I was supposed to make it to Montreal today for an exciting conference at McGill on “After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship” but, alas, Chicago O’Hare and Midwestern weather problems had other plans for me. I’ll be Skyping in to the conference tomorrow to present a work-in-progress of mine entitled “Marriage as Civil Union: Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships and the Issue of Legal Translation,” in which I use relationship-recognition experience from the United Kingdom on my way to arguing that “U.S. trans-jurisdictional analysis with respect to formal relationships must be complicated and its reductionist insistences queried; doing so, in fact, reveals that ‘civil unions’ and ‘domestic partnerships’ cannot simplistically be trans-jurisdictionally translated as ‘marriage’ always, and neither can ‘marriage’ itself.”
For my friends north of the border, if you are in Montreal, this conference has a public session Friday afternoon (starting at 4 p.m.) on “Radical Formations: Sex, Trans, Race,” with Sharon Cowan, Roderick Ferguson, and Dean Spade speaking. One of the conference organizers, Robert Leckey, has also penned this article/op-ed about the McGill conference and how it relates to contemporary Canadian queer advocacy now that same-sex marriage has been available in Canada for the past decade.
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