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This chapter examines why, starting in the 1980s, many scholars and politicians found it useful to return to the structuralist social contract of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Around this time, lawyers, activists, social scientists, and politicians began to employ a discourse of rights or droits de l'homme. They argued for their right to raise children outside of the context of the heterosexual nuclear family, their right to marry and to make different forms of private life publicly relevant, their right to choose a child's last name, or their right to choose a different gender. For those troubled by these claims, particularly for those on the left, the works of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan provided a counterargument to this discourse of rights which is in perfect accordance with the secular and intellectual values celebrated in French political life.

This chapter recounts societal aspirations for families as postfeminist, gender-neutral spaces at the beginning of the twenty-first century that have outpaced the actual rate of social change, particularly in heterosexual families. It points out how gendered patterns in the division of household labor and workplace disadvantage remain stubbornly entrenched. It also confirms parenting as the increasingly preferred gender-neutral label for the multifaceted work of providing care to children. The chapter explores how navigating contemporary motherhood meant navigating a discursively gender-neutral space as a person whose lived experience and interactions with social institutions are in fact quite gendered. It discusses the tensions between gender-neutral aspirations and discourse and gendered institutions, which shape the experiences of mothers without primary custody of their children.

This chapter makes a queer narratological case for Ulysses on the basis of its vision of the family. Queerness here is not by any means coterminous with homosexuality or sexual deviance, but the structural consequences of homosexuality in narrative terms are foundational to the form of Ulysses, to the communal and collective realities that provide the framework and scaffolding of the novel. Ulysses is neither a rediscovery nor a wreckage of Victorian family values but a work and a world structured by an alternative ideology of kinship: a queer family epic. The muted but distinct references to homosexuality in Ulysses are an important sign of the queer vision of human life that underpins its formalist strategies. The great project of Joyce's family plots is the queering of heterosexual family life—as in Dickens and Holmes, homosexuality has a powerful metaphorical role in Ulysses but little concrete presence in the novel.

This chapter looks at why women associated with the Promise Keepers and most black women supported the men’s marches. It shows that both groups of women believed in the folly of radical feminism, the evil of homosexuality, the need for strong two parent heterosexual families, and the equality of men and women based on the complementarity of their gender roles. It takes a historical look at black and white womanhood and concludes that Promise Keeper women and black women wanted similar things from men but for different reasons. In looking at black and white women historically this chapter explores the concept of postfeminism and the race-traitor trope. It shows the difference that race made in these women’s approach to the family and social issues.

This chapter examines the cultural and moral concerns arising from future regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and other reproductive technologies, including the potential of ART to challenge the traditional two-parent heterosexual family and the ability of technology to allow parents to engage in prenatal screening. Four main issues are addressed: the ability of reproductive technology to allow for only one legal parent; the unavailability of reproductive technology to certain socioeconomic classes; the concern that beneficiaries of reproductive technology are playing God by altering natural reproduction; and the way reproductive technologies are intertwined with more controversial issues such as cloning and stem cell research. The chapter takes into account a variety of religious, historical, and philosophical objections with different aspects of reproductive technology, from preimplantation genetic diagnosis to the moral status of embryos and embryos as property. It also considers how domestic and foreign courts and legislatures have addressed reproductive technology issues and concludes by analyzing the power of private contracts in agreements involving sperm donation and surrogacy.

Ardel Haefele-Thomas in Chapter 2 analyses Elizabeth Gaskell’s pioneering of alternative family ties in her short Gothic fictional texts. Gaskell utilizes the Gothic genre to explore and provide points of escape for women confined within abusive, heteronormative situations. From her understanding of the ways that gender, class and subversions of ‘normative’ heterosexual family structures can function together to create transgressive critiques and narratives, Gaskell finds a place to carry out queer family re-structurings within her Gothic short fiction. Haefele-Thomas explores contemporary queer theory focusing specifically on ideas of transgender and gender queer positionality as well as historic references to famous nineteenth-century cross-dressing cases that may have influenced Elizabeth Gaskell’s thinking about the topic.

This chapter examines the cultural and moral concerns arising from future regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and other reproductive technologies, including the potential of ART to challenge the traditional two-parent heterosexual family and the ability of technology to allow parents to engage in prenatal screening. Four main issues are addressed: the ability of reproductive technology to allow for only one legal parent; the unavailability of reproductive technology to certain socioeconomic classes; the concern that beneficiaries of reproductive technology are playing God by altering natural reproduction; and the way reproductive technologies are intertwined with more controversial issues such as cloning and stem cell research. The chapter takes into account a variety of religious, historical, and philosophical objections with different aspects of reproductive technology, from preimplantation genetic diagnosis to the moral status of embryos and embryos as property. It also considers how domestic and foreign courts and legislatures have addressed reproductive technology issues and concludes by analyzing the power of private contracts in agreements involving sperm donation and surrogacy.

This chapter introduces the members of the 7008er network at the occasion of a significant gathering, when seven families with children born from the same sperm donor come together at a hotel in the Midwest. From the beginning, the children in this network seek to construct themselves as a family. Love, trust, and harmony serve as guideposts in the unscripted land of donor-linked families. They also use structures they know from traditional families, such as a sibling pecking order. As the group expands to incorporate new members, the original narrative of family membership fails to describe the reality of competing allegiances among teenagers. Instead of remaining a coherent group, the members of this network break into a number of separate factions. Born between 1995 and 2001, the kids interviewed are between fifteen and nineteen years old.

The parents in the Social Capitalist network introduce a set of new ideas about the meaning of relationships with donor siblings. Rather than trying to squeeze themselves into any preexisting model of family, they actively negotiate their own rules for interaction and for language (including use of the word “dibling”). They also introduce a set of new ideas about the benefits the group can provide. They state quite clearly that they value the social and cultural capital available through group membership. The parents scurry to become members early (while their children are under the age of five) because they want both to influence the group’s formation and to secure the benefits they hope their children will receive in years to come. Because the children are so young, we hear only from the parents.

The members of the Tourists are not really sure what they are looking for when they connect with other people to whom they are connected by reliance on the same sperm donor. The mere existence of donor siblings is a novelty to the members of this network, but like tourists who are only curious about the sites in a different land, a brief visit with the others suffices. Interestingly, the donor makes himself known to this network, but he too is a tourist who sets clear limits on what he has to offer the children born from his sperm donation. The Facebook group and holiday cards sent within the network are reminders of membership, but there is little other interaction. Born between 1994 and 2001, the kids interviewed are between sixteen and nineteen years old.