Chosen families and american kinship

1. Chosen families and american kinship Gay and lesbian parenting

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.