Lesbian Mothering and Risky Choices: ‘Dangerous’ New Forms of Love and Kinship

Abstract

During the last four decades new forms of family have been emerging in Western liberal democracies that have presented challenges to thinking about what family is. In this chapter, drawing on Douglas’s ideas about purity and danger, there will be an exploration of how families headed by lesbians have been constructed both in public discourses and legislation as presenting risks to social order. The responses to these perceived risks have led to, variously, recognition, exclusion and regulation. In their work on non-heterosexual families of choice, Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2001) argued that lesbian and gay parenting provides a litmus test of how far a society has come in tolerating non-heterosexual identities and intimate lives. In this chapter it is argued that lesbian-headed families have been constructed as representing an antithetical family to that most desired and idealized in society: the heterosexual nuclear family. This ideal is based on a heterosexual couple enacting gendered roles in which motherhood is constructed as the most important role for women. Thus it will be shown that different constructions of lesbians have been used and continue to be used, to reinforce the risks they pose to the social order of intimate life as well as, by extension, to society as a whole.