Governing through love: Same-sex cohabitation in Sweden:

The concept of love was introduced into a Swedish policy context in the early 1980s as regulations of same-sex cohabitation were proposed. The same-sex cohabitation legislation was presented as a tool in the battle against discrimination of lesbian women and gay men in the government commissioned reports, and offered an inclusion of same-sex couples based on the idea of same-sex love and heterosexual love as fundamentally the same. The article demonstrates how this governing of same-sex relationships rested heavily on authenticity and inclusion/exclusion of wanted/unwanted non-heterosexual subjects. By creating a concept of gay identity based on an essentialist notion of orientation, love was used as a sign of normality indicating authentic ‘homosexual orientation’ and restricting this authenticity to individuals in monogamous and stable same-sex relationships. Nevertheless, the act only recognized a selected few and created new lines of division between different non-heterosexual subjectivities.