Elizabeth A Suter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 86709 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Elizabeth A Suter |
| NOMBRES | Elizabeth A |
| APELLIDO | Suter |
| FIRMA | SUTER E A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Denver |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3946-4198 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 312 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Special Issue on Relational Dialectics Theory
Charting a Research Agenda for Relational Dialectics Theory
Setting the Agenda
Family communication scholarship on transnational adoption has privileged adoptive family communication, in part, because only a fraction of transnational adoptees have been able to locate birth relatives. Given increased global access to DNA testing and more advanced technologies, reunions between transnational adoptees and birth families are increasing. Informed by our positionalities as an adoptive mother of a child born in China and a Korean …
Propagating Superior-Quality Singleton Children as Anticipatory Modernization
We conducted a relational dialectics analysis of 259 Chinese birth planning policy propaganda. We identified a coalition of five discourses animating the texts. We found the coalition created conditions of monologic wholeness, characterized by simultaneous dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction. Dialogic expansion promised a utopic, future China in exchange for birth parents’ childbirth sacrifices and creation of a generation of superior-qua…
The Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network
Lockdowns and “stay-at-home” orders, starting in March 2020, shuttered bench and field dependent research across the world as a consequence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continues to have an impact on research progress and career development, especially for graduate students and early career researchers, as strict social distance limitations stifle ongoing research and impede in-person educational programs. The goal of the Bioinfo…
Catalysts and motivations for change in privacy coordination
Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM) was applied in a qualitative analysis of survey responses from parents in transracial, internationally adoptive families concerning their management of private, adoption-related information. Participants were 166 parents of at least one child adopted from China or Vietnam who responded to an open-ended online questionnaire. Most parents described at least one change in coordination of their child’s pr…
Parents’ Management of Privacy Turbulence Surrounding Private, Adoption-Related Information in Transracial, Internationally Adoptive Families
Parents (N = 166) in transracial, international adoptive (TIA) families with children from China or Vietnam were surveyed to investigate their experiences with privacy turbulence surrounding the family’s private, adoption-related information. About half described at least one instance of privacy turbulence, with a total of 98 instances. The instances included examples of all six types of privacy turbulence described in Communication Privacy Manag…
Engaging Theories in Family Communication
Critical Theorizing in Family Communication Studies
Despite modest growth in interpretive research, the study of family communication remains predominantly situated within postpositivism to the relative neglect of critical approaches. We argue that this inattention derives partly from the limited number of critically inflected family communication theories. In this article, we seek to encourage critical family communication theorizing. We do so by explicating the critical underpinnings of the rece…
The promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods for advancing critical interpersonal and family communication research
This article argues that contrapuntal analysis and intersectional analysis are particularly germane for realizing the emergent critical turn in interpersonal and family communication studies. Contrapuntal analysis is apropos for examining the multiple discourses and intersectional analysis for examining the embodied vectors of difference at play in contemporary interpersonal and familial communicative life. I organize my discussion of the promise…
A Tale of Two Mommies
This study examined co-mother family of origin stories. Origin stories, representing the formation of a family, are culturally understood within a master narrative of heterosexual love and biological childbearing. Beginnings of co-mother families rupture this dominant, gendered, boy-meets-girl script. Investigating whether or not co-mother stories reify the normative master narrative or if instead their narrations resist and/or possibly transform…
Introduction
The Dialogic Construction of “Adoption” in Online Foster Adoption Narratives
One hundred online narratives of foster adoption were analyzed qualitatively with the goal of identifying what, if any, competing discourses animated the meaning of “adoption” constructed by adoptive parents. Framed in relational dialectics theory, two discourses were identified: (1) the Discourse of Utilitarian Acquisition, in which adoption was constructed as a second-best pathway to parenting, after biological reproduction had failed, and (2) …
Motherhood as Contested Ideological Terrain
Framed by relational dialectics theory (Baxter), this investigation considered the meaning(s) of motherhood in female–female co-motherhood. Analysis identified two competing discourses: (1) discourse of essential motherhood (DEM) and (2) discourse of queer motherhood (DQM). Speakers' invocation of the DEM reinscribes the mainstream US cultural discourse that children can have only one authentic (i.e., biological) mother, whereas invocation of the…
Discursive Constructions of the Meaning of “Family” in Online Narratives of Foster Adoptive Parents
Framed by relational dialectics theory, discursive constructions of the meaning of “family” were examined in 100 online foster adoption narratives. Parental narratives manifested struggles between biogenetic and discursive constructions of “family,” identified here as the discourse of biological normativity (DBN) and discourse of constitutive kinning (DCK). The DBN reinscribes the dominant cultural and foster care system preference for biogenetic…
Negotiating Identity and Pragmatism
The current study advances the extant literature on how internal boundary management processes (naming, discussing, narrating, ritualizing) impact identity by demonstrating how naming fosters identity in the context of international adoption. The study examined: (a) parental treatment of their children's birth country names in the naming process and (b) parental motives for various naming forms (i.e., placement of the child's birth culture name w…
Accounting for Lesbian-Headed Families
Although lesbian mothers are often called to justify their family’s legitimacy, we know little about these interactions. The current study included 44 female coparents across 10 focus groups discussing the interactive process of discursive legitimacy challenges. Using the theoretical framework of remedial accounts (Schönbach, 1990), inductive and deductive coding revealed several existing and new types of challenges, accounting strategies, and ev…
Parental management of adoptive identities during challenging encounters
This interpretive study utilized Owen's ((1985) Thematic metaphors in relational communication: A conceptual framework, The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 1-13) metaphoric approach to identify and understand the cognitive structures undergirding transracial, international adoptive parents' sense-making and management of familial and personal identities during interactions that challenge familial and personal identities. Twelve focus…
How Much Did You Pay For Her?”
Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria chang…
Discursive Negotiation of Family Identity
Research suggests that social interactions may challenge the identity of families with adopted children from China. Yet, both the extent of challenge experienced, and how families negotiate these interactions remains unknown. Thus, this project investigates the degree to which questions or comments from others either support or challenge family identity, as well as the degree to which response strategies used by parents either support or challeng…
Negotiating Lesbian Family Identity via Symbols and Rituals
This study reports how lesbian families negotiate their family identities via symbols and rituals. Sixteen couple interviews were conducted with lesbian co-mothers (for a total of 32 participants) who had their children via donor insemination in the contexts of their current same-sex relationships. Interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Framed by symbolic interactionism, this study reports how these families negotiated affirmation and di…
Family Talk
About as Solid as a Fish Net
Nonbiological lesbian mothers lack not only biological ties to their children, but have no legal ties even if those children are intentionally conceived through donor insemination in the context of a committed relationship. This article explores symbolic attempts to construct the nonbiological mother as a legitimate parent in the absence of such ties. Sixteen families whose children were conceived through donor insemination are analyzed in this s…
Gender Role and Feminism Revisited
Lesbian couples' management of public-private dialectical contradictions
This study explores the processes by which a group of lesbian women report managing public-private dialectical contradictions at the external border between their relationship as a couple and networks, social norms, and laws. Specifically, 18 dyads and 2 individuals, all of whom had been in a committed relationship for at least 1 year, were interviewed about the rituals that are part of their relationship. Transcripts of the interviews were analy…
Discursive Constructions of the Meaning of “Family” in Online Narratives of Foster Adoptive Parents
Framed by relational dialectics theory, discursive constructions of the meaning of “family” were examined in 100 online foster adoption narratives. Parental narratives manifested struggles between biogenetic and discursive constructions of “family,” identified here as the discourse of biological normativity (DBN) and discourse of constitutive kinning (DCK). The DBN reinscribes the dominant cultural and foster care system preference for biogenetic…
The promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods for advancing critical interpersonal and family communication research
This article argues that contrapuntal analysis and intersectional analysis are particularly germane for realizing the emergent critical turn in interpersonal and family communication studies. Contrapuntal analysis is apropos for examining the multiple discourses and intersectional analysis for examining the embodied vectors of difference at play in contemporary interpersonal and familial communicative life. I organize my discussion of the promise…
Motherhood as Contested Ideological Terrain
Framed by relational dialectics theory (Baxter), this investigation considered the meaning(s) of motherhood in female–female co-motherhood. Analysis identified two competing discourses: (1) discourse of essential motherhood (DEM) and (2) discourse of queer motherhood (DQM). Speakers' invocation of the DEM reinscribes the mainstream US cultural discourse that children can have only one authentic (i.e., biological) mother, whereas invocation of the…
Critical Theorizing in Family Communication Studies
Despite modest growth in interpretive research, the study of family communication remains predominantly situated within postpositivism to the relative neglect of critical approaches. We argue that this inattention derives partly from the limited number of critically inflected family communication theories. In this article, we seek to encourage critical family communication theorizing. We do so by explicating the critical underpinnings of the rece…
Gender Role Identity and Attitudes Toward Feminism
Lesbian couples' management of public-private dialectical contradictions
This study explores the processes by which a group of lesbian women report managing public-private dialectical contradictions at the external border between their relationship as a couple and networks, social norms, and laws. Specifically, 18 dyads and 2 individuals, all of whom had been in a committed relationship for at least 1 year, were interviewed about the rituals that are part of their relationship. Transcripts of the interviews were analy…
Parental management of adoptive identities during challenging encounters
This interpretive study utilized Owen's ((1985) Thematic metaphors in relational communication: A conceptual framework, The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 1-13) metaphoric approach to identify and understand the cognitive structures undergirding transracial, international adoptive parents' sense-making and management of familial and personal identities during interactions that challenge familial and personal identities. Twelve focus…
