Vanilla democracy: Sexuality, parenthood, and kinship in Greece

Abstract

This article analyzes how parenthood gets established as a defined sexual category predicated on the exclusion of imagined deviance. Examining the Greek state's policies on reproduction, public discourses over non-heterosexual kinship, and the LGBT movement’s claims for the institutional recognition of same-sex parenthood, I analyze the circulation of sexual concepts and ideas through the cultural notion of parenthood, their imbrication with policies on family and reproduction, and their connection to broader national, political, and reproductive imaginaries. Through a careful reading of the “Greek case,” a nation where same-sex couples can now enter a civil partnership, but who nevertheless lack any legal recognition of same-sex parenting, I argue that political attachments to parenthood have implications for understanding other forms of institutionalized reproduction, including the academic re/production of scholarship on kinship and sexuality, labor law, and the reproduction of state authority.