Abstract
Studies of changing family and kinship relations have demonstrated that no singular understanding of family exists: families are what families do.1 It is claimed that “transformations of intimacy” have restructured adult-sexual2 and parent-child relationships,3 without obligation, around “elective love.”4 Research on lesbian and gay parent families highlights the importance of a “friendship ethic”5 where friends and partners are incorporated into fluid family forms.6 These “families of choice” are developing egalitarian parental relationships based on gender “sameness.”7 Paradoxically, while research on lesbian and gay parent families adds to our understanding of emerging patterns of queer kinship,8 and the ways that lesbian mothers negotiate the daily practices of mothering,9 little attention has been paid to the consequences of parenthood on mothers’ lesbianism. There has been some research into how lesbian mothers manage their parental and sexual identities,10 but how these identities and practices of self are materialized remains under-researched. In this chapter I demonstrate that by analyzing lesbian parent families through spatial structure it is possible to see the ways that lesbian parent families (re) present and experience themselves and how mothers manage their sexual-maternal identities.
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Notes
Carol Smart and Bren Neale, Family Fragments? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “On the Way to a Post-Familial Family: From a Community of Need to Elective Affinities,” in Love and Eroticism, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1999).
Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan, Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments (London: Routledge, 2001).
Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Gillian Dunne, “A Passion for ‘Sameness’? Sexual and Gender Accountability,” in The New Family, ed. Elizabeth Silva and Carol Smart (London: Sage, 1999).
Gillian Dunne, “Opting into Motherhood: Blurring the Boundaries and Redefining the Meaning of Parenthood,” discussion paper, in LSE Gender Institute (November 1998), issue 6;
Janet Wright, Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1998).
Jacqui Gabb, “Lesbian Motherhood: Strategies of Familial-Linguistic Management in Lesbian Parent Families,” Sociology 39, no. 4 (2005), forthcoming; Jacqui Gabb, “‘I could eat my baby to bits’: Passion, Desire and Sexuality in Mother/Child(ren) Relationships,” Gender, Place, Culture 11, no. 3 (2004), 399–415;
Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Gill Valentine, “Negotiating and Managing Multiple Sexual Identities: Lesbian Time-Space Strategies,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: NS 18 (1993), 237–248.
David Bell and Gill Valentine, “The Sexed Self: Strategies of Performance, Sites of Resistance,” in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1995).
Gill Valentine, “(Re)Negotiating the ‘Heterosexual Street’: Lesbian Productions of Space,” in Body Space: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996).
Gill Valentine, “Out and About: Geographies of Lesbian Landscapes,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19, no. 1 (1995), 96–111.
Kate Griffin and Lisa Mulholland, Lesbian Motherhood in Europe (London: Cassell, 1997), 11–20.
Ellen Lewin, “Negotiating Lesbian Motherhood: The Dialectics of Resistance and Accommodation,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.
Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993).
Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Macmillan, 1991), 34.
Joseph Bristow, “Being Gay: Politics, Pleasure, Identity,” New Formations 9 (1989), 74.
Kristin Esterberg, “‘A Certain Swagger When I Walk’: Performing Lesbian Identity,” in Queer Theory/Sociology (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
Cathy King, “Boys and Us,” in Lesbian Parenting: Living with Pride and Prejudice, ed. Katherine Arnup (Charlotte Town: Gynergy, 1995), 213.
Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963).
Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, an Introduction,” Differences 3 (1991), pp. iii–xviii.
For example, see Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson, Schooling Sexualities (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998);
Amy Wallis and Jo Van Every, “Sexuality in the Primary School,” Sexualities 3, no. 4 (2000), 409–423.
Charlotte Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Child Development 63 (1992), 1025–1042;
Fiona Tasker and Susan Golombok, Growing Up in a Lesbian Family: Effects on Child Development (New York: Guilford Publications, 1997).
Lisa Saffron, What about the Children? Sons and Daughters of Lesbians and Gay Men Speak about their Lives (London: Cassell, 1996).
Lisa Saffron, It’s a Family Affair: The Complete Lesbian Parenting Book (London: Diva Books, 2001).
For a more thorough examination of children’s experience of sex education in lesbian parent families and experience of bullying in school, see Jacqui Gabb, “Sexuality Education: How Children of Lesbian Mothers ‘Learn’ about Sex/ uality,” Sex Education 4, no. 1 (2004), 19–34.
Jacqui Gabb, “Critical Differentials: Querying the Contrarieties Between Research on Lesbian Parent Families,” Sexualities 7, no. 2 (2004), 171–187.
Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine, “Wherever I Lay My Girlfriend: That’s My Home,” in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995), 99.
Graham Allan and Graham Crow, “Insiders and Outsiders: Boundaries Around the Home,” in Home and Family: Creating the Domestic Sphere, ed. eid. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 5.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977).
David Bell, “Insignificant Others: Lesbian and Gay Geographies,” Area 23 (1991), 325.
James Duncan, “Introduction,” in Housing and Identity (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 2–4.
Julia Twigg, Bathing—The Body and Community Care (London: Routledge, 2000), 78.
David Sibley, “Families and Domestic Routines: Constructing the Boundaries of Childhood,” in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Social Transformation, ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1995), 131.
For example, see Yolanda Retter, “Lesbian Spaces in Los Angeles, 1970–1990,” and Maxine Wolfe, “Invisible Women in Invisible Places: The Production of Social Space in Lesbian Bars,” in Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997);
Barbara Weightman, “Gay Bars as Private Places,” Landscape 23 (1980), 9–16.
Gillian Rose, Feminism and the Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 140–159.
Elspeth Probyn, “Lesbians in Space: Gender, Sex, and the Structure of Missing,” Gender, Place, and Culture 2, no. 1 (1995), 81.
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© 2005 Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer
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Gabb, J. (2005). Locating Lesbian Parent Families. In: Hardy, S., Wiedmer, C. (eds) Motherhood and Space. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12103-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12103-5_11
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