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Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, "By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston and Today I have Dr. Michael Stambolis Rustifer, Associate professor at Universite Toulouse Jean Jarras. And today we are going to be talking about his book, Power Vested in How Experts Shape Same Sex Marriage Debates, published 2025 by Columbia Press. Welcome to the show today.
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Thank you for having me.
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C
Excellent. So we'll start off with just a brief maybe introduction as to how you came about this topic and decided to conduct research on expertise.
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Yeah. So the book looks at debates over same sex marriage and parenting because those debates really go together in the United States and France. To the two cases that I look at in the book and what drew me to the question of expertise was the way I was looking at the field of the debate at the time. So when I started Working on this book, same sex marriage was not legal yet nationally in the United States. It had been legalized in some states and also was not yet legal in France, but had been legalized in other parts of Europe, like Belgium and Spain, for example, just to name two examples. And a lot of the literature at the time, both in sociology but also political science, was really interested in explaining for, you know, good reason why it was that we saw, first of all, homosexuality go from such a stigmatized and marginalized way of being to being something that was recognized in important ways, and the family formations of queer families were able to, to exist. And so the question was, you know, how does that change happen so quickly? And why does it happen in some parts of the world or some parts of a country and not others? And I think that's a really important and interesting question. And part of the answers were social movement strategies, political opportunity structures. There was a lot of research looking at organizing and messaging on both sides of the debate, groups in favor of and against same sex marriage, finding interesting similarities in discourse, in protest discourse. For example, just to give the example of France and the United States, there were people in protest saying things like, jesus had two dads, why can't I? And in France, you saw the same poster, j' AI zus, s' il avait de papa. Or on the other side, kids need a mom and a dad in France, impaire une mer, c' est ereditere. So people were focusing on the movement discourse and on similarities and on explaining outcomes. And I felt that the outcome, the research on the outcomes and explaining differences in outcomes was already being covered enough, perhaps, and that part of the story, an important part of the story, was missing, and that part of the story was experts. And so I came to the idea of experts just paying attention to the debates. I knew this was a topic I wanted to do more research on. And I was noticing that the kinds of discourse that was being heard before decision makers, like judges in some of the federal cases that were wending their way to the courts in the US or in preliminary debates in the French parliament that was about to start debating same sex marriage. When I began working on this project, I noticed some differences. So, for example, I was hearing a lot of psychoanalysis and philosophy before French lawmakers, but not hearing from those people in the United States, but in the US Hearing from economists talking about, say, the cost of same sex marriage for a company in terms of healthcare coverage, or the economic benefits of legalizing same sex marriage, because it leads to, say, a boost in the marriage industry or increased tax revenue. And those arguments made by economists were completely absent from the French case. So the question of the project ultimately became, although dealing with the same legal issue, the recognition or not of same sex marriage and parenting in both countries, what kinds of information are decision makers relying on? Who's providing that information, and if there are differences, what are they and what might explain them? So that's sort of in a nutshell. And if you want, I can tell you a little bit about why I think experts are important to pay attention to, just in general.
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Yeah, definitely. I think that maybe that will come out in our next question. In fact, I think that, you know, one of the things that you made a point of is how social expertise really are and why it's important to use a sociological lens to make sense of how this is happening. I don't think it's estranged from other major societal transformations that have taken place. You know, another of French men who I'm thinking of is Emile Durkheim in the division of labor, right. And thinking of how knowledge has moved from something very centralized to very fragmented or differentiated. And I think knowledge and who is seen as an expert on a variety of different topics have become varied and differentiated from one nation to the next. As you mentioned, the economist in the United States as being seen as an expert in same sex marriage, which I think might be problematic in many ways, whereas the psychoanalyst may have several other problematic matters when thinking of them as the expert in France. Like seeing a. Well, from a psychological lens. Homosexuality is a pathology, right? As one problem.
