Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society

1. Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society Week 7: Beyond the Nuclear Family: Can parenting ‘be’ what parenting ‘is’? Dr. Maria do Mar Pereira m.d.m.pereira@warwick.ac.uk

4. See: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/14/lesbians-needed-guidebook-on-parenting and: http://www.wearefamilymagazine.co.uk/

5. Family

6. Family

7. Lone Motherhood

8. AttitudesTowardsLoneMotherhood http://bobnational.net/programme.php?archive=68330&view=flash_player

9. TheStigmaofLoneMotherhood Between the 1950s and 1980s, thousands of unmarried women in the UK and elsewhere were forced to give up their babies for adoption. In 2010, a group of these women set up the ‘Movement for an Adoption Apology’. Mission Statement of the MAA We seek recognition and acknowledgement of the pain and grief suffered by many birth parents and their children because of the unethical adoption practices of the past. (…) For many years, until at least the 1980s, pregnancy outside marriage was severely frowned upon, and frequently young women who found themselves in this situation were given little choice but to give in to the strong pressures which were exerted on them by the authorities to have their babies adopted. They were not given information about the welfare services, including housing and financial help, which were available at the time.

10. TheStigmaofLoneMotherhood Mission Statement of the MAA (cont.) There was no question of these women being found to be unfit mothers; they were simply pre-vented from becoming mothers at all. This experience so trauma-tised many of these women that they have suffered years of men-tal and/or physical ill health ever since, and many were unable to have more children.

11. TransformationsFilmOuting! Join us for a trip to the Warwick Arts Centre (WAC) to see the film and then discuss it afterwards! Date: November 21st (Thursday) Time: 6.30 Meeting Place: outside the cinema in the WAC, at 6.25 Price: £4 (please buy your own ticket)

12. Lone Motherhood Routes “Problems” Separation, Divorce, Death Choice Donor Sperm Adoption/fostering Societal: engenders criminality in boys Economic: is a drain to the welfare state Moral Panics

13. Single Mothers’ Struggle for Legitimacy (Bock, 2000) • Bock’s research participants: well-educated career women in their 30s and early 40s who decided to have children as single mothers, to guarantee they do not miss out on motherhood • Discursive strategies deployed to legitimate their situation, and demonstrate that they are ‘proper’ mothers: • The experience that comes with age is valuable • Responsible job equals responsible mother • Emotionally mature • Economic means to support a child

14. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parents

15. Sexuality and Parenting Tasker, Fiona (2005) ‘Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children: A Review’, Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 224-240. ‘Findings from research suggest that children with lesbian or gay parents are comparable with children with heterosexual parents on key psycho-social developmental outcomes. In many ways, children of lesbian or gay parents have similar experiences of family life compared with children in heterosexual families’ (p. 224).

16. Resources • http://www.stonewall.org.uk/at_home/parenting/default.asp • http://www.prideangel.com/p4/about-us.aspx • http://www.donor-conception-network.org/index.htm • http://www.newfamilysocial.co.uk/

17. Normalising Gay Parenthood Charlie Condou, The Guardian, July 2012 Last year when the Guardian asked me to write something about my quirky family set-up [the weekly column “The Three of Us”], I had a number of reasons for wanting to do it. First, without wanting to sound too pretentious, it was to be a role model. Growing up as a young gay man who knew, always, that having kids was important to me, there was no one to look to for a positive example of gay fa-milylife. The fear that I would never be a father gnawed at me for years, making my coming out and path to self-acceptance so much harder than it needed to be. (…)

18. Normalising Gay Parenthood Finally, I wanted to answer those critics who call families like mine ‘unnatu-ral’ and worse. I wanted to show that the reality of our day-to-day life is actually pretty ordinary. Parenting and sexuality are two very different parts of life and, unsurprisingly, a person's sexuality plays no part in how they function as a parent. Potty training is the same whether you're gay or straight, heterosexual parents are no better at surviving on two hours' sleep than gay parents. And the issues we have to deal with as a family – feeding, sleeping, discipline, television access – are universal. But, actually, it's this very ordinariness of my family life that is prompting me to bring the column to a close. Because, in the end, a newspaper column about my daughter's move to a big-girl bed, or my son's first rusk just isn't interesting enough. There are only so many ways I can say "this is my family, look how normal it is", and I think I've made that point. (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jul/14/charlie-condou-gay-dad-farewell)