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Same-Sex Families and Legal Recognition in Europe European Studies of Population European Studies of Population 24 Marie Digoix Editor Same-Sex Families and Legal Recognition in Europe European Studies of Population Volume 24 Series Editors Elwood D. Carlson, Ctr Demography & Population Health, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA Stuart Gietel-Basten, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong The book series “European Studies of Population” (ESPO) aims at disseminating population research with special relevance for Europe. The series is multidisciplinary in character and includes both formal demographic analyses, as well as studies of the social, economic and other determinants and impacts of population trends. International comparison is of prime interest to ESPO, and both contemporary and historical perspectives may be applied. ESPO is open to methodological work and theoretical studies, as well as to studies that focus on the social and policy implications of demographic trends. The series includes monographs and edited volumes. ESPO is published under the auspices of the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS). More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5940 Marie Digoix Editor Same-Sex Families and Legal Recognition in Europe Editor Marie Digoix French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) Paris, France ISSN 1381-3579 European Studies of Population ISBN 978-3-030-37053-4 ISBN 978-3-030-37054-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37054-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents 1 Introduction – LGBT Questions and the Family ������������������������������������ 1 Marie Digoix 2 What First, What Later? Patterns in the Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partners in European Countries . 11 Kees Waaldijk 3 Same-Sex Couples and Their Legalization in Europe: Laws and Numbers ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 45 Clara Cortina and Patrick Festy 4 Same-Sex Parents Negotiating the Law in Italy: Between Claims of Recognition and Practices of Exclusion ������������������ 73 Marina Franchi and Giulia Selmi 5 Same-Sex Families Challenging Norms and the Law in France ������������ 95 Matthias Thibeaud 6 LGBT Desires in Family Land: Parenting in Iceland, from Social Acceptance to Social Pressure ���������������������������������������������� 117 Marie Digoix 7 Postface. After Legal Recognition . 155 Wilfried Rault Index ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 175 v Contributors Clara Cortina Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Marie Digoix French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Paris, France Patrick Festy French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Paris, France Marina Franchi London School of Economics, London, UK Wilfried Rault French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Paris, France Giulia Selmi University of Verona, Verona, Italy Matthias Thibeaud French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Paris, France Kees Waaldijk Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands vii Chapter 1 Introduction – LGBT Questions and the Family Marie Digoix Abstract The past decades have seen significant changes in the way non hetero- sexual sexualities are regulated in European countries. In a moment of ongoing transitions, the interdisciplinary research presented focuses on aspects related to homosexuals rights and the way LGBT individuals deal and perceive the impact that the presence (or absence) of laws has on their intimate lives. The evolutions in family rights in European laws and the balance towards equal rights, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, are first detailed with an analy- sis of typical sequences found in a legal survey. Demographic analyses enrich these aspects in dealing with registration and par- enting. Statistical analyses of same-sex partnerships and same-sex marriages show frequencies of registration together with a focus on parenting linked to the partner- ship status. In the next chapters, same-sex families are specifically studied in their daily life in France, Iceland and Italy through qualitative data. It investigates from a legal point of view and from a social perspective, what is at stake in the changing life of homosexuals in the field of parenting, what brings to everyday life the support of the law and what its absence implies. The Postface opens towards the future of LGBT research. Keywords Same-sex couples · Comparative family law · Same-sex parenting · Family policies · Demographic behaviours The author is grateful to Patrick Festy and Kees Waaldijk who kindly gave useful comments of the first draft of this introduction. M. Digoix (*) French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 1 M. Digoix (ed.), Same-Sex Families and Legal Recognition in Europe, European Studies of Population 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37054-1_1 2 M. Digoix Research on homosexuality in Europe has started to diversify. Until very recently, LGBT populations were mostly studied from a psychological or medical perspec- tive, sometimes in feminist research. The homosexual couple began to interest social sciences researchers after the beginning of AIDS epidemics. The importance of lifestyles people lived in and died in the time of AIDS raised public awareness on the lack of rights. The first researches of Michael Pollak (1985) and Marie-Ange Schiltz (1998) focused on the gay couple giving a new definition of what the term could mean (differentiating sexuality from sociability). Jurists have also been inter- ested in situations of injustice in which individuals were regarding citizenship. The interest for sexual minority rights began to rise in the academic world when recogni- tion of same-sex unions’ legalisation started to be a universal claim in gay and les- bian struggles. In 1989, Denmark became the first country in the world to create a legal frame- work, based on marriage, to offer same-sex couples the possibility to register offi- cially their union. Thereafter, the opening up of marriage and other legal arrangements to same-sex couples in a growing number of countries changed the visibility of homosexuality. However, this acknowledgement of homosexuality through the legal recognition of homosexual couple, reveals more the acceptance of a compliance to normative behaviour via the heterosexual model than of the sexual orientation of the individual per se (Rydström 2011). If discrimination on sexual grounds is generally prohibited by law in most of Western European countries (Waaldijk and Bonini-Baraldi 2006), the homosexual, because of his sexuality, is still stigmatised in society (Baiocco et al. 2012; Digoix 2013a). Marrying/registering a partnership implies coming out and coming out still relates to the individual in a rational choice between what law can bring to a personal situation (social recognition or legal consequences, for example) compared to what it might deteriorate (visibility and the ‘endless’ repeti- tion of coming out) (Fassin 2005; Andersen 2011; Harding 2011). With regards to the opening up of marriage and parental status to same-sex couples, European coun- tries have not reached the same level of rights (Waaldijk 2005, 2013). Nordic coun- tries have pioneered a common trend in adopting laws (Digoix 2013b) while the timing of legalisation varies among Southern European countries. Studies have rarely been conducted in a comparative perspective but in most cases, they have shown that equal citizenship has been put forward as a political means to reach equality (Albæk 1988; Bauer 2006; Calvo 2010; Paternotte 2011). Up until recently, homosexual couples have diversified their types of unions, balancing
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