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Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the things I was interested in paying attention to, and we'll talk about this probably in a minute, are some of the dangers of different kinds of discourses, what kinds of images do they lead us to have when it comes to same sex couples and their families? You know, what kinds of terms do the debates take place in? And also why do they take place in that way? Like, what makes it that psychoanalysts or philosophers are important in the French context and economists in the US Context. And on a general level, it really made me think about how is expertise socially constructed? And I definitely do not start from the premise that expertise is always valuable in the same way in all places. And that just came from the empirical cases finding the same legal questions really not leading to the same kinds of discussions and then not the same kind of authorities to answer those questions. And I thought it was important to pay attention to experts because of the particular role they play. Often we don't think about them as much, or we do think about them a lot lately because of COVID because of vaccine hesitancy, because of other issues and a lot of the research talking about the crisis of expertise, but precisely because there's been a lot of critiques of expertise, we can also sometimes overlook the important role that they play. And they're important because of the platform they receive, because they are asked by decision makers to provide some kind of opinion about a decision that's being made. And because of that, they're legitimated just by virtue of being heard by decision makers. And that also means that they receive media attention. In France, the hearings that took place for weeks before the parliament actually voted to legalize same sex marriage. On the nightly news, you had excerpts from those hearings. So like literally the voices of these experts were being projected into people's living rooms and on and on the radio. And because of that, they can shape the way we think about things. Like, so the way the public perceived the stakes around debates over marriage and parenting for same sex couples were shaped by these expert voices. And because of that special power they have and the access they have to decision makers, they're also really important, as a lot of other research has shown, as part of social movement strategies. You want an ally if you want to be taken seriously. It can be good if you can find an expert, particularly a scientific expert, to give your expertise weight, to make it seem more serious and then so you can analyze social movement strategies to try to get access to experts, to build relationships with them on both sides. And that's what I ended up doing in the book and what I describe, and I tried to sort of theorize what, what is it exactly that these experts are providing as a kind of cultural resource, symbolic resource in these decision making arenas like courts and legislatures that allows the partisans in favor of or against same sex marriage to make their claims.
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Yeah, and you know the Thomas and Thomas theorem, right? The situations that are created as real are real and their consequences. And when people are proclaimed experts and it shows how they are not suspended from time and they are not in a vacuum, they are raw and in society and the consequences are real, which even further harden the definitions that we have for situations like same sex marriage. And that goes into my question about the expertise not being neutral, but deeply embedded in morality and in politics and in cultural struggles. How did you find these different kind of experts competing with their knowledge and defining what marriage is and should be?
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Yeah, what I found is that we can think about experts as a Kind of class of people, it depends on who we put in that class and how we define them. And one of the ways I approached this topic was to you could think about experts and define them in a deductive way. Experts are people who have diplomas, people who are highly credentialed, people who have technical mastery in a certain domain. That's one way to approach expertise and I think it's a very valid one. But it wasn't the approach that I took. Instead I said let's take an inductive definition of expertise and put everybody in the under, put them under the heading of expert if they have been heard by a decision making institution. So in other words, I went to look in the archives of who provided testimony before the French parliament since 1990 and in the United States, I looked at the state level, comparing California and Texas and then also on the national level and also in the court because as it turns out, institutions are really important and the value of the expert and the profile of the expert is determined in significant ways by whether or not they're being heard by an institution that values the political claims, for example, or whether it's important to demonstrate mastery in terms of the rules of evidence, to take the example of federal courts in the U.S. so anyway, inductive definition of expertise. And part of that is that that allows us, when we take that definition, to see all the kinds of people who are involved, not just scientific experts or technical experts, but ordinary citizens, religious representatives, people affiliated with think tanks or other organizations, and also to measure the degree to which they are supporting one side or the other. So in other words, these experts are in competition with one another and they are being enrolled by social movement organizations, either directly or indirectly. And even if they don't want to. And many of them claim that they are independent and not attached. And that's certainly true in many cases. Their voices are being used to support one side or the other. So they are competing. And that competition is something that gives us an idea of how they participate in, like you said, defining marriage or not. And I have some examples about, like where the debates in particular kinds of questions that we can see that competition and how it played out. One example is the research, and this is particularly the case though for scientific experts is research on the outcomes of children raised by same sex couples. And there was sort of credibility struggles, as Stephen Epstein would describe them, between both sides, pro and anti same sex marriage, using the scientific evidence or trying to shape the production of scientific evidence, even to try to shore up their claims ECZEMA is unpredictable, but you can flare less with evglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking EPGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Emplis Lebricizumab LBKZ a 250mg per 2ml injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis. Before starting ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit eglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-596.
