven by equality call for fresh lines of inquiry. In unintended ways, reforms may harm their intended beneficiaries. They may also worsen the disadvantage of other groups. Committed to tackling these important issues beyond the boundaries that often confine legal scholarship, this book pursues an interdisciplinary consideration of efforts to advance equality, as it explores the developments, challenges, and consequences that arise from law reforms aiming to deliver equality in the areas of sexuality, kinship, and family relations. With an international array of contributors, After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship will be an invaluable resource for those with interests in this area.

Robert Leckey is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Faculty of Law, McGill University, where he conducts research in comparative family and constitutional law. He is author of Contextual Subjects: Family, State, and Relational Theory and co-editor of Queer Theory: Law, Culture, Empire.

Social Justice

Series editors: Sarah Lamble, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, Davina Cooper, University of Kent, UK, and Sarah Keenan, SOAS, UK

Social Justice is a new, theoretically engaged, interdisciplinary series exploring the changing values, politics and institutional forms through which claims for equality, democracy and liberation are expressed, manifested and fought over in the contemporary world. The series addresses a range of contexts, from transnational political fora, to nation-state and regional controversies, to small-scale social experiments. At its heart is a concern, and inter-disciplinary engagement, with the present and future politics of power, as constituted through territory, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, economics, ecology and culture.

Foregrounding struggle, imagined alternatives and the embedding of new norms, Social Justice critically explores how change is wrought through law and governance, everyday social and bodily practices, dissident knowledges, and movements for citizenship, belonging and reinvented community.

Titles in this series:

Intersectionality and Beyond

Law, Power and the Politics of Location

Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas and Didi Herman (eds), 2009

Regulating Sexuality

Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives

Rosie Harding, 2010

Rights of Passage

Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow

Nicholas Blomley, 2010

Anarchism and Sexuality

Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson (eds), 2011

Queer Necropolitics

Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco (eds), 2014

After Legal Equality

Family, Sex, Kinship

Robert Leckey (ed.), 2014

Forthcoming:

Power, Politics and the Emotions

Impossible Governance?

Shona Hunter

Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty

Tarryn Phillips

Global Justice and Desire

Queering Economy

Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel, Christoph H. E. Holzhey and Volker Woltersdorff (eds)

Chronotopes of Law

Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance

Mariana Valverde

Protest, Property and the Commons

Lucy Finchett-Maddock

Regulating Sex After Aids

Queer Risks and Contagion Politics

Neil Cobb

Subversive Property

Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging

Sarah Keenan

First published 2015
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Robert Leckey

The right of Robert Leckey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
After legal equality: family, sex, kinship/edited by Robert Leckey.
pages cm(Social justice)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Same-sex marriageLaw and legislation. 2. Gay couplesLegal status, laws, etc. 3. Equality before the law. 4. HomosexualityLaw and legislation. 5. Gay rights. 6. Queer theory. I. Leckey, Robert,editor of compilation.
K699.A84 2014
346.0168dc23
2014001223

ISBN: 978-0-415-72161-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-86303-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Contents

ROBERT LECKEY

JONATHAN HERRING

SUSAN B. BOYD

RICHARD COLLIER

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

KIM BROOKS

HELEN REECE

CLAIRE F.L. YOUNG

RODERICK A. FERGUSON

CATHERINE DONOVAN

ROSIE HARDING

DANIEL MONK

Susan B. Boyd is Professor of Law and holds the research Chair in Feminist Legal Studies in the Faculty of Law at Allard Hall, University of British Columbia.

Kim Brooks is Dean of the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, and Senior Research Fellow in the Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute at Monash University.

Richard Collier is Professor of Law and Social Theory at Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University.

Catherine Donovan is Professor of Social Relations at the University of Sunderland.

Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Womens Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Rosie Harding is Senior Lecturer in the Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham.

Jonathan Herring is Professor of Law, University of Oxford.

Janet R. Jakobsen is Professor of Womens Studies and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Robert Leckey is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Paul-Andr Crpeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, McGill University.

Daniel Monk is Reader in Law at Birkbeck, University of London.

Helen Reece is Reader in Law at the London School of Economics.

Claire F.L. Young is Professor in the Faculty of Law at Allard Hall, University of British Columbia.

This collection emerged from a workshop called After equality: Family, sex, kinship, hosted at McGill University on 1113 April 2013. Other papers will appear, in 2015, in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (27(1)). Thanks are owed to the Connection Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (file no. 61120120004), to the Paul-Andr Crpeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, both of McGill University. Thanks also to Rgine Tremblay, Manon Berthiaume, Bethany Hastie, Iris Graham, Catherine Le Guerrier, Allison Render and Marc Roy, as well as to Colin Perrin and Rebekah Jenkins at Routledge. I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by photographer Valerie Simmons to reproduce her image of the dancer and choreographer Jos Navas.