Abstract Book of the 7th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2025
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Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Only a Matter of Equality, But Also of Gender and Social Justice
lucrezia fortuna
ABSTRACT:
This paper stems from the launch of the Uguali! referendum, which aimed to repeal the 2016 law on civil partnerships for same-sex couples and extend marriage rights to them. The Italian legal system is characterised by fundamental ambiguity surrounding the relationship between marriage, family and filiation. These concepts overlap, having profound repercussions on the rights, aspirations and bodies of those admitted to them and those excluded. This ambiguity is an expression of the heteronormative paradigm that still informs these institutions. Despite judicial attempts at adaptation, the Constitution itself reveals the law’s delay in recognising and protecting the pluralistic ways in which families are formed and function in modern society. Consider the situation of women, who are confined to the roles of mothers and carers. This perpetuates their exclusion from full social and economic citizenship, precisely because of the asymmetries in care tasks and the invisibility of their value. From this perspective, equal marriage would have effects beyond same-sex couples as it would redefine the concepts of marriage, family and filiation, and disrupt the gender order on which they are based. Consider the distribution of care work: it would show how the gender division that governs it, primarily to the detriment of women, far from being the result of a natural and immutable principle, is rather the result of the repetition over time of norms and constructs that the law can decide to consolidate or finally discontinue.
Keywords: gay marriage; family; resignification; redistribution of care; social justice