Hayden_1995_Gender+Genetics+Generation

Theoretical Frameworks of Gay and Lesbian Kinship

• Ideological Exclusion and Kinship Claims:

  • Lesbians and gay men have historically been ideologically excluded from the realm of kinship in American culture, constructing gay and lesbian family configurations as a deeply contested domain.
  • Claims to the legitimacy of gay and lesbian families are consistently articulated, contested, and evaluated through their perceived differences from or similarities to normative ideologies of "the American family."

• The Weston vs. Lewin Theoretical Dichotomy:

  • Kath Weston (Families We Choose, 1991):
    • Argues for the distinctiveness of gay and lesbian kinship structured around "chosen families."
    • Biological ties are decentered; choice and love serve as the defining features of kin relationships.
    • Gay and lesbian chosen families are neither derivative of nor substitutes for heterosexual biological families; they represent a distinct form of kinship in their own right.
  • Ellen Lewin (Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture, 1993):
    • Focuses on how motherhood constitutes a defining feature of womanhood in American culture that supersedes the "difference" of lesbian identity.
    • Demonstrates that lesbian mothers negotiate relatedness and relationships in ways that reflect broader cultural narratives of mothering, asserting that lesbian mothers are not fundamentally distinct from heterosexual mothers.

• Biology as a Contested Axis of Distinctiveness:

  • Together, these ethnographies illustrate that "biology," broadly conceived, functions as a central axis around which claims to the distinctiveness of gay and lesbian kinship revolve.
  • Under a simple binary logic:
    • Decentering biological ties (as shown by Weston) allows for claims of unique, non-traditional kinship.
    • Centralizing biological ties (especially through motherhood, as shown by Lewin) leads to claims of sameness, assimilation, or traditional legitimacy.
  • This dichotomy can be disrupted by examining how lesbian mothers actively employ, unpack, disperse, and refigure biological concepts through donor insemination to forge a uniquely lesbian sense of kinship.

• Scope and Historical Context of Lesbian Parenting:

  • Focusing on donor insemination is not an assertion that it represents a universal or defining model for all lesbian kinship.
  • Lesbian and gay parenting pre-dates current interest in alternative families and encompasses diverse structures: children from prior heterosexual relationships, adoption, single parenthood, and multi-parent co-parenting arrangements.
  • Parenting within lesbian and feminist communities exists alongside a long history of contestation regarding reproductive choice and the feminist political choice not to mother.

• Marilyn Strathern's Analytical Framework:

  • Following Marilyn Strathern (Reproducing the Future, 1992b), existing cultural symbols pressed into new service acquire new meanings.
  • Rather than creating entirely novel concepts out of nothing, kinship re-articulation relies on an ongoing dialectic between "old" cultural symbols and "new" social applications.

Schneiderian Kinship and the Symbolic Matrix

• David M. Schneider's Model of American Kinship:

  • Schneider's foundational model (American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 1980 [1968]) posits American kinship as a symbolic system defined by two contrasting, mutually dependent elements:
    • Blood: Shared biogenetic substance (a state of being).
    • Love: A code for conduct governing relationships and legitimating blood ties (doing).
  • The central unifying symbol of this system is (hetero)sexual intercourse, which mediates blood and marriage and serves as a "folk theory of biological reproduction."
  • In Schneider's formulation, sexual intercourse defines parentage: the father is the genitor, the mother is the genetrix, husband and wife are lovers, and the child is both the product and object of their love.

• Homophobic Exclusions and the "Threat to Family":

  • Homophobia in the U.S. relies on the assumed interdependence of heterosexuality, gender, kinship, and procreation.
  • Anti-gay rhetoric operates on pseudo-evolutionary claims that homosexuals cannot reproduce themselves and must "recruit" progeny, asserting that homosexuals destroy family life because they "can't create anything" (Green 1991).
  • Contests over the legitimacy of gay and lesbian families are fundamentally contests over the cultural definition of "creativity" and procreative agency.

• Chosen Families and Schneider's Dualism:

  • Weston's chosen families challenge the core Schneiderian premise by establishing erotic and affective familial ties between same-sex partners that are grounded neither in biogenetic substance nor legal marriage.
  • These non-procreative families challenge the privileged status of biogenetic reproduction as the sole determinant of authentic kinship.

Choice, Love, and Feminist Critiques of Kinship

• De-Naturalizing Biological Baseline:

  • As Strathern (1992b) notes in evaluating Weston's work, chosen families make explicit that there has always been an element of choice in heterosexual kinship regarding whether biological ties are recognized or activated as social relationships.
  • Schneider (1980) acknowledged that Americans constantly exercise choice in deciding the degree to which blood ties become active relationships.
  • Chosen families shift the focus from blood to choice on two levels:
    1. Explicitly: By constructing legitimate families out of networks of friends and lovers.
    2. Implicitly: By revealing that conventional blood-based kinship is itself a cultural construction rather than a raw fact of nature.

• Feminist Anthropological Re-Formulations of Schneider:

  • Feminist theorists (Jane Collier, Sylvia Yanagisako, Carol Delaney, Susan McKinnon, Marilyn Strathern) critique Schneider for treating kinship as a domain of "pure culture" detached from gender, age, race, class, and power.
  • Collier and Yanagisako (1987) argue that gender and kinship are mutually constituted: both rely on cultural assumptions about the biological facts of sexual reproduction.
  • Schneider's separation of gender and power from kinship maintains the abstract stability of his model (where transformation requires a complete departure from the blood/love matrix), but obscures how power and inequality are embedded within kinship symbols (Delaney and Yanagisako in press; McKinnon 1992).

Gender, Power, and Dual-Motherhood

• The Second Female Parent as "Another Mother":

  • In intentional lesbian co-parenting families, the second parent is explicitly understood as another mother—she is neither a father substitute nor a gender-neutral co-parent.
  • Resonating with Adrienne Rich's (1984) critique of "compulsory heterosexuality," lesbian motherhood offers an alternative to the institutionalized gender inequities associated with traditional heterosexual households.

• Twofold Politicized Claims of Lesbian Co-Parenting:

  • Doubling Maternal Nurturance: Motherhood is embraced as a distinctively female, nurturant enterprise, doubling maternal support (Washburne 1987: "every baby should have at least two mothers"; Hill 1987: heterosexual mothers envious of shared maternal labor).
  • Eradicating Gendered Power Differentials: Lesbian co-parenting claims to eliminate patriarchal power imbalances inherent in heterosexual couples:
    • Margaret Nichols (1987): Lesbian and gay relationships are far less likely to exhibit the vast power differentials found in heterosexual couples bogged down by sex-role conflicts.
    • Suzanne Cusick (1991): Defines lesbian relationships as based on "non-power," where a porous boundary permits a continuous bi-directional flow of power.
    • Nancy D. Polikoff (1987, 1990) & Baba Cooper (1987): Re-framing lesbian mothering as an opportunity to raise children in households with parents of equal power, directly countering "heteromothering."

• Re-Figuring the Procreative Symbol:

  • Schneider identified sexual intercourse as the central symbol mediating parentage and family unity.
  • Strathern (1992a) notes that Euro-American procreative ideology treats male and female parents as asymmetrically placed; the sexual act reproduces parenthood as an unequal union distinguished by gender.
  • Replacing the male-female procreative pair with two female partners reconfigures the alignment of gender, power, and sexuality that traditionally structures American kinship.

Structural Asymmetries and Co-Motherhood Dynamics

• Legal Inequity and Biological Asymmetry:     *