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C
Yeah, you know, an interesting thing that I looked at recently is divorce rates. I was curious, you know, just, you know, that same sex marriage is is legal in the United States of America and has been for, for what, a little over 10 years I think now. And out of curiosity, what what does divorce rates look like among same sex marriages and same sex males having the lowest divorce rates out of out of all marriages. And that made me curious as to why. But that's just another example of competing claims and earlier claims seeing same sex relationships as being some of the most fragile ones. Which marriages are showing a little bit different than that?
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Absolutely. It's the debate around the sort of the sociology of the family as it relates to same sex couples. In particular, divorce rates in countries that were already legal before the United States were an important part of of that. And it's interesting where that kind of question about divorce rates or this is quote unquote stability of same sex relationships mattered and where that information came from. So it was important in US Courts. It was important more broadly. One side was making the claim that same sex couples shouldn't have access to Marriage because their relationships are inherently unstable. And then they could try to provide evidence to support that. Divorce rates or separation rates or relationship longevity rates is one of the ways they do that. Another side is saying that, well, that's actually evidence that if the state recognized those relationships, then that would actually be a good thing for everybody involved. So there's a values claim there too. About what normative claim about what should or shouldn't happen. What I found was very interesting is that in the French case. So that was really true in the US case, particularly in Corks. But in the French case, that evidence was less often used precisely because the way the French parliament approached the question was more theoretical than empirical. And there are several reasons for that. One is because technically speaking, same sex marriage was illegal in France, unlike in the United States, where the federal system allowed for experimentation across states, where it was legal in some places and not in others. That wasn't the case in France, a very centralized country. So there were no same sex marriage data that could be used on to make that claim. And the information from other countries, interestingly, was not as convincing in the French situation because there was the idea that it was inapplicable to the French case and that if same sex couples could get married in Spain or in Belgium, well, that was one thing, but in France it's different and therefore not as relevant. Also, a lot of that research is published in English and the reality is that a lot of the French parliamentarians don't speak English enough to be interested in that. And there's a lot of anti Americanism in France as well, which in other words, all kinds of reasons why the international research from other countries published in English, particularly coming from the United States, was considered illegitimate. And there's another reason why that kind of question didn't matter as much. The question of divorce rates or separation rates or relationship longevity of same sex couples is because in the French parliament there's this idea that what matters is the general principle rather than the specificity. Um, and so when working on a law, and particularly family law, the rationale is that it's important to think of family structures in general. So it's not to say that there weren't anti same sex marriage experts. There certainly were. But instead of thinking about like divorce rates, what they were doing was they were, they were drawing on a structural anthropology like Levi Strauss and talking about universal rules around marriage or psychoanalysis in particular, Lacan, and how, you know, the emotional and psychological dynamics require that a marriage be composed of a husband and a wife. So general principles rather than like specific divorce rates. But I'll make a one follow up point on that. What a key difference that I talk about in the introduction and we see throughout the different chapters is that marriage and parenting, which are related but different issues are flipped in the two countries, which means that like the meaning and value socially and culturally of marriage as an institution versus say, parenting as an institution, are not perceived in the same way. And so it's actually, I mean, not all of the listeners will necessarily know this, but France, like other European countries, but France, to take that example, is a place where people, there are a lot of people who have children out of what we would say in the US out of wedlock. In other words, people don't see marriage as really that important as an institution. They see parenting as the important institution. Whereas in the United States the value we put on marriage is much higher. And for that reason, the points that were more contentious were really about parenting in France and less around marriage per se, whereas in the United States it was marriage itself. And public opinion data shows that too. So, for example, French people had always been much more in favor of same sex marriage relative to American people. Whereas at the same time, Americans, when asked about whether they thought same sex couples should be allowed to adopt, the majority were like, yeah, sure, no problem. Same sex couples should totally be allowed to adopt, but they shouldn't be allowed to get married. And it was the opposite in France. Sure, let them get married, but definitely they shouldn't be allowed to adopt. Which I thought was fascinating because it sort of tells us about the value of those institutions in each country and then what kind of experts can contribute to those debates.
