Discourses on Sexual Difference and Anticommunitarianism in France

In recent years, the family has emerged as a particularly controversial topic in French politics. The debates around the legislation of bioethics, same-sex unions, single-parent households, family names, surrogacy, transsexuality, and gay adoption have been furious. They have torn through party lines, generated heated parliamentary sessions, persevered in the courts, and inspired many scholars to intervene. France, of course, is not the only country where the political and social organization of sexuality and reproduction have triggered intense passions, but the particular arguments and vocabulary that were mobilized during these discussions were symptomatic of a distinctly French polemic. Indeed, as politicians elsewhere were turning to religion, morality, tradition, or “nature” to ground their objections against gay marriage and medically assisted reproduction, French judges and legislators found solace in structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis, and more specifically, in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. Deputies cited The Elementary Structures of Kinship in parliament to argue that heterosexual marriage was the foundation of all societies, and consequently, that gay marriage was not naturally but socially unacceptable. Others invoked Lacan to suggest that children raised by lesbians or single mothers would be lacking the “Name-of-the- Father” and were thus more likely to be psychotic. Others, still, insisted on the importance of the incest prohibition as they highlighted the “symbolic” nature of kinship relations and the “anthropological function of the Law.” This paper examines how and why the structuralist vocabulary of sexual difference came to provide a theoretical justification to defend familialism and fight against communitarianism.