We agree with Cooper when she argues that what we are witnessing is an exten­sion of familial patterns into, and onto, other forms of social organisation: in this case, into the setting of households beyond those based on marriage. And we also agree with Boyd and Young that this form of disciplining not only confirms […]

We began, when we first introduced our notion of the ‘shared household’, with a reference to a ‘utopian moment’. A point which has been made very succinctly by feminists in relation to the same-sex marriage debates is that it is all too easy to become constrained by the parameters which have been set by these […]

What we are suggesting is that two concerns — equality and concern for economic­ally vulnerable parties — have always been in play in the reform debates. It may seem that economic vulnerability is a very sound ground on which to argue for law reform, and that it is important, in particular for feminists, to keep […]

Should — or can — a model predicated upon bilateral relationships be extended beyond a bilateral model? To begin in the middle, the question of how far the model can, or should, be stretched is at issue only when we begin within the origins of the model itself, a presumption of the ‘typical household’ and […]

Whilst we can see a stretching of the marriage model to include relationships not based within a sexual nexus, it is clear that the pattern of reform presumes a bilateral partnership.[178] If one aspect of the logic of semblance has been stretched to the point of loss, another (along with economic interdependency!) seems to remain. […]

When the House of Lords first debated the Civil Partnership Bill, Lord Tebbit and others raised a simple question: why limit a right to register to same-sex (sexual) partners? If economic vulnerability arising from sharing a household — especially, for instance, when one party was caring for another — was an important factor[170] in extending […]

On the one hand, we have the figure of the female cohabitant left economically vulnerable at the end of a period of cohabitation. On the other hand, we have the demand from many gay rights campaigners for access to marriage or to a marriage-like status. The momentum which directs the trajectory of each interest group […]

Property Relations Anne Bottomley and Simone Wong Introduction When the Civil Partnership Act 2004 was being debated in Parliament, the chance was taken by a number of members of both Houses to raise, again, the plight of the female cohabitant who, at the end of a period of cohabitation (however lengthy) does not, unlike her […]

In this chapter, I have interpreted the Civil Partnership Act as an act of legal discipline, but we might wonder whether we can also understand it in terms of opening up possibilities for resistance. While law may seek to close off possibilities — to discipline and to domesticate — we also have come to recognise […]

For those who enjoy debating the politics of same-sex marriage, the Act provides a fertile source of material on which one can speculate whether the legal recognition of same-sex relationships is assimilationist (buying into an idealised heterosexual model of coupledom) or transgressive (challenging patriarchy by not conforming to a heterosexual, gendered model). However, the reason […]