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Reframing homosexuality and same-sex couple relationships
An understanding of the historical and social specificity of marriage allows for a
critical stance towards knowledge claims that this institution is both unchanging and
unchangeable. Social constructionist traditions call into question common-sense
understandings and highlight the ways in which knowledge is formed, sustained or
challenged by social processes, including through interaction (Burr, 2003). Same-sex
marriage and, to a lesser extent, civil partnership imply a significant rethinking of
constructions of marriage itself, but also suggest new framings of homosexuality and
of same-sex relationships. This notion of reframing homosexuality is reflected in
policy, with civil partnership in the UK a means to, “promote culture change that
could make a real and positive difference to same-sex partners” (Women and
Equality Unit, 2004, p. 4).
This latest recasting of homosexuality and same-sex relationships as enjoying legal
parity with heterosexual couples can also be seen in a constructionist context.
During the last third of the twentieth century, the prospects of gay men in particular
in the UK, Canada and California have been transformed through highly symbolic
developments including the decriminalisation of male same-sex acts and the
delisting of homosexuality as pathology by the American Psychiatric Association.
Thus, constructions of non-heterosexuals as criminals, or as mentally disordered
have been eroded. The gradual secularisation of Western societies also means that
casting LGB people as sinners has lost much of its force. These constructions of
homosexuality as a personal defect were challenged by nascent gay and lesbian
social movements, though the relative liberation of the 1970s was short-lived, with a
conservative backlash against LGB rights claims fuelled by the unfolding HIV-AIDS
epidemic (Bronski, 2011). Whereas de-criminalisation did not equate to social
acceptance, or the dismantling of hetero-normativity, the possibility of legal
recognition reflects a changing social environment for non-heterosexual people.
This transformation of the prospects available to some same-sex couples is
acknowledged not only in LGB scholarship (Weeks, 2007; Cook, 2007; Plummer,
1995), but is also visible in autobiographical accounts of lesbian and gay lives that tell
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