Lesbian Family Life, Like the Fingers of a Hand

Under-Discussed and Controversial Topics

Valory Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317992189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, an array of approaches - first person and theoretical accounts, clinical understandings, qualitative and quantitative research - are brought to bear on controversial or under-discussed topics in lesbian family life.

From conception all the way to care for elderly parents, this book takes a fresh look at lesbian family relationships. Topics include: butch/femme couples, infidelity, the psychological meaning of family for lesbians, age-discrepant couples, lesbian nuns as family, Listservs as family, intentional family for aging women, women raising sons, mothers who come out late in life, mothers and children in situations of domestic violence, lack of support for lesbian domestic violence survivors, death of a partner, psychological issues in the use of sperm donors or surrogates, and middle-aged lesbians caring for homophobic elderly parents. Some authors use self psychology and Jungian psychology to describe aspects of family life. The richness and diversity of topics makes it a text on "lesbian lives".

Therapists and academics from throughout the U.S. have contributed to this collection. Many lesbian women, as well as teachers (it can be a text) and mental health professionals who work with children, families, couples and elderly will find useful material here.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

FOREWORD

Lesbian Family Life, Like the Fingers of a Hand: Under-Discussed and Controversial Topics

Valory Mitchell

Lesbian identity does not follow the well-worn ruts in the conventional road that lead from sex to gender to gender-role to gender-of-partner. In the same way, our families cannot be neatly mapped according to a conventional family tree, where connections are established by law (as in marriage) or by genetic connections. Invisible through those lenses, our families have thrived nonetheless. And they are very visible now; same-sex marriage, the “lesbian baby boom,” and lesbian/gay “families of choice” are front-page news for some, old news for others, and have become “just how it has always been” for the generation of young lesbian women in their 20s. There was a time, not so long ago, when no one spoke aloud that another woman was a lesbian. “She’s family,” they’d say. It was closetcode, intended to keep us safely invisible to the straight community, yet identifiable to others like ourselves. An interesting choice for a code word. Why “family”? Perhaps it not only designated something we shared, but also hinted at a loyalty, an understanding, an inner circle.

Much has changed in a short time. Just over a decade ago, Laird and Green (1996) edited Lesbians and Gays in Couples and Families; they documented the important news that lesbians had families! The papers in that volume showed that many of us were closely connected to parents and siblings, had enduring marriage-like couple relationships, children (even grown children), extended family, in-laws, grandchildren—and, as well, the special families that we made—our families of choice. Today, the existence and richness of lesbian family life is no longer controversial; we, and the scholars who write about our lives, have established our presence.

One thing, however, has not changed: because most laws and institutions continue to penalize, exclude or ignore lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, we have the challenge and the opportunities that come from living outside them. We can, and must, decide for ourselves what we mean when we say “family” (Green and Mitchell, 2002).

Of course, just as we are a diverse lot, so our families will reflect our many cultures and contexts. There can no more be “THE lesbian family” than there could be one person who represents “THE lesbian.” Still, the relationships that make up our families are like the fingers on a hand. Each hand is unique; each finger has a separate name and does a particular set of things; yet they are naturally connected, need each other, and often work together to do things that none could do alone.

WHAT IS CONTROVERSIAL IN LESBIAN FAMILY LIFE?

When I announced the call for papers on under-discussed and controversial topics in lesbian family life, it occurred to me that the submissions could be imagined as data in a social psychology experiment. Taken together, this rich collection—of first-person accounts, theoretical and clinical papers, qualitative and quantitative research—becomes the “evidence” that helps us articulate and define our ideas about lesbian family. Let us consider what is controversial (and why), what we do not (or rarely) talk about (and why), what we have stopped talking about because we take it for granted.

Feminist research methods (Stewart and Gold-Steinberg, 1990) and hermeneutic deconstruction techniques (Cushman, 2000) have taught us to look at silences, at those who rarely have a voice. By considering what is “marginal” as well as what is “in the text” about our families, we can see what has become an accepted part of lesbian family life, and glimpse those issues and themes that challenge us or make us uneasy. And we can confront the tasks ahead. All in the family? Or are some left out? Many lesbians feel marginal in our “community,” and have responded by creating special families for themselves. Several articles in this book contend that, as a group, we prefer to look away and not talk about our patterns of exclusion. Like the larger culture in which we are embedded, the lesbian community (including the lesbian academic and scholarly community) has played its part in maintaining class, color, creed, disability, and age barriers. Working-class lesbians and lesbians of color (Fisher, 2007), older lesbians (Ariel, this book), and religious lesbians (Hunyady, this book) feel marginalized, rendered exotic or even unwelcome. As voices from these silenced sisters emerge, they describe examples of extraordinary relational creativity.

