In the late 1970s, queer parents increasingly fought to maintain custody of their children from different-sex relationships. These mothers and fathers were responding in part to the gay liberation movement, which inspired them to come out and demand their rights. Also important was that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, which eliminated what had been an all-but-impenetrable barrier to custody. Courts were nevertheless reluctant to grant these petitions, fearing that the children would learn to be gay or lesbian from the adults in their lives. In response to these court cases, social scientists developed research studies that concluded parental homosexuality had no effect on the future sexual orientation of children. Based on that work, family courts around the country granted custody to lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating the first wave of visible queer-headed families.

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’, beginning with the fraught way that queer has sometimes been understood as a move away from feminism’s perceived limitations. It maps debates about the relationship between feminism and queer and their respective objects of study across work by scholars including Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Annamarie Jagose, Robyn Wiegman, and Clare Hemmings. With a specific focus on the temporal relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘queer’, the chapter performs a relationship to ‘queer feminism’ that might go beyond the idea that queer emerges ‘after’ feminism. Instead, it opens up a number of different temporal relationships that might be bound to the idea of ‘queer feminism’including repetition, institutional time, belatedness, and the idea of being on, or in, time. It thus insists on ‘queer feminism’ as not only a methodology but also an object that might be tracked, a means of returning to the question of what kinds of objects gender and sexuality are, an invitation to consider disciplinary or institutional time, and a mode of theorising time’s affective structures.