Chosen families and american kinship Gay and lesbian parenting

Schneider: recap American folk theories of kinship are based on: Shared biogenetic substance (DNA or ‘blood’) Relationships of diffuse, enduring solidarity (love). American kinship has been challenged by new family forms, e.g. single-parent families, unmarried heterosexual families, gay families, lesbian families.

Weston: Families we Choose Chose to study gay families because they destabalize the naturalization of the family as a biological entity. They link family to notions of ‘enduring solidarity’, but not shared biogenetic substance; spoke of family ties as socially negotiated rather than biologically mandated. ‘chosen families’ rather than ascriptive families. Chosen kin were expected to ‘be there’ for one another through reciprocal exchanges of material and emotional support. Gays in the SF area invert the hierarchy between kin and friends. In traditional terms, friendships are liminal categories in American kinship. But for gays, ‘solid friendships can last a lifetime.’ ‘Coming out’ for gays to their biogenetic families had the risk of sundering ideally permanent kin connections. Many gays justified the kinship nature of personal relationships through appealing to the permanence and length of such relationships. To categorize some forms of friendship as fictive kinship, is to presume that blood relations, organized through procreative heterosexuality constitutes true kinship. Distinctive because the biogenetic tie is subordinated to that of enduring love. The exclusion from and threat to family that marks gay men and lesbian women amounts to a virtual denial of their cultural citizenship.

Hayden: Lesbian Families Centrality of motherhood in American cultural narratives of womanhood. For lesbians and gay men who are parents, the two-parent model is not the only one. They may have children through previous heterosexual relationships, they adopt children; they are single parents or raise children with several co-parents. How do they define themselves and how does society define them? Lesbian co-mothers move between ‘new’ and ‘old’ meanings of kinship and motherhood. Familial ties between persons of the same sex that are not grounded in procreation do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage. Raise new questions about what defines kinship if it is not biogenetic connection? Hayden argues that lesbian families mobilize biological ties rather than contradicting them, as gay couples do. But in so doing, they also decentre it as a singular category. The dispersal of the biological tie seems to highlight its elasticity.

Kinship, Gender and Power Collier and Yanigasako: American kinship system does not exist apart from its constitutent elements of gender, age, ethnicity, race or class. Kinship and gender are mutually constituted because both are based on the same ideas of biological differences. Gender assumptions about the facts of sexual reproduction pervade kinship theory; thus even an analytic separation becomes problematical. The interlinking of kinship and gender is foregrounded in lesbian families; many see lesbian co-mothers as ideally trying to overcome the hierarchies of masculinity and femininity.

Tensions in Lesbian Families While ideally based on co-motherhood, legal structures equate ‘blood’ ties with family. Having children through donor insemination introduces an asymmetry into the relationships between lesbian parents and the child. The birth mother has an immediately recognizable relationship to her child, while her partner is doubly excluded from the realm of kinship. Expressed in the lack of terms for the role of ‘co-mother.’ She becomes the ‘non-birth mother’, the ‘other mother.’ Also becomes more difficult to maintain the boundaries of the family in relation to others. Lack of outside support and recognition affects family functioning. Non-birth mother also has no legal rights; and the biological mother may minimize the needs that the ‘co-mother’ has for support in parenting. Another lesbian co-mother spoke of feeling ‘like a fraud.’ And another, that she wasn’t making the same ‘sacrifices’ that the biological mother made. Hayden: represents the complexity that the symbols of biogenetic substance still possess even in families that are trying to alter the boundaries of definitions of the family. Some lesbian co-mothers try to have sbilings on both sides participate as aunts, uncles and grandparents. Some combine their names and hyphenate them.