Queer Parents and Fatherhood Movements, 1970–2010

Abstract

The twelfth chapter discusses the transformations of the nuclear family ideal, of its gendered and heteronormative patterns in the wake of the women’s movement and the LGBT movement. At its center stand a lesbian couple and their daughters in San Francisco, supported by the gay fathers who also take responsibility in the family. The author interviewed both couples. The chapter presents their life and the politics of queer families, gay marriage, and the so-called gayby boom in relation to the powerful recent discourse on the “crisis” of the family and to the fatherhood movement, its different and often revisionist subgroups and their politics. At the same time, the chapter presents a queer family as the embodiment of a slow but persistent transformation of the hegemonic nuclear family model that has come about since the 1970s. They represent a historic change toward a greater recognition of patchwork families in general and of many different kinds of living arrangements, particularly in metropolitan centers. Yet the chapter also shows how the current politics of gay marriage and queer families oscillates between a total disintegration of the nuclear family on the one side and the reassertion of its values of love and mutual responsibility on the other side.