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International audience ; This paper examines experts who have testified before U.S. and French courts and legislatures on same-sex marriage and parenting debates between 1990 and 2013. Experts can provide special evidentiary weight to political arguments, which I call expert capital. For this reason, social movements and decision-makers on both sides of the debate solicit them. Yet, because of specific national conditions, this article shows that not all experts have the same capacity to use their respective academic and professional resources to impact policymaking in each country. Drawing on 71 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation in both the U.S. and France, it analyses how progressive and conservative experts have struggled for dominance in their fields. Results show that American progressive experts have achieved a degree of power in their fields as their conservative counterparts turn to resources outside the academic mainstream. In France, progressives have only recently begun to challenge conservatives' dominant position. I argue that these power balances, which are subject to change, are due to: 1) size and centralization of knowledge regimes; 2) disciplinary and university reactions to research on gender and sexuality; 3) academic and professional organization strength; 4) social acceptance of gay families; and, 5) the degree of division among allied experts. These findings have implications for research on social movements. They show that the capacity of experts to provide expert capital to their activist and decision-maker allies is constrained and enabled by factors specific to knowledge production fields that vary cross-nationally.

International audience ; This paper examines experts who have testified before U.S. and French courts and legislatures on same-sex marriage and parenting debates between 1990 and 2013. Experts can provide special evidentiary weight to political arguments, which I call expert capital. For this reason, social movements and decision-makers on both sides of the debate solicit them. Yet, because of specific national conditions, this article shows that not all experts have the same capacity to use their respective academic and professional resources to impact policymaking in each country. Drawing on 71 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation in both the U.S. and France, it analyses how progressive and conservative experts have struggled for dominance in their fields. Results show that American progressive experts have achieved a degree of power in their fields as their conservative counterparts turn to resources outside the academic mainstream. In France, progressives have only recently begun to challenge conservatives' dominant position. I argue that these power balances, which are subject to change, are due to: 1) size and centralization of knowledge regimes; 2) disciplinary and university reactions to research on gender and sexuality; 3) academic and professional organization strength; 4) social acceptance of gay families; and, 5) the degree of division among allied experts. These findings have implications for research on social movements. They show that the capacity of experts to provide expert capital to their activist and decision-maker allies is constrained and enabled by factors specific to knowledge production fields that vary cross-nationally.

AbstractThis article argues for a more systematic inclusion of human sexuality in studies of ethnicity and nationalism. Reviewing key extant social science research on sexuality, it highlights how scholars can leverage its theories, methods, and findings to enhance our understanding of the ways people build imagined ethnic and national communities and draw symbolic boundaries around them. This research reveals that sexuality is not tangential to those activities. Rather, policymakers, religious institutions, local communities, families, and other organizations all participate in more or less obvious ways to define what kinds of sexual desires, behaviours, and identities are acceptable for legitimate citizenship and group belonging. Those decisions have ramifications on both the global scale of international relations and the local scale of personal self‐understanding. For these reasons, this article argues that scholarship that elides sexuality may run the risk of painting an incomplete picture of social processes related to ethnicity and nationalism.

This dissertation asks how and why American and French decision-makers—and those striving to persuade them—use specific kinds of "experts" and "expertise" when debating if same-sex couples should have the right (or not) to marry and found families. To answer these questions, I analyze archival, interview, and ethnographic data to study "expertise"—conceived broadly—in media, legislative, and judicial debates on the U.S. state, U.S. federal, French, and European levels from 1990 to 2013. I find that, despite addressing the same issues, decision- makers draw on divergent categories of "experts" mobilizing types of knowledge that follow systematic cross-national patterns. For instance, French institutions hear professors and intellectuals who discuss gay family rights in the abstract while U.S. institutions hear ordinary citizens whose lived experiences ground academic testimony. Furthermore, some "expertise," such as economics in the U.S. or psychoanalysis in France, is pervasive in one context but absent in the other. I argue that nationally specific patterns in "expertise" are due to embedded institutional logics, legal structures, and knowledge production fields that impact how information is produced, made available, and rendered legitimate nationally and historically.Chapter 1 identifies the people U.S. and French newspapers cite and what they say. U.S. reporting prioritizes ordinary citizens and advocacy organizations using personal experience and legal expertise. In contrast, French reporting prioritizes intellectuals and professionals using psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts. Chapter 2 finds national differences in people testifying before legal and political institutions. In contrast to French legislatures, which draw on famous intellectuals, state agencies, and other elite actors, U.S. legislatures hear more ordinary citizens and activists. Courts, which are central to advancing gay rights in the U.S. but not France, combine personal testimony with empirical science from "expert witnesses." Chapter 3 describes how these patterns are partly the result of the way lawyers and legislators navigate cultural and institutional constraints as they organize testimony. Chapter 4 explains how knowledge availability also depends on power and resource distribution in fields where academics and professionals work. Finally, Chapter 5 describes how experts' access to decision- making institutions depends on the relationships they forge with organizations and lawmakers.

