Sex & the State: Government Responses to Gay Marriage in France (Politics‪)‬

The announcement by Greens mayor and parliamentarian Noel Mamere in April 2004 that he intended to preside over the marriage of two men sparked heated debate in France. Mamere's subsequent celebration of the marriage produced political and legal repercussions, and attracted massive media attention. The celebration was enabled by an ambiguity in the Code civil, the legal framework introduced by Napoleon and an important symbol for the post-revolutionary State. This paper outlines some political investments in the gay marriage debate, concentrating on the dominant representations of a political elite. My objective is to situate these responses in relation to their generation within a specific political culture and in the interests of a particular social order. As a consequence of primarily attending to the dominant discourse on recent events and the historical regulation of male homosexuality, the scope of this paper is limited mainly to gay male marriage and I do not address lesbian marriage and writing. While the subject of gay marriage has generated a mass of critical literature, (1) little of this treats the debate in France, partly because legal challenges and reform have a longer history in this area than in some other settings. A danger for Anglophone literature is missing the importance of, and distinctions between, the framing of debate in different settings. This danger extends to commentary in France, where Mamere's actions are frequently placed together with the celebration of gay marriages by the city administration in San Francisco and elsewhere in the United States around the same period. (2) I begin, therefore, with an outline of the development of some of the specificities of the French context. My approach is to present some institutional and discursive transformations in the moral regulation of sexuality in France, emphasising continuities in contemporary debate by reference primarily to reporting in the national press. To this end I draw on the constructionist work of writers such as Michel Foucault, Robert Nye and Gert Hekma. I present the rhetorical construction of the debate with attention to common themes, constructions and strategies (3) deployed by a political establishment. Dominance here is understood through the relationship between representations and distributions of power as