Lesbian, Gay and Queer Parenting: Families, Intimacies, Genealogies

How are new relationalities formed? By what methods are kinship/family claims made? How are gender and race made relevant to subjectivities? How does state welfare discipline parenting? Are new forms of intimacy possible? This book investigates such questions through detailed analysis of stories, films, photographs, and policy debates, looking at the ways in which identities, subjectivities and connections are taken up in their everyday complexity. Based upon original research with gay and lesbian parents, primarily but not exclusively those who have fostered or adopted children, this book asks whether a queer kinship is possible or desirable, why family claims are made, how sexuality is made to matter in mundane contexts, how concerns about gender role models, about gender identities, about racial 'types' and cultural forms are used, and how ideas about sexuality, and about sexual 'types', are produced and used within the ruling relations of institutional and state practices. Drawing upon interactionist, feminist, discursive and queer sociologies, this book considers the complexity of gay and lesbian parents' everyday lives, and will be of interest to those working in the fields of sociology, social work, social policy, gender, race, family and sexuality studies.