ABSTRACT This reflective article considers the ways in which children were symbolically deployed to configure the politics in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the recent Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. I suggest that the politics of equivalence, whereby the equality of queer relationships was rhetorically argued by suggesting they were ‘the same’, enabled an associated discursive attachment to the nuclear family, centred on the possibility for reproduction and the potential existence of children. As a result, there was a troublesome convergence in both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the cry, ‘what about the children?’. While the concern was clearly levelled from very different political standpoints, the attachment of the politics of futurity to children, I suggest, is a key part of why the mainstream ‘Yes’ campaign focused so narrowly on the amendment to marriage legislation to the neglect of a broader queer politics and more diverse queer cultures and expressions.

中文翻译：

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穿裙子的男孩：同性婚姻、孩子和对等政治

摘要 这篇反思性文章考虑了在最近的澳大利亚同性婚姻邮政调查中的“是”和“否”运动中，儿童被象征性地部署以配置政治的方式。我认为对等政治，即通过暗示他们“相同”来修辞地争论酷儿关系的平等，使对核心家庭的相关话语依附成为可能，集中在生育的可能性和儿童的潜在存在上。结果，在“孩子们呢？”的呼喊声中，“是”和“否”运动都出现了麻烦的收敛。虽然这种担忧显然是从截然不同的政治立场出发的，但我认为，未来政治对儿童的依恋，