Discursive Negotiation of Family Identity
Research suggests that social interactions may challenge the identity of families with adopted children from China. Yet, both the extent of challenge experienced, and how families negotiate these interactions remains unknown. Thus, this project investigates the degree to which questions or comments from others either support or challenge family identity, as well as the degree to which response strategies used by parents either support or challeng…
The Dialogic Construction of “Adoption” in Online Foster Adoption Narratives
One hundred online narratives of foster adoption were analyzed qualitatively with the goal of identifying what, if any, competing discourses animated the meaning of “adoption” constructed by adoptive parents. Framed in relational dialectics theory, two discourses were identified: (1) the Discourse of Utilitarian Acquisition, in which adoption was constructed as a second-best pathway to parenting, after biological reproduction had failed, and (2) …
Accounting for Lesbian-Headed Families
Although lesbian mothers are often called to justify their family’s legitimacy, we know little about these interactions. The current study included 44 female coparents across 10 focus groups discussing the interactive process of discursive legitimacy challenges. Using the theoretical framework of remedial accounts (Schönbach, 1990), inductive and deductive coding revealed several existing and new types of challenges, accounting strategies, and ev…
How Much Did You Pay For Her?”
Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria chang…
About as Solid as a Fish Net
Nonbiological lesbian mothers lack not only biological ties to their children, but have no legal ties even if those children are intentionally conceived through donor insemination in the context of a committed relationship. This article explores symbolic attempts to construct the nonbiological mother as a legitimate parent in the absence of such ties. Sixteen families whose children were conceived through donor insemination are analyzed in this s…
Gender Role and Feminism Revisited
Introduction
Negotiating Identity and Pragmatism
The current study advances the extant literature on how internal boundary management processes (naming, discussing, narrating, ritualizing) impact identity by demonstrating how naming fosters identity in the context of international adoption. The study examined: (a) parental treatment of their children's birth country names in the naming process and (b) parental motives for various naming forms (i.e., placement of the child's birth culture name w…
Do Lesbians Change Their Last Names in the Context of a Committed Relationship
This exploratory study begins to redress a critical gap in the literature on committed same-sex relationships and last name practices. Data were gathered from an Internet survey, which included 16 lesbian respondents currently in a same-sex relationship. Analyses explored individual, couple, and family of origin factors associated with changing or not changing one's name. Name-changing was cited as a strategy for securing external recognition and…
Negotiating Lesbian Family Identity via Symbols and Rituals
This study reports how lesbian families negotiate their family identities via symbols and rituals. Sixteen couple interviews were conducted with lesbian co-mothers (for a total of 32 participants) who had their children via donor insemination in the contexts of their current same-sex relationships. Interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Framed by symbolic interactionism, this study reports how these families negotiated affirmation and di…
Focus Groups in Ethnography of Communication
Historically, ethnography of communication has viewed participant observation as the central and necessary methodological point of departure for any ethnographic endeavor. However, as this article illustrates, this becomes problematic when particular topics of inquiry do not provide ample opportunities for observation. After struggles to participant observe conversations on women's marital naming practices, I was able to research this topic and p…
Propagating Superior-Quality Singleton Children as Anticipatory Modernization
We conducted a relational dialectics analysis of 259 Chinese birth planning policy propaganda. We identified a coalition of five discourses animating the texts. We found the coalition created conditions of monologic wholeness, characterized by simultaneous dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction. Dialogic expansion promised a utopic, future China in exchange for birth parents’ childbirth sacrifices and creation of a generation of superior-qua…
A Tale of Two Mommies
This study examined co-mother family of origin stories. Origin stories, representing the formation of a family, are culturally understood within a master narrative of heterosexual love and biological childbearing. Beginnings of co-mother families rupture this dominant, gendered, boy-meets-girl script. Investigating whether or not co-mother stories reify the normative master narrative or if instead their narrations resist and/or possibly transform…
Heterosexist Inclusion and Exclusion during Ritual
