Gay Marriages, Society and Homosexuality - Essay Example

Gay Marriages It can be described as same sex marriage which is legally or socially recognized between people of the same biological sex. There are conflicts already in the society whether same sex couples should be allowed to enter into marriages or use different status name such as civil unions can grant them equal rights as traditional man and woman marriage with limited or no rights at all. Gay marriage is very different with Gay Kinship, but nevertheless the two have become so much confounded in the US citizens opinions and whenever they are heard of, people keep on arguing that marriage should remain a heterosexual institution. Gay kinship itself does not work unless it assumes a recognizable family norm and in linking these views together, sexuality should be organized in a service of reproductive relations whereby marriage is conceived as that which secures institutions through conferring legal status. If Kinships is understood as a set of practices instituting relationships which negotiate reproduction of life and death demands, then, its practices will be those that address forms of human dependency such as birth, child rearing, illnesses and death. Recent conceptions of Kinships have been disjointed from marriage assumptions and kinship mainly functions properly via a network of women whom might or not be related biologically. Kath Weston has managed to supply ethnographic description of lesbian and gay non marital relations emerging heterosexually and marriage also being separated from questions of kinship to the extent that gay marriage legislative proposals often exclude rights to adoption or reproduction. Gay marriage draws upon profound and abiding investments not only in heterosexuality but mostly in forms of personal relationship that needs to be recognized by the state. This crisis could be viewed in various perspectives such as, legitimation is entering into terms of legitimation offered and finding ones public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation and delimitation of legitimation happens via an exclusion of a certain spot even though it is not patented dialectically. Spheres of legitimate intimate alliances are established by producing and intensifying regions of illegitimacy and gay marriage takes place via such logic which has broken into the debate on whether marriages should be legitimately be extended to homosexuals which in one hand, portrays the sexual field as circumscribed in such a manner that sexuality is thought of in terms of marriage whereby marriage can be perceived as a purchase on legitimacy Politics which incorporates critical understanding becomes the proper way of maintaining a claim of being self reflective and non-dogmatic and the fact that there is a political stand, does not necessarily mean a single and enduring stand. For instance it is very difficult to stand up and say you are for gay marriages because it can be interpreted as just someone who wants to secure the rights of those who wish to make use of it or someone wants to counter the homophobic discourses that are marshaled against gay marriages. Some argue that in order to have a progressive sexual movement, heterosexual marriages should not be the only way of legitimate sexuality which also challenges the notion whereby marriages becomes the basis on which benefits such as health care are allocated and there should be proper ways of organizing such entitlements so that everyone regardless of their marital status has access to it, and if marriage is a way of accessing those benefits, then, how does someone affirm that entitlement which is as important as healthcare should be allocated on the basis of marital status and what are the effects to the non-married and how does this make the sexual field to be reduced. Or is it that people believe strongly that marriage is the best way for lesbian and which should be installed as a norm for the future and for everybody and we need to rework and revise the social organization of friendship, sexual contacts and community to produce non state centered forms of support and alliances since marriages becomes by extending itself as a norm. In Gay marriages proposals there are issues pertaining to homophobic sentiments focusing on fears about reproductive relations whether natural or artificial with concerns on what is likely to happen to the child produced ultimately resulting to issues related to technology, new demographics, unity and transmissibility of the nation and there are already fears that feminism in its insistence on childcare has effectively opened up kinship outside the family to the Gay strangers. For instance, in the French gay proposal bill, there were debates on pacts of civil solidarity (PACS) that constituted marriage alternatives between two individuals unrelated by blood, the bill’s passage finally depended on proscribing rights of non heterosexual couples from adopting children and accessing reproductive technology. This raises the critical question, should legally allied gay people have children and what should the state do in relation to this, what should it provide to them and the kinds of intimate relations that ought to be eligible for state legitimation, the desire to keep the state from offering recognition to non heterosexual partners and the desire to compel the state from offering such recognition. This same provision was proposed and adopted in Germany. In the French proposal of when questions of reproduction and adoption arose, an implicit could be seen between the French culture and universalism which had its own consequences for the fantasy of nation at stake and the best way that this proposal could easily sail through was by denying rights of joint adoption to non-heterosexuals, which is against the symbolic order of letting homosexuals have families. In order to have a clearer view of this debate, the figure child of non-heterosexuals parents becomes a cathected site for anxieties about cultural purities and transmission and whatever social forms and it is also against symbolic order to have homosexuals form families because they are not marriages hence not families and the only way the proposal could not sail through was denying joint adoption to individual with such relationships and as Eric Passin and others argue, the alteration of rights of filiations in French perspective becomes indeed scandalous since the rights of the marriage contract can be within range or extended, but filiations rights cannot. However, the failure to secure state recognition for someone’s intimate recognition might be