Preface and Acknowledgments

Summary

WHEN I FIRST BEGAN TO CONCEIVE OF this project in early 2009, gay couples and their families in the United States had just been dealt a crushing defeat by the passage of California's Proposition 8, which revoked the right of gay couples to marry in that state. As I write these words in fall 2015 the Supreme Court has ruled—after elections in 2012 supported the right of gays and lesbians to marry in four states and numerous decisions upholding it in lower courts—that marriage equality is the law of the land. That this tremendous change has taken place over the course of just over six years is a testament to the ways in which notions of what constitutes a family and how these families are recognized are continually changing. The terms “values” and “traditions” or “traditional” have, at least in American public discourse, been co-opted by the political right to the extent that they are almost always implicitly coupled with “conservative.” One of the goals of this project is to expose the ways in which such conservative notions of “traditions” and “values” (as they pertain in particular to individual identity, to the family, and to gender) are themselves both historically contingent and almost always more open and unstable than they appear when viewed retroactively through politically charged lenses. I aim to call attention to the artificiality or contingency of what has previously been taken for granted (whether celebrated or criticized) as “normal” and normative. If this project is in any sense a defense of the family, it is of the idea that family is a flexible institution rather than an exclusive one, grounded on emotional attachment and open to being reinvested with meaning over and over as our shared commitments and values evolve.

As with any scholarly endeavor, this book would not exist without the support and contribution of numerous colleagues, friends, and family members. Its bibliography speaks to the influence of a community of scholars whose work has shaped my own, but some more personal thanks are also in order. In the very early stages, my advisers Brigid Doherty, Joseph Vogl, and especially Christiane Frey pushed me to develop my interests into arguments and my instincts into evidence.