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Erin Cahill
PhD Candidate, Sociology, University of Wollongong

'Outlaws and their Mortgages'

Since 1999, many Australian states and territories have passed progressively encompassing legislation recognising the relationships of lesbians and gay men. This paper uses a series of interviews with lesbians in long term relationships to discuss the role of legislation and legal systems in these women's lives. Specifically, it focuses on the impact of and attitudes towards the Property (Relationships) Act 1984 (NSW) which arguably marked the starting point in this process of Australian legislative reform. Unanimously the women interviewed supported the legislation and recognised that it would address some of the legal problems faced by lesbians. However, the interviews also indicated scepticism regarding relationship legislation more generally, and discussed alternative patterns of limited engagement with legal systems that women had developed to protect their relationships, in the absence of more encompassing laws.

This discussion is framed by a theoretical consideration of the debate for and against the legal recognition of lesbian relationships, using US legal theorist Ruthann Robson's work on the lesbian outlaw. The outlaw is marked by inherent contradiction, outcast by society and relishing outsider status. As a symbolic figure she represents the everyday contradiction of lesbian lives in law. A citizen within democratic society, the lesbian is always 'in' law; her sexuality, however, is an historic site of legal persecution, exclusion and penalty and as such, she is simultaneously 'out' of law. This paper proposes a reading of the lesbian outlaw as a figure afflicted by her outlawry, but also as a figure whose exclusion lends her the potential to imagine relations outside of the hetero-patriarchal legal model.

Bio: Erin Cahill is a postgraduate candidate in the Sociology program at the University of Wollongong, NSW. Her thesis examines the negotiation of lesbian relationships in lived experience and as they appear in Australian legislation.

<eec01@uow.edu.au>