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Yeah. And the impressions that are put upon the audience members who are listening and how it installs beliefs and values among of people in a nation and solidifying beliefs and values across generations and across audiences, or at least attempting to. Right, that's interesting with the international relations. And all of this is important in terms of being key insights for what is considered knowledge among experts. And I think that it has an impact by either expanding or constraining the possible futures. Would you have a moment to talk about where expert intervention helps legitimize or delegitimize same sex marriage and the moments where it's either constrained or expanded in terms of possible futures, with the debates as a result of the power structures being like, what is normal, what is expected, what is associated with Francis, similar to what you're just talking about and you know, marriage and children and those norms in place and how that either constrains or expands possible futures in the conversation of same sex marriage.
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Yeah, sure. The way I think about that is sort of how are arguments made? And so in the book I really focus on decision making institutions. I do have a whole chapter where I look at the media, while in particular the New York Times and Le Monde, which is sort of the French equivalent. But one of the things I think about is on what grounds are claims being made to justify the legalization of same sex marriage or to argue against the legalization of same sex marriage. And it's on that point, on the way justifications are made that I think the question of making something making the legalization of same sex marriage possible but also acting as a potential hindrance is really interesting and important. So I'll take the example of research on the outcomes of children raised by same sex couples. So it turned out that this argument was a winning argument, particularly in the United States. A winning argument because for decades opponents of same sex marriage had been arguing that children need to be raised by a mother and a father and that children who are raised in same sex households suffer because of that psychologically. Maybe their outcomes in school aren't as good as their peers raised in heterosexual relationships. Now the advantage of the United States relative to France, where because same sex parenting, adoption, artificial insemination, surrogacy, all of those things were illegal until same sex marriage was legalized in 2013. And in fact surrogacy is still illegal in France. And access to artificial insemination for lesbian couples and single women wasn't until the early 2000s. You technically same sex couples weren't raising children in, in same sex relationships in France. They certainly were actually doing it for a variety of reasons, getting sperm in Spain or in Belgium or other kinds of arrangements. But technically speaking, these couples couldn't exist in the US because there were states where access to adoption was never illegal, where sperm banks were deregulated, and where surrogacy also was legal in lots of places. You way before same sex marriage was even legal, you had plenty of same sex couples raising children. So there were social scientists who could do research on those children, several generations of them. In fact, by the time we get to the same sex marriage debates, and that data, all of that research that was produced by sociologists, demographers, psychologists, psychiatrists, et cetera, was that research had actually come to a kind of consensus that in fact, children who are raised by same sex couples are similar in every important way to children raised by their peers in heterosexual Relationships. Now, it's interesting to point out that there are actually some differences. The discourse that there are no differences is actually not accurate. And so there are some people, some activists, but also just others in general who hear the no important differences. That actually doesn't mean no differences at all. And that was something that came up in the courts. But to sum up, what I'm trying to say on the point of that question is that by the time we get to federal court where there was a trial where the judge actually asks, and this is a case that ends up ultimately being folded into other cases that leads to the case Obergefell vs Hodges, that legalized same sex marriage in that case that started in California, Perry versus Schwarzenegger, you actually have the judge saying, all right, you say same sex marriage is bad because children need a mother and a father. Prove it. Prove it with a bench trial. Find witnesses, find to demonstrate that you have a similar case originating in Michigan to Bailey Snyder. Same argument. The judge was like, okay, this is your claim anti same sex marriage. People show us the science that says children need a mother and a father and well, they couldn't do it because there isn't that data. The scientific research that we have does not support that claim. That doesn't mean to say they didn't try. Some of the listeners will be familiar with or not, but with the. The sociologist Mark Regneris, who is at the University of Texas, Austin, who was involved in producing a study that claimed to show that children raised by same sex couples fare less well. There were all kinds of methodological problems with the study. It was funded by a conservative organization. And the story of that, which people who read the book, and I don't want to spoil it, they can find out about it. But anyway, there's this like this one study that's methodologically flawed that one of the judges ends up calling junk science and totally worthless. So on the one side you have all of the scientific