ABSTRACT
Lesbian and gay activists favouring equal legal recognition of same-sex relationships can point to a host of successes in a number of countries over the last decade. Between 2004 and 2006 New Zealand passed its Civil Union Act, Canada passed the Civil Marriage Act, the UK passed the Civil Partnership Act and South Africa passed its Civil Union Act. Immigration law and policy applying to same-sex couples has also been liberalized in all of these countries in recent years. This groundswell of recognition has been somewhat of a phenomenon; in Canada for example, it has been noted that once courts recognized discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, legal recognition of same-sex relationships, and provision of the right to marry, occurred with ‘startling rapidity’ (Young and Boyd 2006: 216). At the same time, opponents of marriage and other recognition for lesbians and gay men continue to decry the threat to civilization, marriage and the family – the cornerstones of society – supposedly posed by these developments.1 This threat is often framed in terms of a counter-evolutionary decay or degeneration of society. Some lesbian and gay scholars warn of the regulatory and domesticating potential of these reforms. Other scholars, including myself, have argued that these types of reforms have shifted the terrain of legally and socially acceptable relationships from a simple dichotomy between heterosexual and gay and lesbian to acceptance of those same-sex couples who are willing to conform to heteronormative relationship models. This chapter continues this project by further unpacking a type of raced, gendered and classed normativity in the reforms: relationships of domination integral to empire. It traces ideas of decay, degeneration and domesticity in the production of sexuality in empire, in same-sex relationship recognition, and in the liberalization of same-sex immigration, all focusing on New Zealand. It highlights some of the raced and gendered configurations of empire embedded in the language of the reforms, arguing that the reforms operate in part to reproduce and re-embed, rather than disrupt, patterns of imperial domination.
