Boys in Dresses: Same-sex Marriage, Children and the Politics of Equivalence

Abstract

This reflective article considers the ways in which children were symbolically deployed to configure the politics in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the recent Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. I suggest that the politics of equivalence, whereby the equality of queer relationships was rhetorically argued by suggesting they were ‘the same’, enabled an associated discursive attachment to the nuclear family, centred on the possibility for reproduction and the potential existence of children. As a result, there was a troublesome convergence in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the cry, ‘what about the children?’. While the concern was clearly levelled from very different politi..