evidence supporting this claim. On the other side you have none. And experts who really can't come up with anything that meets the rules of evidence standards. And the judge is like, okay. And supporters of same sex marriage, including the experts who were involved in producing that research, were really thrilled to say that the science supported them. In other words, same sex marriage should be legal because the research says that it's not bad for children and therefore good. Well, as a sociologist, I sort of took back and, and, and thought, okay, but so what about the counterfactual claim? What if the research were to show that Children who were raised by same sex couples don't fare as well as children raised by different sex couples. And in fact, I asked that question in my interviews. You know, I asked my interviewees toward the end of the interview that, that precise question, if the research were to show the opposite of what it actually shows, if the research were to suggest that kids are, you know, suffer for whatever, whatever reasons or just don't fare as well, leaving aside, you know, the methodological issues or whatever, if those, if that's what the research were to show, would you still be in favor of same sex marriage? And I found some interesting differences. Some of the people, some of the experts said, you know, then I'd have to think about it. Maybe, maybe if the research showed that kids, quote, unquote, need a mother and a father to have the same, to have good outcomes, then I'd have to think about the legality of same sex marriage. And a lot of other experts who supports same sex marriage said, well, at the end of the day it doesn't matter because at the end of the day, same sex marriage is about rights and if one category of people gets one, the other category should also have it. And for, for a question of justice. So to me, what I found interesting to get back to your question about, you know, how did, how thinking about this question, can we think about what allows for a social change to take place, but also constrains it, is that if we rely on science to do moral work, then we're forcing the science to do something that it's not meant to do and that that could be dangerous. So if activists have to rely on the science to make a claim, then they are undermining their capacity to make a claim that same sex marriage should be legal just because it is a question of justice. And therefore by extension, do we actually even need scientific expertise to answer this question or not? So because science did work for them, they heavily invested in it and continue to do so. And it's not that I don't want people to believe that I'm arguing that science, scientific expertise is not valuable for contentious social issues. Of course it is. But I do think we need to be sensitive to the work that we are asking the science to do and also who produces that science, under what conditions and et cetera.
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C
Well, it's really this argument between collectivism and individualism, right? Do we buy in? Do we assimilate and become one and live underneath the rule of the law, the rule of the people? Or do we protest and have a little bit of Free will and agency to create change within the social systems that we are a part of. And I think that that was part of, like, you know, Kant's law of three stages and moving more. More towards positivism so that, you know, people aren't living under the thumb of. Of world class.
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No. And it also leads to a point about how these debates constrain more radical arguments. And, you know, there were already lots of critiques coming from queer activists, but also social scientists about debates around same sex marriage. Same sex marriage is a conservative institution. It's a bourgeois institution. It's exclusionary. It should not be the priority of the LGBTQ movement. And in fact, you know, lots of people have said that one of the reasons why the LGBTQ movement shifted to same sex marriage was in part because of conservative gay intellectuals. So, I mean, that wasn't the only reason, but that could be sort of part of it. And what that does mean is that the more radical arguments, the people who said we should actually just do away with marriage altogether, those voices needed to be sort of, wouldn't say, silenced, but their voices became a liability for people trying to argue that same sex marriage was necessary and important. And in fact, this is something I talk about in the book a little bit. People like Judith Stacy, who's a sociologist of the family, who had, you know, supported the radical critiques of marriage for all of the reasons I just mentioned and wrote about why, you know, marriage is not necessary. We don't need marriage. Let's not invest in this. The conservatives used her arguments and her books to try to support their side. They're like, see, even, even these queer thinkers are saying that marriage is not good for LGBT people, so we should definitely not legalize it. Which meant that queer scholars like Judith Stacy ended up having to publish work online in different forums to demand that their research not be used for arguments against same sex marriage, which I thought was really fascinating. But, yeah, the way the argument was made constrained what, what was considered legitimate or not, and even sort of constrained the more leftist radical voices that were in favor of. Of not trying to fit into the norm, but trying to create a new family form that, that they argue, and I tend to agree could benefit everybody. Rather than trying to get LGBTQ people to fit into the another, an already existing family formation, let's reinvent something that's more inclusive and then that would actually be better for all of us.
