Same-sex marriage, nation, and race: French political logics and rhetorics

Abstract

While the debate on "marriage for all" may have looked like a mere repetition of the earlier one on PaCS, the terms have changed since the late 1990s - from secular to religious, and from anthropological to biological. But it is still about national identity. In France, filiation is sacralized because it defines both family and citizenship. As the comparison with the United States makes clear, the opposition to gay marriage is thus also about race: it articulates the racialization of the nation and the biologization of the family. However, the political rhetorics do not always coincide with this logic of naturalization/denaturalization: while the sexual nationalisms of the early 2000s pitted "sexual democracy" against racialized minorities, the polemics of the next decade, from the Taubira law to the (so-called) "theory of gender," offer new configurations of the intersections of sexual and racial politics. Is the Catholic, bourgeois movement of La Manif pour tous about whiteness, or is a morally conservative alliance with the children of immigrants and Muslims from the outer-cities possible? The conclusion of this paper focuses on the tensions between intersectional logics (of equivalence) and rhetorics (of articulation): same-sex marriage signifies race but it is also signified by the different political actors.

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