Exponential territorialization: Reduce, refuse or reuse? An exploration of the territories of inclusive legal norms and gender binary

This chapter focuses on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of territory to evaluate the effects and results of the mutual interaction between legal norms and gender standards. It is concerned with assessing the social reverberation of legal measures that aim at challenging the marginalization of those people who are discriminated against on the basis of their nonconformity with gendered standards. The chapter looks at the legalization of same-sex marriage as an instance of those legal norms that somehow challenge the traditional positioning of gendered bodies into society. It discusses a process that curbs differences through the annexation of nonconforming elements into the accepted symbolical domain of gendered practices. The task of territorialization consists in organizing a series of objects around a center through “an activity of selection, elimination and extraction” that “take something from chaos”. Through this process, new territories are drawn from “the chaotic indeterminacy of the real” and put in relation with other framed spaces.