Response to Igartua

This response to Karine Igartua's paper begins by noting the important role that the personal narrative has acquired in mental health scholarship, especially of marginalized groups. The author uses the content of Dr. Igartua's narrative as a stimulus to explore the anxiety that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people frequently experience in association with parenting. He argues that a significant root of the devaluing of GLBT parenting is the unfounded cultural idealization of hypernatural conception, defined as the parent/child's blood relation authorized by the state through marriage. The GLBT community has defended against this devaluation principally by trying to shift the definitions of the signifiers mother and father so that pairing them, that is, claiming that a family can have two mothers or two fathers, does not constitute a contradiction in terms. The author argues that this strategy is unlikely to succeed because it fails to defeat the connotative contradiction inherent in “two-mom” and “two-dad” families, is no match for the superior cultural support that the “natural” family receives, and because as a hetero-imitative practice it may encourage the very dogmas that harm us. He suggests that a better strategy might be for the GLBT community to tolerate the anxiety of anomie, that is, endure our exclusion from the current gender-based and naturalist system of naming and legitimating parent/child configurations, while we embrace the opportunity to consider new cultural forms

Contradiction · Devaluation · Epistemology · Lesbian · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transgender · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Psychology · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Social Psychology

• (How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter

  Judith Stacey, Timothy J Biblarz•American Sociological Review•2001

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