ABSTRACT
In Spain same-sex marriage and adoption were approved in 2005, and in 2006 a new law granted both single women and lesbian couples access to artificial reproductive techniques. As such, the country offers an interesting case for studying the contrast between the legal achievements of gender and sexual dissident people and the permanent social invisibility and hostility that queer people still face.
Drawing on interviews I conducted in 2015 and 2016 in Madrid about lesbian coupledom and parenting, I analyze the interviewees’ narratives of experiences of disrespect in the private sphere within families of origin and in the public sphere in social and institutional spaces, despite their legal rights. I use Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to analyze the long and diffuse processes that slowly and continuously cause discrimination against sexual and gender dissident people and queer families who are visible as such. I also use Monique Wittig’s concept of the “straight mind,” referring to heterosexual assumptions that circulate in society, as a tool to understand the episodes of slow violence denounced by the interviewees during the research.