AbstractBefore 2013, French children could not have two parents of the same sex. For example, non‐biologically related mothers in lesbian couples were legally invisible and prohibited to use second‐parent adoption. A 2013 bill legalising same‐sex marriage and adoption authorised that option. However, this reform requires same‐sex couples – but not heterosexual couples – to marry before establishing parental rights. Given this inequality, we ask: compared to their heterosexual peers, do French same‐sex couples with children marry more often? What do they think about same‐sex marriage in general and their own marriages in particular? To answer these questions, we draw on survey responses and interviews from the first national cohort study of French same‐sex couples, most of whom are lesbian, raising children born between 2011 and 2013 (n = 162). We find significantly higher marriage rates among same‐sex parents compared to different‐sex parents. What may appear at first glance to be an unvarnished attachment to marriage is belied by discriminatory logics requiring couples to go against their stated ambivalence towards the institution of marriage in order to safeguard their parental rights. We argue that this burden is a form of legal violence that enforces heterosexist norms through legislation that was ostensibly enacted in the name of equality.

International audience ; Before 2013, French children could not have two parents of the same sex. For example, non-biologically related mothers in lesbian couples were legally invisible and prohibited to use second-parent adoption. A 2013 bill legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption authorized that option. However, this reform requires same-sex couples-but not heterosexual couples-to marry before establishing parental rights. Given this inequality, we ask: Compared to their heterosexual peers, do French same-sex couples with children marry more often? What do they think about same-sex marriage in general and their own marriages in particular? To answer these questions, we draw on survey responses and interviews from the first national cohort study of French same-sex couples, most of whom are lesbian, raising children born between 2011-2013 (n=162). We find significantly higher marriage rates among same-sex parents compared to different-sex parents. What may appear at first glance to be an unvarnished attachment to marriage is belied by discriminatory logics requiring couples to go against their stated ambivalence toward the institution of marriage in order to safeguard their parental rights. We argue that this burden is a form of legal violence that enforces heterosexist norms through legislation that was ostensibly enacted in the name of equality.

International audience ; Before 2013, French children could not have two parents of the same sex. For example, non-biologically related mothers in lesbian couples were legally invisible and prohibited to use second-parent adoption. A 2013 bill legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption authorized that option. However, this reform requires same-sex couples-but not heterosexual couples-to marry before establishing parental rights. Given this inequality, we ask: Compared to their heterosexual peers, do French same-sex couples with children marry more often? What do they think about same-sex marriage in general and their own marriages in particular? To answer these questions, we draw on survey responses and interviews from the first national cohort study of French same-sex couples, most of whom are lesbian, raising children born between 2011-2013 (n=162). We find significantly higher marriage rates among same-sex parents compared to different-sex parents. What may appear at first glance to be an unvarnished attachment to marriage is belied by discriminatory logics requiring couples to go against their stated ambivalence toward the institution of marriage in order to safeguard their parental rights. We argue that this burden is a form of legal violence that enforces heterosexist norms through legislation that was ostensibly enacted in the name of equality.

International audience ; Before 2013, French children could not have two parents of the same sex. For example, non-biologically related mothers in lesbian couples were legally invisible and prohibited to use second-parent adoption. A 2013 bill legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption authorized that option. However, this reform requires same-sex couples-but not heterosexual couples-to marry before establishing parental rights. Given this inequality, we ask: Compared to their heterosexual peers, do French same-sex couples with children marry more often? What do they think about same-sex marriage in general and their own marriages in particular? To answer these questions, we draw on survey responses and interviews from the first national cohort study of French same-sex couples, most of whom are lesbian, raising children born between 2011-2013 (n=162). We find significantly higher marriage rates among same-sex parents compared to different-sex parents. What may appear at first glance to be an unvarnished attachment to marriage is belied by discriminatory logics requiring couples to go against their stated ambivalence toward the institution of marriage in order to safeguard their parental rights. We argue that this burden is a form of legal violence that enforces heterosexist norms through legislation that was ostensibly enacted in the name of equality.