Lesbian, Gay and Queer Parenting

It was a pleasure to review this book. Social work is sometimes accused of being anti-intellectual and atheoretical; Stephen Hick's work acts as a refutation of such accusations. Social work academics have in recent years been encouraged by publishers, often for commercial purposes, to shoehorn their work into structures that conform to social work education regulatory requirements. What a delight to read a book that was free from such temporal, bureaucratic constraints. It was imaginatively structured and beautifully written. This text is not a quick and easy ‘how to do it/think it’ contribution; rather, it is a theoretically dense and thought-provoking conceptual work. Drawing on fifteen conversations with lesbian and gay parents conducted between 1992 and 2010, he interrogates notions of genealogy, kinship, family, the everyday, gender, race, the state's relationship to lesbian and gay parenting and vice versa, and intimacy. He draws on the work of Foucault, along with ideas from ethnomethodology, institutional ethnography, discourse, queer and feminist theories to help him with this enterprise. One of the many strengths of this thought-provoking book is the author's ability to embrace complexity and contradictions. The depth of analysis of each piece of conversation drawn on for the purposes of exemplification is eye-wateringly brilliant.

Conversation · Epistemology · Ethnography · Ethnomethodology · Exemplification · Human sexuality · Kinship · Lesbian · Pleasure · Queer · Queer theory · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Psychology · Reproductive Health and Technologies

• Family life in urban public spaces

  Open Access•Vanessa May•Families Relationships and…•2023

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