Sexuality and the Law Commons^™

The Human Environment: Awakening To The Indomitable Cuban Spirit--Government, Culture, And People, Berta Hernández-Truyol

FIU Law Review

My thoughts are to write about The Human Environment. I will address the recent events concerning the increased silencing of dissent and the criminal law reforms that prohibit peaceful gatherings.

The Strange Pairing: Building Alliances Between Queer Activists And Conservative Groups To Recognize New Families, Nausica Palazzo

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article explores some of the legal initiatives and reforms that opponents of same-sex marriage in Canada and the United States have pushed forward. Despite being animated by a desire to dilute the protections for same-sex couples, these reforms resulted in “queering” family law, in the sense that they functionalized the notion of family. Consequently, two cohabiting relatives or friends would be eligible for legal recognition, along with all the public and private benefits of such recognition. I term these kinds of “unions” and other nonnormative relationships to be “new families.”

The central claim of this Article is thus that …

Franco's Spain, Queer Nation?, Gema Pérez-Sánchez

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article discusses how, through its juridical apparatus, the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco sought to define and to contain homosexuality, followed by examples of how underground queer activism contested homophobic laws. The Article concludes by analyzing a literary work to illustrate the social impact of Francoism's homophobic law against homosexuality.

Hegemony, Coercion, And Their Teeth-Gritting Harmony: A Commentary On Power, Culture, And Sexuality In Franco's Spain, Ratna Kapur, Tayyab Mahmud

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Professor Gema Pérez-Sánchez's article, Franco's Spain, Queer Nation? focuses on the last years of Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship and the early years of the young Spanish democracy, roughly from the late 1960's to the early 1980's. The centerpiece of her article looks at how, through law, Franco's regime sought to define and contain what it considered dangerous social behavior, particularly homosexuality. She traces how the state not only exercised hegemonic control over definitions of gender and sexuality, but also established well-defined roles for women and drew clear lines between what constituted legitimate and illegitimate sexualities, namely, the line between heterosexuality …

Querying A Queer Spain Under Franco, Peter Kwan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

There should be more articles in the legal journals such as Professor Gema Pérez-Sánchez's. In Franco's Spain, Queer Nation?, Professor Pérez-Sánchez has done a great service to legal scholarship in four respects. Firstly, she has written an appropriately far-ranging piece. In a discipline that has as one of its central missions the broadening of critical legal discourse, LatCrit can sometimes appear to suffer from symptoms of parochialism in its understandable emphasis on the Latina/o experience within American borders, or on the experience of its Latina/o immigrants once they have reached these shores. To be sure, this is not a problem …