ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with how the law is serving as a semiotic circuit where the basic notions of sexuality, family and kinship are currently being revised. In this sense, I will look not so much at the legal instruments that are being deployed by legislatures and courts to accommodate a variety of sexual lifestyles and family formations, as at the use of them that is being made by social actors who ask for legal recognition. Not only does this understanding avoid objectivist pitfalls whereby the role of social actors is effaced and the law figures as a top-down machinery driven by barely visible forces. More than that, this view emphasizes the central role that social agents are granted by contemporary legal techniques. In brief, this chapter is devoted to showing how the law juridifies by empowering those who have recourse to it. At the same time, it unearths some of the most remarkable socio-political effects of this juridification dynamic.