Age differences and aging. Age differences and aging recur among our under-discussed topics, perhaps because we live in such an ageist culture. Voices of middle-aged (Cayleff, this book) or older lesbians (Cruikshank, 2002), of young women in age-different couples (Bruns, this book) or adult daughters of lesbians (Davies, this book) are rarely heard. As women expand beyond the procreative and paid-work focus that tends to dominate the first half of our adult lives (Helson, Mitchell and Moane, 1984), they become available for profound relational endeavors; as we lift our ageist (and perhaps patriarchal?) blinders, there is much about family building to see here.

Masculinity/femininity in lesbian couples and parents. Lesbians’ relationships to gender roles are among the under-discussed topics in lesbian family life. Perhaps homophobia has made us experience lesbian masculinity and lesbian femininity as too dangerous to address. Yet the emergence, in our communities, of people who choose a permanent transgender identity, one that is not on-the-way to one side of the gender binary, demands that we consider anew our confusion of sex with gender. Lev (this book) has suggested that part of our silence about lesbian masculinity and femininity is in response to a mis-reading of the androgynous ideals of second wave feminism. And, in something of a paradox, at the same time that our community embraces gender fluidity, although it has been established that our sons grow up psychologically healthy and comfortable in their lives (Drexler, 2006), the relevance of masculinity for sons has been a conscious concern for many lesbian parents and others (Weston, this book). Here, again, we are not so different from the larger community in our discomfort and inconsistency.

Families in danger: Betrayal and loss. When family is not defined by procreative relationships, we define it by what it brings us—trust, solidarity, continuity. We prefer not to think about relationships where the connection is ruptured—families that are “in trouble” or have lost their sense of safety—particularly when the dangers emerge from ourselves or our partners. Several under-discussed topics concern families in danger—from intimate partner violence (Turrell & Herrmann, this book), from the emotional and psychological violence that is the aftermath of infidelity (Burch, this book), or through the death of a partner (Broderick, Birbilis, and Steger, this book).

These painful experiences are rendered more harsh and isolating by the failure of our community to acknowledge them, or to provide support (Hardesty, Oswald, Khaw, Fonseca, and Chung, this book). Again, we resemble the larger culture in wanting to look away, in being unwilling to integrate death with life, in wanting to pretend that families don’t hurt each other. These illusions join with other illusions that are uniquely our own—of a lesbian utopia where we won’t get hurt, of women as incapable of aggression—to make us unwilling (as a community) to hear these voices.

Children: Blending “blood” and “choice.” In 1991, when the anthropologist Kath Weston published her book Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians, Kinship, she considered the juxtaposition of “blood” and “chosen” family. Was one modeled after the other? Was one a replacement or substitute for the other? Her research led to a clear “No!” on both counts. And the articles in this collection confirm those conclusions.

Because, in lesbian couples, only one partner has genetic ties with the children (unless a member of the other partner’s family is a sperm donor), our families of procreation epitomize the blending of “blood” and “choice.” Lesbians (and gay men) choose children (no “accidents” here!), and we have chosen them in great numbers. A recent survey of lesbian and gay youth (Savin-Williams, cited in Rothblum, 2007), found that the majority expect to marry their (gay/lesbian) partner and raise children. To do so, we are unique in that all of us require the help of others, birth parents of adopted children or donors and surrogates. Which of these people is and is not family? As our fears of custody loss fade with years of established precedent, we may now become able to look more deeply at this question, in ways that make many of us uneasy (Ehrensaft, this book).

THE BAD NEWS … AND THE GOOD NEWS

The bad news is that we bear a striking resemblance to the heterosexual community (and to the heterosexual academic community) in what makes us uneasy, what we avoid talking about, what we consider controversial. Like the straight community, we avoid facing our patterns of exclusion—our class, creed, color, age, even our gender biases. Like them, we would prefer to think that violence, infidelity, death do not visit our doors—even if that means turning away from sisters in pain. While we acknowledge donors’ and surrogates’ contribution, like the straight community we are reluctant to think deeply about the meaning—for us and our children—of the role they have played in helping us build family.

Some of this similarity results from all of us being citizens not only of LGBT communities, but of the larger culture—with its biases and blindness—as well. Some is a legacy of the danger felt by LGBT people. Many still believe that it is essential, for survival and acceptance, to hide our problems, lest they be seized on by homophobic hate mongers and used against us, individually or as a group. To explain our vulnerability to these prejudices and illusions is not, however, to condone it. For the sake of us all, we must listen.