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C
You know, it's interesting, and this kind of leads to the next question as well, but the ability for experts to have disagreements and the ability for one to win and one to lose, particularly in court cases, but to not lose face. And I'm curious about authority. Who gets to speak credibly for public debates and why and how does race, gender, sexuality and institutional location shapes whose expertise gets heard and recognized while others get dismissed. But again, as I said, what was interesting about that is I thought that these experts, while they were dismissed, they didn't lose face, they were still seen as experts, maybe just not as credible a particular topic.
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A
Yep, that's such a good point. And it's something that I think I was probably one of the aspects of this research that really fascinated me the most, you know, I part of it for personal reasons, but also, you know, if we think about, say, Goffman and you know, the. I had had a lot of training in grad school and social interactionism. So thinking about how we persist, present ourselves and how do we manage stigma and how do we, you know, what, what is it that we need to do in order to be taken seriously and not lose face. And that's a really important thing when it comes to understanding experts. I think that I argue in the book because the perception that the audience has, in this case say the public, but in particular judges or lawmakers of the value of the expert is going to depend on who is providing that expertise and what we think or what they think of as, you know, making something more or less valuable in terms of, like you said, social locations like race, class, gender. And so it isn't just purely about the information. And in fact the same piece of information provide. This is not like groundbreaking or anything to say this but. But it was interesting to see it empirically. The same kind of information will not be taken in the same way depending on who the person is. So that was sort of the general notes make it more specific. I have a part of the book where one of the subtitles is Straights say It Best. And it turned out that a lot of the research conducted perhaps unsurprisingly on, on queer people was done by queer people. So a lot of the, you know, groundbreaking or path breaking psychologists who studied lesbian families were lesbians themselves. Right. That's not a shocker to anybody because they were the people who were most invested in finding out about people like themselves, like so many of us are. But of course we have this idea that science needs to be neutral and detached and, and disconnected. And as much as judges or lawmakers might be, you know, sensitive to the idea that that's not always true. Although like I Actually don't believe that a lot of judges have any training in STS and have that idea. But suffice it to say the people who are putting the, the, the, the panels of experts together in this, in the case of courts to talk about that example in the United States wanted to have the quote, best experts. And the people who were putting these panels together were, you know, major, a major law firm, but also the aclu, also people who have been involved for decades in, in LGBT organizing through the courts. So basically, you know, a vast majority of people who are gay themselves were like, well, we need the best experts. It actually turns out that the, quote, best experts are the straight experts, which is really kind of ironic because they were really worried and they were rightly worried that the other side, the opponents, during cross examination, would use the personal eyes of the experts to delegitimize them and be like, well, of course the lesbian psychologist found that lesbians do a great job raising children because she's, she's not disinterested. So the teams of attorneys putting the, the, the work together, putting that fine looking for experts and vetting them went out of their way to, to look for people who could fit what they assumed the judges would see as like, you know, the, a typical expert. So yeah, which means go to a really good university, have excellent publications, ideally be straight. Now this of course, isn't universally the case. They were definitely gay experts on the standard, but that they were so sensitive to the perception that meant that they were reinforcing structures of inequality by seeking experts who were middle class, white, straight guys.
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C
Yeah, it's interesting. In the United States, there's the download brotherhood, the closeting among black males who go as far as even getting into heterosexual marriages and stepping out on their wives in some cases to be with other males because of the stigma that is embedded in race and ethnicity and how that plays out in expertise. So it's interesting.
- [41:23]
A
Absolutely. And I don't talk about it as much in the book, I mention it, but I don't analyze it. But race is important as well, in part because of the simple racism embedded in the institutions of higher education. And so if we're thinking about what the profiles of scientific experts that we see in front of lawmakers, well, the vast majority of them are white and middle class because that's the way those institutions operate to select out racialized people before they can even get to the stage of doing higher education. So if you look at the racial background of the experts or the class background of the experts, they're definitely not representative of the population.
