The discourse of love as a Human Right amongst LGBT families

MATÍAS DE STÉFANO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; IX IASSCS International Conference ?Sex and the marketplace. What´s love got to do with it??; 2013

IASSCS / UBA

Since relatedness -ties based on a diffuse-lasting solidarity- and elective kinship -in opposition with nature bonds created by consanguinity- emerge in Anthropology of Kinship, we have witnessed the settling of individual choice as a feature of homoparentality, in clear denaturalizing contrast with blood ties traditionally unquestioned. Thus, the traditional but imprecise boundary between friends and relatives became even more flexible to understand those who have demonstrated their love, being there when they were needed. It is then when love -and especially the right to give and receive it- has taken shape of a central symbol in the political struggles of homoparentality, as it bypasses the implicit assumption of procreative heterosexual marriage and blood ties. It is a kind of product and symbolic foundation of LGBT families, their construction of kinship is -in part- based on love discourses and practices. Then, the right to love was -and is- one of the main arguments of the LGBT community claims in regard to the struggle for the realization of rights related to parenthood and kinship. The rhetoric of love is, in one hand, called to balance the image of homosexuality stereotypes linked to instability and risk -on stages as sexuality, health, etc.- that hangs over this collective, and in the other, appeals to universal and desirable values establishing a sort of equivalence with heterosexuality and its norm. In the last fifty years, love became a standard to justify the claim of kinship rights, but also to deny them, due the socially constructed nature of human rights. As happens with love, the polysemic meanings of rights are involved in a conflictive battleground of symbolic power, and their negotiated strategies face the most diverse positions based on the same legitimacy. The attachment of certain rights to love depends on political points of view. Thus, the fundamental right of children to be loved -wielded from the homosexual community- faces their right to have a mother and a father -wielded from the more conservative sectors of society-. With this evidence, its urgent to recognize that love, in their discourses and practices -as well as parenthood and kinship rights- are highly political issues that cross the boundaries of the personal and urges reflection of society as a whole.