A Respectable Scandal: Gay Parenthood, Emotional Dynamics, and Social Change

Abstract

Most of the scholarship and current literature on parental care focuses on its gendered costs and unbalances. Less attention is paid to the consequences of being excluded from this specific type of care—what we could call the right to parent. Gay and lesbian parents claiming their right to parent represents a momentous historical change: the increasing visibility of these parents is one of the most important components of such change. Emotional dynamics are key to this social change. Emotions constitute the link between doing parenting at the micro level of interactions and doing, or undoing, difference at the macro level of social structures; similarly, different ways to do parenting and to do gender must be taken into account if we want to grasp a truly comprehensive picture of the phenomenon of parenthood. This article draws on a wider study on different kinds of care and caregivers, whose aim is to offer a more inclusive interpretation and a more reliable discourse on family care and parenthood. Parenthood is still societally significant, but different ways to attain parenthood (biologically, through adoption, surrogacy, etc.) or to be a parent (single or in a couple, gay or heterosexual, married or unmarried, etc.) seem to mark a more important difference. While such difference can translate into inequality, this is now being challenged by these increasingly more visible parents. My findings show that the divide between the categories of “parents” and “nonparents” dissolves the divide between the categories of “gay/lesbian” and “non-gay/lesbian.” Gay and lesbian parents produce social change by taking the sexuality out of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) politics in the mainstream arena. Same-sex parenthood may still be perceived by many as a “scandal,” but more and more as a respectable one.