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Lovers, Legal Strangers, and Parents: Negotiating Parental and Sexual Identity in Family Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Kimberly Richman
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Abstract

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This is a study of meaning making and identity construction in child custody cases involving gay or lesbian parents. In it, I investigate the language of all such recorded decisions over the past 50 years, focusing on how judges—in interaction with the litigants before them—construct, negotiate, deny, and confirm the sexual and familial identities of the parents and would-be parents involved in these custody contests. Employing a constitutive framework and drawing on the social, scientific, and feminist literatures on sexuality, family, and law, I find that through multiple discursive processes, from self-representation to imposition to negotiation of new spaces of compromise, family law actors bring together sexual and familial statuses often treated as exclusive of each other.

Type
Papers of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 36 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Nonbiological Parenting , 2002 , pp. 285 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant # SES-0004287. The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for their suggestions, comments, and ideas: Valerie Jenness, Ryken Grattet, Martha Umphrey, Jonathan Golderg-Hiller, Austin Sarat, Kitty Calavita, Susan Sterett, and Richard Leo.

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