described as derealization whereby the terms of the state maintain hegemonic control over the norms of recognition which if monopolized by the state might lead the gay and lesbian turning against the state. This leads to a dilemma because, on one hand, living without norms of recognition is likely to result in sufferings and disenfranchisements, while on the other hand, the demand to be recognized might lead to some kind of social hierarchy and new ways of supporting and extending the powers of the state if it refuses to recognize the legitimation. By the gay community making a bid to the state for their recognition, there will be restrictions on what are recognizable as legitimate sexual arrangements which fortify the state as norms of recognition and eclipsing other possibilities within the civil society and cultural life and in demanding recognition in relation to norms that legitimate marriages and delegitimized forms of sexual alliances outside the marriage brackets, it is basically displacing the site of delegitimation from one part of an odd community to the other. The drive for gay marriage is also a response to HIV/AIDS because the gay disavow their promiscuity as healthy and normal and capable of sustaining monogamous relations with time which also poses the questions as to whether the drive to become recognizable within existing norms of legitimacy requires people to subscribe to practices that delegitimizes sexual lives structured outside marriage bonds and monogamy presumptions. living without norms of recognition may result in sufferings and disenfranchisement and the demand to be recognized may lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy to precipitous foreclosure of sexual field. In a bid for state recognition, we restrict what is going to become recognizable as legitimate sexual arrangements thus fortifying the state as source for norms of recognition and eclipsing other possibility with civil society and cultural life. To demand and receive recognition according to norms legitimizing marriages or to norms articulated in critical relation to marriages or rather transforming collective delegitimation into a selective one. Such practices are difficult in reconciling with radically democratic sexually progressive movements. People opposed to the French Pac’s rarely voiced skeptical views about gay marriages and culture in its entirerity and this has been called into question by variability of legitimated sexual alliances and immigration, and with gay parenting also being figured as challenging fundamentals of culture that had been transformed. According to Agacinski, he argues that culture requires that a man and a woman produce a child and the child should have this natural dual point of reference for its own initiation in the symbolic order whereby in this regard the symbolic order entails a set of rules that support human’s sense of reality and cultural intelligibility. He continues to argue that, gay parenting is both unnatural and a threat to culture in the sense that, sexual differences which can be described as irrefutable biological and gains significance in the cultural sphere as foundation of life in procreation and homosexual parenting a practice that departs from culture and nature while centering on dangerous and artificial fabrication of the human, hence figured as violence. A child should have a father and a mother whereby the father should be a man and the mother a woman and a child’s parent’s existence have to be properly understood by the child itself and their existence is essential to the child’s origin. However, there are arguments that other kinds of kinship arrangements are possible within certain cultures and there are ways to explain the ordering practices that kinship is sometimes exemplified and recent efforts within anthology no longer situate kinship as the basis for culture but conceive it as a cultural phenomenon that is complexly interlinked with other phenomena, social and politics. For instance, kinship is already being linked with political formations of national and transnational identities, economic movements pertaining to labor and capital, religion cosmologies, hierarchies of race, gender and taxonomies whereby the ethnographic studies pertaining to kinship have metamorphosed by including newer topics such as; Diasporas cultures and dynamics of global political economy. There are quite a number of questions that that needs to be addressed in regards to understanding the psychic life of those living outside normative kinship; these are the fantasies of love children reared in homosexual families unconsciously adopt, how do children displaced from their original families ?or those born through implantation? Or sperm donor inseminations understand their origins? What cultural narratives will they understand? Finally how do we begin understanding the forms of gender differentiation taking place within the child when heterosexuality is not the presumption of Oedipalization? This can be concluded that a double edged thinking will only lead to a political paralysis and if we continuing engaging the frames that these particular debates supply, then we are bound to ratify the frame at the moment we are taking our stand which signals a certain paralysis in the face of exercising power to change the terms where such discussions are rendered thinkable. As the rights of marriage, when adoption and reproductive technology ought to be secured outside the marriage frame, then the sexuality field has become foreclosed from debates on whether people might marry, conceive or raise children which leads into a dilemma and if we keep on deciding, this becomes a sensitive issue and unknowing our side, then, we have deliberately accepted an epistemological field that is structured by the very fundamental loss and the life of sexuality, kinship and the unthinkable community in relation to lost horizon of sexual politics and we have to find our proper way in the wake of ungrievable. References 1. Butler, Judith, Antigones Claim: Kinship Between life and death. The welleck libraries lecture. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 2. Feher Michael. Reflections, Politics and sex (1998):2-25. 3. Franklin, Sarah, Susan McKinnon. Relative values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Durban Duke. 4. Hertier Francoise. Society and Homosexuality. Ed. Marrianne Gomez. La Croix (Nov 1998): 16. 5. Weston Kath. Families we chose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia UP. 1991. 6. Warner Michael. The Trouble with Normal Sex. Politics and the Ethics of Life. New York: Free Press, 1999. Read More