Love, Freedom and Governance: Same-Sex Marriage in Canada

Abstract

Recent developments in Canadian marital jurisprudence require that we ask: what if love could be mobilized as a technology of power? In this article I propose such an analysis. I establish a recent discursive shift in the meaning of marriage in law, amounting to what I will call a `normalizing love discourse'. I argue that this process of transformation reflects a broader synthesis within liberal governance of freedom, aspiration, feeling and the exercise of power. The shift has operated in two ways: marriage is now defined by love (and the state's sanction of it), and second, love among heterosexuals or among lesbians or gay men has been rendered legally equivalent for the purpose of marriage law. I then draw upon accounts of neo-liberalism to suggest several lines of inquiry that may be fruitful for developing a critical analysis of legal love discourse. I argue that love is being opened as a space for and method of governance, at the paradoxical moment of its (re)privatization in/as marriage.