Querying Lesbian Fatherhood

This article is an auto-ethnographic exploration of the subject position “lesbian dad.” Lesbian fatherhood is understood as a category in which lesbian gender inflects parenthood in the context of a lesbian-parent family, i.e., as a category that emerges at the intersection of the discourse of kinship and queer cultural discourse. The article examines the theoretical underpinnings and conditions of possibility of lesbian fatherhood and discusses this position as an interesting vantage point for observing the interrelations of gender, sexuality, and kinship, as well as the social construction and performative character of parenthood in general. It looks at the difficulties of claiming such an identity in light of the expectation of coherence between social gender, reproductive role, parental status, and parental role, and analyzes the reduced efficacy of alternative kinship terms as owing to fact that parental terms signify across a broad range of contexts – from the most intimate to the institutional. Nevertheless, it proposes that the nuclear family can function as a semiautonomous gender culture, in which collaborative familial performance informed by queer cultural codes sustains the meaningfulness and reality of lesbian fatherhood. The article also looks at the contestations of lesbian fatherhood suggesting that the prevailing discourse on same-sex families depends on a suppression of queer difference.

1. 1.

   My use of the term “lesbian gender” follows Rubin (1992) who employs it in reference to the category “butch. ” The idea that sexual subcultures recognize and support different genders is elaborated by Hale (1997).

2. 2.

   Estimates made by the New Family Organization in 2008 mention over 2000 lesbian households with children and several hundred gay male households with children (Roer Strier and Haberman Friedman 2007). These numbers must have risen considerably in the interim, since in the last decade over 1000 gay male couples have formed families through recourse to international surrogacy (Glazer 2019).

3. 3.

   For a brief survey of these legal achievements, see Gross 2014.

4. 4.

   While these roles have been evolving, and the divide between them has become more blurred, their general characteristics still hold true for most heterosexual families, especially the mother’s role as the principal care giver and the father’s auxiliary capacity.

5. 5.

   Cf. Corinne Hayden’s discussion of lesbian co-parents enacting “procreative agency,” which places them in the realm of (male) authorship (Hayden 1995), and Petra Nordqvist’s discussion of the co-parents as “originators” (Nordqvist 2012).

6. 6.

   My performance of fatherhood draws on some elements of mainstream codes of fatherhood, e.g., rough-and-tumble play, but flouts others (I take little interest in football). It also complies with certain aspects of the traditional gendered parental division of work but not with others (e.g., while it is my partner who takes primary responsibility for cooking, she is also usually the one who drives when we drive together). In addition, certain traits and behaviors that are not strongly gender-marked (e.g., building Lego models, giving technical support, or being calmer and less demonstrative) acquire in our family the significance of being father-like simply by forming part of the pattern of differences between my partner and myself that get interpreted as mother-like or father-like, respectively.

7. 7.

   The attribution of fatherhood to the mother’s husband dates back to Roman law and is reflected by the proverb “Mater semper certa; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.”

8. 8.

   Co-parent adoption is available in Israel since 2005 as a result of a lesbian couple’s successful appeal to the Supreme Court. Since 2015 a new and improved legal provision – a judicial parenting order that parents can appeal for shortly after the birth of the child – has largely replaced the lengthier, bureaucratically complicated, and intrusive procedure of co-parent adoption, which involved scrutiny by the social services as in cases of regular adoption. However, in the past couple of years, the ministry of welfare has begun to raise obstacles, attempting to force some families back into the track of co-parent adoption.

9. 9.

   The fact that parental roles are defined in consideration of the slots already occupied the family matrix is borne out also by Brown and Perlesz’s example of a lesbian adoptive parent who does not name herself the mother of her partner’s biological daughter despite the fact that she is taking an equal part in raising her, since the child was conceived in the context of previous relationship and has another mother (Brown and Perlesz 2007).

10. 10.

    My late friend and colleague, Yael Levi-Hazan, has attempted as a masculine-identified woman who gave birth to her first child, to formulate and clear a theoretical space for a non-gendered parental identity that would be available also to gestational parents (Levi-Hazan 2019).

11. 11.

