Commentary on Almack’s Chapter

Abstract

The ‘display’ (or otherwise) of families, and the related issue of facilitating recognition of families, is central to the lives of people in the families of lesbian women, as a burgeoning related body of research and concerted activism around the world attest. The legal, public policy, social and discursive contexts in which lesbian women have families vary across time and place (e.g., see Ryan-Flood 2005; Short 2007a; 2007b). The terrain which lesbian couples who have created families have navigated and negotiated, however, has predominantly been one in which the family-related laws, public policies and discourses have been built on and have promoted a family hierarchy and blue-print of the ‘real’ or ‘ideal’ family as having one partnered heterosexual mother and father. As lesbian women ‘navigate a landscape’ in which lesbian-parented families are often not recognised, understood and/or valued (with associated legal, financial, practical, interpersonal and emotional negative consequences), lesbian mothers “show”, “signpost”, “mark-out”, and give cues about how to relate to them as a family (Short 2007a; 2007b). Thus, ‘displaying’ who the family is, and that the family is a family (particularly to those outside what might be regarded as the immediate family), are part of the resources and strategies used to ‘navigate’ a terrain in which lack of recognition, discrimination and denigration are features.