Boys in Dresses: Same-sex Marriage, Children and the Politics of Equivalence

ABSTRACT This reflective article considers the ways in which children were symbolically deployed to configure the politics in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the recent Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. I suggest that the politics of equivalence, whereby the equality of queer relationships was rhetorically argued by suggesting they were ‘the same’, enabled an associated discursive attachment to the nuclear family, centred on the possibility for reproduction and the potential existence of children. As a result, there was a troublesome convergence in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the cry, ‘what about the children?’. While the concern was clearly levelled from very different political standpoints, the attachment of the politics of futurity to children, I suggest, is a key part of why the mainstream ‘Yes’ campaign focused so narrowly on the amendment to marriage legislation to the neglect of a broader queer politics and more diverse queer cultures and expressions.