    For example, in Israel in 2016, the ministry of interior changed the sex registration of a transman who gave birth back to female and insisted on listing him under the rubric ‘mother’ in the child’s birth certificate (https://news.walla.co.il/item/3054423). Similarly, in the United Kingdom, a senior family judge has recently ruled against a transman who contested his registration as ‘mother’ in the birth certificate of the child to which he has given birth. The judge determined that the status of being a mother arises from a person’s role in conception, pregnancy, and giving birth regardless of the person’s legally recognized gender, thus providing a definition of motherhood that grounds it solely in the female role in conception while attempting to sever it from social and legal gender. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/TT-and-YY-APPROVED-Substantive-Judgment-McF-23.9.19.pdf

12. 12.

    Darren Rosenblum makes a case for a performative understanding of motherhood that would make space for male motherhood (Rosenblum 2012).

13. 13.

    Contemporary research on fathers has shifted the emphasis from fatherhood as a status that confers rights and obligations to the notion of “fathering” that stresses practices over status, thus offering an active or performative understanding of fatherhood (Morgan 2002). However, in today’s reality competing discourses and models of fatherhood coexist, and while social theory and more progressive cultural discourses tend to emphasize the practical and performative aspect of parenthood, what I’m trying to get at here is both the given and unquestionable character of male biological fatherhood in popular discourse and the vital role that social recognition plays in the construction of parental identity.

14. 14.

    The claim that for nonbiological lesbian parents, parenthood is an acquired status resonates with the notions of doing family (Morgan 1996) and displaying family (Finch 2007) but does not reduce to them. Certainly, the process I describe of gaining recognition as a parent through performing parenting work answers to Finch’s concept of display as “the process by which individuals, and groups of individuals, convey to each other and to relevant others that certain of their actions do constitute ‘doing family things’ and thereby confirm that these relationships are ‘family’ relationships” (Finch 2007, p. 73). However, in performing parenting work and displaying it to gain recognition of the relationship as a parental one, it is not only others’ recognition that is at stake but also one’s identity as parent, which depends on this recognition. While Finch notes that the need for display is greater as relationships move further away from those readily recognizable as family relationships, she does not address the role that recognition plays in consolidating and sustaining kin status.

15. 15.

    As has been demonstrated in child custody disputes between alienated same-sex partners in the United States, the work of parenting is a weaker foundation for claiming parenthood than biological ties or a socially sanctioned relation to the child and is subject to trivializing reinterpretations. As Jessica Feinberg notes, “in the heat of a legal proceeding, many parents will use their genetic connection to the child to support their arguments for superior parental rights.” And whereas in the past the non-genetic parent had no way of becoming a legally recognized parent in the first place, Feinberg suspects that even today, after legal advancements have made it possible in the majority of states for both members of a same-sex couple to be legally recognized as the parents of a child conceived through ART, there is high likelihood that judges will take genetic connections into consideration when making custody decisions (Feinberg 2016, p. 338). Obviously, nonbiological heterosexual parents too could be vulnerable in certain contexts to nonrecognition despite social parenting; but while this is an issue that concerns only a minority of heterosexual families, it concerns all same-sex families as such, as children in them are by definition genetically related only to one of the parents (at least under current technological and legal conditions).

16. 16.

    The family health center handles vaccinations and growth evaluations for babies and preschool children.

17. 17.

    My discussion of the importance of recognition in constructing parental identity and consolidating kin status concerns social recognition rather than legal recognition. However, the two are intricately related, as legal recognition often reflects or follows upon social recognition, at the same time that it promotes it (e.g., the legal recognition of my parental status after I adopted my son worked to facilitate social recognition in situations where previously the discrepancy between the lived reality of our family and our legal documents would have thwarted it).

18. 18.

    This is the obverse case from the phenomenon noted by Gabb (2005) of children using their “other mother’s” forename as a parental category.

19. 19.

    For many LGBT people, the closet was and still is an essential safety measure in the face of anticipated violence and discrimination. This is obviously not the case in the social reality I am fortunate to inhabit, where the harm I may sustain by coming out as a dad is merely lack of cultural intelligibility and identity contestation.

20. 20.

    As noted, the juxtaposition of the notions “lesbian” and “father” in the collocation “lesbian dad” effects a resignification and queering of fatherhood; however, it also lends a particularly queer inflection to the signifier “lesbian,” which in recent years is often employed in contradistinction to “queer” – as connoting gender intransitivity, and possibly also lesbian-feminist politics, as opposed to a queer one. Obviously, this is not the way I employ “lesbian” here, but rather as a term whose range of signification partly overlaps that of “queer.”

Authors and Affiliations

1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

   Amalia Ziv

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amalia Ziv .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

   Helena Wahlström Henriksson

2. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

   Klara Goedecke

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