- [42:02]
C
I think that's important for your research because as you said at the beginning, there was a whole lot of research out there already about same sex marriage and about gatekeeping of expertise, Michelle Lamont and others who look at that whole gatekeeping process or Pierre Perdu and higher education. But I think that the approach you take with looking inductively at it, I think there is something about becoming an expert, right? And not just all of a sudden being an expert and filling the mold, but a process in which people are like, these experts are like amateur boxers and getting their teeth cut in audiences of others who are judging their expertise.
- [42:53]
A
Yes, absolutely. One of the things I talk about, I have a chapter where I look at the fields where these experts work and the sort of political alignments of those fields and the resources that are available within them. And people who are hearing me talk and use those words can, can probably guess that I do tend to use a Bulgarian frame in my analysis. But yeah, I mean, people who were studying the topics of LGBT families in the United States started out being really marginalized in the 1970s and 80s. These were definitely not mainstream fields. They had a hard time getting funding, but ultimately, by the time we get to the mid to late 2000 and tens, they are actually recognized. They have sections, say at the ASA and have become really mainstream. And so the. Their capacity to produce research that would be relevant to these debates was really increased. Whereas in France, even to this day, gender studies, women's studies, or research on queer families is still not. Does not have the kind of institutional recognition that it deserves. And that also means that that was really a hindrance to producing that kind of information in the French case. So looking at sort of like who is it that had these careers, what institutions were they working with and what kind of resources did they have? One category of experts that I talk about in the book a lot is religious representatives and the kind of hurdles that they face as well, and how they need to learn to articulate their arguments in ways that will pass muster in the institutions where they are. And in France, because it's religious discourses, it's changing. It's changing a lot in the last decade. But for a long time, religious claims or claims couched in religious language were considered illegitimate because France is a really sectorized, officially secularized country. There are all kinds of ways in which that isn't true. But it was very rare to say, to have like a pastor, for example, provide testimony in a hearing using religious language, whereas all of the Archives in the US Are full of religious representatives making religious claims on both sides in favor and against same sex marriage. But in France, they. You actually had occasionally some hearings that featured religious representatives, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, but they almost never used religious terminology. Instead, they would use the language of anthropology, particularly Levi Strauss and psychoanalysis, to make their claims. And they were almost. Well, not almost. They were all always against same sex marriage and parenting. But what to me that showed is that the. It was necessary that they articulate their arguments using secular expertise rather than religious expertise, because of an embedded expectation that religious discourse is not something that can be given credence in political forums.
- [46:12]
C
And it's the difference in value of ideology versus science or knowledge. Right. And beliefs and values take in some ways priority in the United States. Just looking at the history of religion in the United States.
- [46:26]
A
Absolutely. Another form of discourse, I mean, I call it a kind of expertise. And I know people will debate about this, and I hope so, because that's the point. Personal experience is really important in the United States, even when it comes from scientific experts, more in legislatures than in courts. But in courts, we're also dealing with personal experiences, because court cases are always about a particular plaintiff who has their story that is told. And so whether it be scientific experts or religious representatives or politicians, people will talk about their families, their children, their neighbors, maybe themselves, and why same sex marriage is important to them personally. And in France, it was fascinating how often it was said to me by lawmakers that I interviewed that we are here to talk about the law. The law is not personal. The law is general and universal. And it would be strange to ask someone to talk about their personal experience, because that would be particularist. And so there was really a devaluing. We saw that in the press in France as well. Unlike in the New York Times, where you always had a vignette of an LGBT family or a politician talking about his lesbian daughter, in France, you almost never had any personal experiences, which really allowed readers to think about same sex couples and their families in the abstract without any kind of, you know, representations of real couples. And I think that's really interesting because it gives us an idea of how ordinary people would perceive these issues as personal, as real in the United States, and as more abstract in France.
- [48:11]
C
Yeah, the difference between reading distinction in the United States as compared to reading it in the application of France, it fits much better with France than it does with the United States.
- [48:20]
A
It's true.
