(..) Indeed, as Eric Fassin and others have argued, it is the alteration of rights of filiation that is most scandalous in the French context, not marriage per se. The life of the contract can be, within range, extended, but the rights of filiation cannot. In some of the cultural commentary that accompanied this decision to deny adoptive rights to openly gay people, we heard from Sylviane Agacinski, a well-known French philosopher, that it goes against the “symbolic order” to let homosexuals form families (“Questions” 23). Whatever social forms these are, they are not marriages, and they are not families; indeed, in her view, they are not properly “social” at all, but private. The struggle is in part one over words, over where and how they apply, about their plasticity and their equivocity. But it is more specifically a struggle over whether certain practices of nomination keep the presuppositions about the limits of what is humanly recognizable in place. The argument rests on a certain paradox, however, that would be hard to deny since if one does not want to recognize certain human relations as part of the humanly recognizable, then one has already recognized them, and one seeks to deny what it is one has already, in one way or another, understood. “Recognition” becomes an effort to deny what exists and, hence, becomes the instrument for the refusal of recognition. In this way, it becomes a way of shoring up a normative fantasy of the human over and against dissonant versions of itself. To defend the limits of what is recognizable against that which challenges it is to understand that the norms that govern recognizability have already been challenged.

(Judith Butler "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?")