Oswald (2000) reported the processes by which heterosexual family weddings may undermine gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender(GLBT) people's family membership. The present study sought to understand whether family membership during ritual was also conditional for heterosexual people. Toward that end, Oswald's methodology was replicated with heterosexual participants. Although faced with multiple pressures, at no time did these difficulties cha…
Parents’ Management of Privacy Turbulence Surrounding Private, Adoption-Related Information in Transracial, Internationally Adoptive Families
Parents (N = 166) in transracial, international adoptive (TIA) families with children from China or Vietnam were surveyed to investigate their experiences with privacy turbulence surrounding the family’s private, adoption-related information. About half described at least one instance of privacy turbulence, with a total of 98 instances. The instances included examples of all six types of privacy turbulence described in Communication Privacy Manag…
Setting the Agenda
Family communication scholarship on transnational adoption has privileged adoptive family communication, in part, because only a fraction of transnational adoptees have been able to locate birth relatives. Given increased global access to DNA testing and more advanced technologies, reunions between transnational adoptees and birth families are increasing. Informed by our positionalities as an adoptive mother of a child born in China and a Korean …
Charting a Research Agenda for Relational Dialectics Theory
Focus Groups in Ethnography of Communication
Historically, ethnography of communication has viewed participant observation as the central and necessary methodological point of departure for any ethnographic endeavor. However, as this article illustrates, this becomes problematic when particular topics of inquiry do not provide ample opportunities for observation. After struggles to participant observe conversations on women's marital naming practices, I was able to research this topic and p…
Do Lesbians Change Their Last Names in the Context of a Committed Relationship
This exploratory study begins to redress a critical gap in the literature on committed same-sex relationships and last name practices. Data were gathered from an Internet survey, which included 16 lesbian respondents currently in a same-sex relationship. Analyses explored individual, couple, and family of origin factors associated with changing or not changing one's name. Name-changing was cited as a strategy for securing external recognition and…
Gender Role Identity and Attitudes Toward Feminism
Heterosexist Inclusion and Exclusion during Ritual
Oswald (2000) reported the processes by which heterosexual family weddings may undermine gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender(GLBT) people's family membership. The present study sought to understand whether family membership during ritual was also conditional for heterosexual people. Toward that end, Oswald's methodology was replicated with heterosexual participants. Although faced with multiple pressures, at no time did these difficulties cha…
About as Solid as a Fish Net
Nonbiological lesbian mothers lack not only biological ties to their children, but have no legal ties even if those children are intentionally conceived through donor insemination in the context of a committed relationship. This article explores symbolic attempts to construct the nonbiological mother as a legitimate parent in the absence of such ties. Sixteen families whose children were conceived through donor insemination are analyzed in this s…
Gender Role and Feminism Revisited
Lesbian couples' management of public-private dialectical contradictions
This study explores the processes by which a group of lesbian women report managing public-private dialectical contradictions at the external border between their relationship as a couple and networks, social norms, and laws. Specifically, 18 dyads and 2 individuals, all of whom had been in a committed relationship for at least 1 year, were interviewed about the rituals that are part of their relationship. Transcripts of the interviews were analy…
Discursive Negotiation of Family Identity
Research suggests that social interactions may challenge the identity of families with adopted children from China. Yet, both the extent of challenge experienced, and how families negotiate these interactions remains unknown. Thus, this project investigates the degree to which questions or comments from others either support or challenge family identity, as well as the degree to which response strategies used by parents either support or challeng…
Negotiating Lesbian Family Identity via Symbols and Rituals
This study reports how lesbian families negotiate their family identities via symbols and rituals. Sixteen couple interviews were conducted with lesbian co-mothers (for a total of 32 participants) who had their children via donor insemination in the contexts of their current same-sex relationships. Interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Framed by symbolic interactionism, this study reports how these families negotiated affirmation and di…
Family Talk
How Much Did You Pay For Her?”
Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria chang…
Parental management of adoptive identities during challenging encounters
This interpretive study utilized Owen's ((1985) Thematic metaphors in relational communication: A conceptual framework, The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 1-13) metaphoric approach to identify and understand the cognitive structures undergirding transracial, international adoptive parents' sense-making and management of familial and personal identities during interactions that challenge familial and personal identities. Twelve focus…
Negotiating Identity and Pragmatism
The current study advances the extant literature on how internal boundary management processes (naming, discussing, narrating, ritualizing) impact identity by demonstrating how naming fosters identity in the context of international adoption. The study examined: (a) parental treatment of their children's birth country names in the naming process and (b) parental motives for various naming forms (i.e., placement of the child's birth culture name w…
Accounting for Lesbian-Headed Families
Although lesbian mothers are often called to justify their family’s legitimacy, we know little about these interactions. The current study included 44 female coparents across 10 focus groups discussing the interactive process of discursive legitimacy challenges. Using the theoretical framework of remedial accounts (Schönbach, 1990), inductive and deductive coding revealed several existing and new types of challenges, accounting strategies, and ev…
Discursive Constructions of the Meaning of “Family” in Online Narratives of Foster Adoptive Parents
Framed by relational dialectics theory, discursive constructions of the meaning of “family” were examined in 100 online foster adoption narratives. Parental narratives manifested struggles between biogenetic and discursive constructions of “family,” identified here as the discourse of biological normativity (DBN) and discourse of constitutive kinning (DCK). The DBN reinscribes the dominant cultural and foster care system preference for biogenetic…
The Dialogic Construction of “Adoption” in Online Foster Adoption Narratives
One hundred online narratives of foster adoption were analyzed qualitatively with the goal of identifying what, if any, competing discourses animated the meaning of “adoption” constructed by adoptive parents. Framed in relational dialectics theory, two discourses were identified: (1) the Discourse of Utilitarian Acquisition, in which adoption was constructed as a second-best pathway to parenting, after biological reproduction had failed, and (2) …
Motherhood as Contested Ideological Terrain
Framed by relational dialectics theory (Baxter), this investigation considered the meaning(s) of motherhood in female–female co-motherhood. Analysis identified two competing discourses: (1) discourse of essential motherhood (DEM) and (2) discourse of queer motherhood (DQM). Speakers' invocation of the DEM reinscribes the mainstream US cultural discourse that children can have only one authentic (i.e., biological) mother, whereas invocation of the…
A Tale of Two Mommies
This study examined co-mother family of origin stories. Origin stories, representing the formation of a family, are culturally understood within a master narrative of heterosexual love and biological childbearing. Beginnings of co-mother families rupture this dominant, gendered, boy-meets-girl script. Investigating whether or not co-mother stories reify the normative master narrative or if instead their narrations resist and/or possibly transform…
Introduction
Engaging Theories in Family Communication
Critical Theorizing in Family Communication Studies
Despite modest growth in interpretive research, the study of family communication remains predominantly situated within postpositivism to the relative neglect of critical approaches. We argue that this inattention derives partly from the limited number of critically inflected family communication theories. In this article, we seek to encourage critical family communication theorizing. We do so by explicating the critical underpinnings of the rece…
The promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods for advancing critical interpersonal and family communication research
This article argues that contrapuntal analysis and intersectional analysis are particularly germane for realizing the emergent critical turn in interpersonal and family communication studies. Contrapuntal analysis is apropos for examining the multiple discourses and intersectional analysis for examining the embodied vectors of difference at play in contemporary interpersonal and familial communicative life. I organize my discussion of the promise…
The Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network
Lockdowns and “stay-at-home” orders, starting in March 2020, shuttered bench and field dependent research across the world as a consequence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continues to have an impact on research progress and career development, especially for graduate students and early career researchers, as strict social distance limitations stifle ongoing research and impede in-person educational programs. The goal of the Bioinfo…
Catalysts and motivations for change in privacy coordination
Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM) was applied in a qualitative analysis of survey responses from parents in transracial, internationally adoptive families concerning their management of private, adoption-related information. Participants were 166 parents of at least one child adopted from China or Vietnam who responded to an open-ended online questionnaire. Most parents described at least one change in coordination of their child’s pr…
Parents’ Management of Privacy Turbulence Surrounding Private, Adoption-Related Information in Transracial, Internationally Adoptive Families
Parents (N = 166) in transracial, international adoptive (TIA) families with children from China or Vietnam were surveyed to investigate their experiences with privacy turbulence surrounding the family’s private, adoption-related information. About half described at least one instance of privacy turbulence, with a total of 98 instances. The instances included examples of all six types of privacy turbulence described in Communication Privacy Manag…
Sociology (24 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Gender Studies (12 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Gender Studies (11 obras) · Developmental psychology (10 obras) · Child Welfare and Adoption (9 obras)