Desiring What the Law Desires: A Semiotic View on the Normalization of Homosexual Sexuality

Abstract

Critics of the same-sex rights discourse claim that recent struggles for sexual equality is fostering a process of normalization that exerts both heteronormative and homonormative effects. This article follows this clue and seeks to identify some of the factors and the channels of the “transformation of desire” which is currently affecting the homosexual imagery. By looking at some key judgments both in the U.S. and Europe, it explores how lesbians, gays, and bisexuals acquire socio-political visibility and how the latter impacts on them. By capitalizing on a semiotic view of law, the article explains how the access to the legal field has forced lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to frame the theme of homosexuality in conformity with a categorial grid typical of traditional kinship models.