Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State

by Bernstein, Mary

• ISBN13: 9780231116909
• ISBN10: 023111690X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: COLUMBIA UNIV PRESS

Summary

This is the first book about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families that connects issues of gender, sexuality, and the family with the broader issues of social movements, politics, and law.Chapters address the themes of visibility, transgression, and resistance, as well as the intersection between the personal and political in the contexts of relationships, parenthood, and political activism. Giving special attention to families of color, immigrant, and poor families, the authors examine the risks entailed in coming out and the significance of class, race, and sexual and gender identity in this process. Parenting also creates dilemmas of visibility as queer families negotiate malls and schools as well as the medical, legal, and political institutions that regulate their families.This book explores how heteronormative and class assumptions influence state polices on parenthood, adoption, and relationships between adults, to question whether the law can meet the needs of queer families. Also discussed is how queer family politics are com-plicated by bisexuality, nonmonagamy, and gender nonconformity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Queer Families and the Politics of Visibility	1	(20)
Mary Bernstein
Renate Reimann
PART 1 Relationships
In/Visibility
A Member of the Funeral: An Introspective Ethnography	21	(23)
Nancy A. Naples
Weddings Without Marriage: Making Sense of Lesbian and Gay Commitment Rituals	44	(9)
Ellen Lewin
``We Can See Them, But We Can't Hear Them'': LGBT Members of African American Families	53	(15)
Michael Bennett
Juan Battle
Talking Freaks: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families on Daytime Talk TV	68	(19)
Joshua Gamson
One Man's Story of Being Gay and Dine (Navajo): A Study in Resiliency	87	(17)
Margaret Ann Waller
Roland McAllen-Walker
Communicating Our Relationships
Family Secrets, or...How to Become a Bisexual Alien Without Really Trying	104	(8)
Elizabeth Randolph
A Place Called Home: A Queer Political Economy of Mexican Immigrant Men's Family Experiences	112	(25)
Lionel Cantu
Constituting Nonmonogamies	137	(15)
R. Jeffrey Ringer
Communication in ``Asian American'' Families with Queer Members: A Relational Dialectics Perspective	152	(23)
Gust A. Yep
Karen E. Lovaas
Philip C. Ho
PART 2 Parenthood
Becoming Parents
Affording Our Families: Class Issues in Family Formation	175	(7)
Terry Boggis
Should Lesbians Count as Infertile Couples? Antilesbian Discrimination in Assisted Reproduction	182	(19)
Julien S. Murphy
Protecting Our Parent-Child Relationships: Understanding the Strengths and Weaknesses of Second-Parent Adoption	201	(20)
Susan E. Dalton
Parenthood
``My Daddy Loves Your Daddy'': A Gay Father Encounters a Social Movement	221	(10)
John C. Miller
Alma Mater: Family ``Outings'' and the Making of the Modern Other Mother (MOM)	231	(23)
Maureen Sullivan
Lesbian Mothers at Work	254	(18)
Renate Reimann
``Aside From One Little, Tiny Detail, We Are So Incredibly Normal'': Prespectives of Children in Lesbian Step Families	272	(21)
Janet M. Wright
PART 3 Political Activism
The Marrying Kind?
Building Common Ground: Strategies for Grassroots Organizing on Same-Sex Marriage	293	(13)
Irene Javors
Renate Reimann
``What If?'' The Legal Consequences of Marriage and the Legal Needs of Lesbian and Gay Male Couples	306	(32)
David L. Chambers
Take My Domestic Partner, Please: Gays and Marriage in the Era of the Visible	338	(20)
Suzanna Danuta Walters
Defense, Morality, Civil Rights, and Family: The Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Issues in the U.S. Congress	358	(21)
Donald P. Haider-Markel
Gender Transgression and Queer Family Law
Political Organizing and the Limits of Civil Rights: Gay Marriage and Queer Families	379	(18)
Randall Halle
Transgenderism and Sexual Orientation: More Than a Marriage of Convenience?	397	(23)
Mary Coombs
Gender, Queer Family Policies, and the Limits of Law	420	(27)
Mary Bernstein
List of Contributors	447	(4)
Index	451