Sexuality and politics in contemporary culture: social and legal recognition for gay couples

This study aims to analyze the main discursive devices that establish borders and hierarchies among sexual practices. The objective is to analyze to what extent the utilization of certain concepts from psychoanalysis, anthropology, and law are invoked to define borders between normal and deviant sexualities. The following points are highlighted: the construction, by these discourses, of the "sexual difference" device (hierarchy between the sexes and exclusion of homosexuality) and the notion of "procreative order" (updating a biological model of filiation). Based on these premises, one notes that the heterosexuality-marriage-filiation triad remains as the only possible reference to conceive of culture or society, while the visibility or civil recognition of homosexual affective and sexual ties threatens to erase borders or transgress limits.

Sexuality; kinship; homosexuality; filiation