- [48:22]
C
So I'm guessing now with your study on same sex marriage and expertise that you're being asked to point your research outward and looking at more contemporary culture beyond just same sex marriage and looking at other forms of culture war. Can you give me any examples of how you might be asked to do so?
- [48:42]
A
Yeah, I talk a little bit about this in the conclusion. And also, I mean, I'm currently doing a new project now where I look at other debates, but I think that, and I'll give you a few examples. One of them, the most obvious, it's not a debate I'm studying myself, but is the debate on trans rights. Rights. The debate on trans rights can and should be analyzed, among other things, through the lens of experts because you have on the one side anti trans groups really articulating their claims in terms of science, in terms of what the data show, in terms of, you know, the effects of gender affirming care or on sex differences between men and women, and really, really, really investing in the production of expertise to support their claims. You see this in the CAST report in the UK and really working hard to debunk or delegitimize the expertise in favor of trans rights. And so when I look at the debate on trans rights as it's playing out in lots of parts of the world, in particular in the US but also in the UK and France and other contexts, the expertise is a crucial element in understanding that. Another debate that I don't under, that I don't analyze myself, but where I hope the lens that I provide in the book will be helpful is obviously the debate around vaccines and public health, where we have lots of debates on personal experience and lay expertise and the way certain voices are being elevated to support, say, anti vaccine claims and then anti vaccine organizations finding key elite scientific experts to produce that information. So that's another example of the long.
- [50:31]
C
Period of time and just earlier in our conversation today and androcentrism and the impact that it has had on medicine. And you know, for a long while just seeing the male as an ideal body and a female being a deviated form of it, and how that has led to major consequences and being behind times in female medicine.
- [50:53]
A
Yes, absolutely. And the way that's actually used to support both what I would qualify as reactionary or conservative claims and also progressive claims, the way scientific debates or scientific doubt is used to buttress arguments on both sides. And so that leads me to the other work that I'm doing right now, which is studying debates on climate change as well as debates on abortion. So two very different debates. This will be my next book, but comparing abortion and climate change is interesting because we tend to think of climate change as a technical scientific debate where the role of scientific expertise is obvious and necessary and almost goes unquestioned. And at the same time, we think about abortion as the prototypical or rather paradigmatic example of morality politics, where what really matters is people's religious and ethical beliefs, which leads us to ignore the super technical and scientific aspects of abortion and why they really matter on the one hand, and on the other hand, why climate change is also immoral debate. And so the project looks at how experts who are involved in these debates think about the role that they're playing. Is it a technical role, is it a scientific role, or is it a moral role, or is it both? And how do they negotiate that? So those are some examples, but there are many. Anywhere where there's contentious claims that are being made, where people want to give their claims a kind of weight, a kind of legitimacy, and they want to be taken seriously, they will inevitably use some kind of expert to do that. And my concept that I develop in the book Expert Capital tries to untangle that.
- [52:44]
C
That'll be interesting and I look forward to reading your writing on both of these topics. But one of the things, the entanglement that I'm thinking of in my head is the difference between a failed birth or a failed person, and that's that entanglement between morality and economic expertise or knowledge.
- [53:05]
A
Absolutely. And where, where what is the definition of life is very much a moral and ethical question, but it is the also a scientific and technical one. And it is one of the main ways that we think about abortion debates, both in France and in the United States, but in really different ways, because law around abortion has not it all played out in the same way in those two countries. And therefore the investment of experts in that question is also really different.
- [53:37]
C
Religiosity mixed in there with economic class and all of that.
- [53:42]
A
Absolutely. Exactly.
- [53:44]
C
But I really look forward to reading that stuff. But if it is found to become worthy of a book, how much content, how much data do you have and whether that can be hashed out into a book or not?
- [53:58]
A
Too much. Too much data.
- [54:01]
C
I look forward to reading it and reading all of the articles that come prior to that. And again, thank you for being on the show today, Michael. And I look forward to continued conversations.
- [54:13]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [54:16]
C
Again, this is New Books in Sociology. I'm Michael Johnston. Again, New Books in Sociology, a channel on the New Books Network. Have a great day.
- [54:24]
A
It.