I’ve been awarded a research grant for a new project – ‘Intimacy Outlawed’. This project, by studying how those in polyamorous relationships engages with law, asks how law impacts individual freedom in intimate relationships.
I’ve been thinking about the role of law (in the broadest sense – including rules and norms) in human agency.
In my research on child marriage, I’ve come to realize there’s a contradiction of freedom in liberalism’s legal projects. While international human rights instruments aim to ensure all humans can act and decide on their own behalf, empirical research has demonstrated that a person’s agency is often only recognized when it is considered to be of the ‘right kind’ by implementers of norms. When persons exercise the ‘wrong kind’ of agency (e.g., engage in sex work, child marriage, Female Genital Mutilation), they are often dismissed for being manipulated or stuck in false consciousness. This contradictory practice is seemingly indicative of the limits of liberalism, which aims at both maximization of human agency and protection of individuals.
In another research on sexual violence law, this dilemma was highlighted further. If the goal is to maximize human agency, intimate relationships are part of a ‘private’ social sphere where state intervention is undesirable. However, regulating ‘private’ intimate relationships (e.g., domestic violence, sex) is considered increasingly necessary to do justice to rights violations. Recent rape law reforms across jurisdictions have adopted strict carceral measures to protect individual’s freedom from coercive sex, but their downside is that individuals’ intimate relationships are exposed to state control. Considering these downsides, trade-offs seem to be necessary between, on the one hand, the protective function of the state and its necessary intervention and, on the other hand, people’s privacy, equality, and freedom in their sexual and romantic relationships.
This task is especially poignant when people engage in relationships that are generally considered ‘morally wrong’ or ‘deviant’. For instance, homosexual relationships have been under stricter restrictions than heterosexual relationships: some jurisdictions have sodomy laws, have a lower age of consent law for same-sex couples, or have not legalized same-sex marriage. Likewise, age of consent law, which is supposed to protect children from sexual abuse, seems to criminalize ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour of teenagers when applied by state legal actors and left at their discretionary power. These existing studies suggest that law can be a form of repressive normalization (in the sense how Foucault talks about law and its power/knowledge), restricting individuals’ agency in engaging in the intimate relationships of their choice.
A question arises as to how law impacts individual freedom in intimate relationships. How does law reflect, influence, reinforce, and control our sense of ‘righteousness’, and how do we navigate our conciseness of law, rules and norms to make our daily and life decisions? To address this question, this project focuses on people who exercise their agency to engage in so-called ‘deviant’ intimacy, that is, sexual and romantic relationships that are not allowed in law. Why does law prohibit these relationships (reasons), and what are the justifications given? How do people exercise their agency in these relationships within and outside the legal realm? How do they perceive, consider, and engage with the law (legal consciousness)?
To answer these questions this project will first focuses on polyamorous marriages in France. How do those in polyamorous relationships in France exercise their agency within and outside the legal realm? How do they perceive, consider, and engage with the French legal system? Why does the French marriage law not allow polyamorous marriage, and what are the justifications given? I will conduct legal analysis as well as ethnographic research, interviewing polyamorous couples about their interaction with the law, and filming them when consent is obtained (visual anthropology).
With the lived account of those who engage in ‘deviant’ intimate relationships that I will collect, I hope to be able to reflect on how law informs our consciousness, behaviour, and normativity. At the core of this project there are questions about the interrelation between normativity and law: how law regulates behaviour that does not necessarily conform to societal norms. And how those whose practices are socially and legally ‘deviant’ navigate through social fields within and outside of the state legal system.
Hoko Horii 