The good news is that we have come so far, as a community. We (and the straight community) are now able take for granted many of our strengths; they are well known, well documented, not news. Here are some aspects of lesbian family life that are no longer among the controversial: (1) We make families, independent of legal and blood ties, that are satisfying and enduring; (2) we are parenting couples whose children and community accept, enjoy and legitimate the two-mom family; (3) children raised in our families do as well (or sometimes better) than children of heterosexual parents; (4) lesbian couples, compared to other couple types, experience high satisfaction, high closeness, and high autonomy; (5) lesbian families emphasize equality, and live it out in the distribution of tasks and responsibilities; (6) lesbians blend members of their families of origin, families of procreation, and families of choice to create a fabric of family life across generations and of lifespan duration.

As we celebrate that the existence of our viable and satisfying families is no longer a surprise, a carefully guarded secret, we can recognize that, in a backhanded way, it is an accomplishment that we are now free to grapple with the same sorts of problems as those in the dominant culture.

KINSHIP

In Weston’s anthropological study, she described the creation of families of choice as a “foray into uncharted territory” (1991: 110). At that time, everything about lesbian family life was under-discussed and controversial. And yet the 200 participants in her study listed many characteristics—none of them definitive, yet all descriptive—of their “family” relationships: trust, regular contact over time, mutual assistance, who comes early to decorate for the birthday party, shared history, ability to work through conflict and differences, persistence, continuity, solidarity. We know what we want from family, even while each family relationship truly is a choice, a “customized individual creation” (Weston, 1991: 136). The academic lesbian community has worked hard and long to establish the existence, viability, and validity of our family lives. Perhaps that allows us, now, to take perspective on our families—what they mean to us and why, who is “chosen” in a “family of choice” and why (Mitchell, this book)—and to take up the work of making more conscious choices about inclusion, lifting our blinders and exchanging our illusions for a robust and rewarding reality.

The cover artist, Barbara Collier, has done pen-and-ink interpretations of several hundred hands, including the hand of her daughter, pictured here. Perhaps we know the boundaries and experience of kinship like we know the boundaries and experience of our hands. Like a hand, family is a natural part of each of us—it belongs to us, stays with us, is not separate from who we are. Often, although not always, we can guide its actions—and today we are called on to reach out. It changes, too, with time and experience, and yet is always here, across our lifetimes.

REFERENCES

Cruikshank, M. Learning to be Old: Gender, Culture and Aging. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002.

Cushman, P. Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Drexler, P. Raising Boys Without Men. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Fisher, A. The Identity Formation Process of African-American Working Class Lesbians: A Study of Triple Jeopardy. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant University, San Francisco, CA, 2007.

Green, R.-J. and V. Mitchell. “Gay and Lesbian Couples in Therapy: Homophobia, Relational Ambiguity, and Social Support.” In A. S. Gurman and N. S. Jacobson, eds. Clinical Handbook of Couple Therapy, 3rd Edition. New York: The Guilford Press, 2002: 548–588.

Helson, R., V. Mitchell, and G. Moane. “Personality and Patterns of Adherence and Non-Adherence to the Social Clock,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46 (5), 1984:1079–96.

Laird, J. and R.-J. Green, eds. Lesbians and Gays in Couples and Families: A Handbook for Therapists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Rothblum, E. Comparison of Same-Sex Marriages and Domestic Partnerships. Presented at the Rockway Institute colloquium, California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, March 2007.

Stewart, A. and S. Gold-Steinberg. “Midlife Women’s Political Consciousness: Case Studies of Psychosocial Development and Political Commitment.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 14, 1990: 543–66.

Weston, K. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

More than Surface Tension: Femmes in Families

Arlene Istar Lev

SUMMARY. This article raises questions about the lack of scholarly focus on butch/femme couples and their absence in studies of lesbian couples and family-building. In an era of lesbian marriage and lesbian parenting, femme and butch coupling and family-building remain unspoken topics within family studies, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT)-specific research. Moving beyond a focus on eroticism within the femme/butch couple, questions about how gender expression impacts other relationships dynamics, including the maintenance of long-term relationships, power and intimacy, domestic chores and child-rearing, are raised. The femme role in “homemaking,” that is, building and maintaining families, especially needs further exploration.

If memory serves, it was 1980 or 1981. I was a young dyke living in the San Francisco Bay Area coming out in the glorious era of lesbian-feminism. I went out with friends to see a new slide show that had recently been put together by The San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project called She Even Chewed Tobacco: A Pictorial Narrative of Passing Women. Our movement was younger then and images of ourselves were hard to find. It was a fun and raucous event and the mostly lesbian audience hooted in joy at the butch dykes dressed in suits and ties and smoking cigars—not that many of us young dykes wore suits and ties or smoked cigars, but we could certainly appreciate that women “like us” had.

I found myself staring at the old photos, mesmerized by these handsome butches, but I was also aware—acutely aware—of the women standing next to them. One photo stands out in my memory all these years later, of a group of couples, butches in tuxes and their femme partners dressed to the nines for a night of dancing. The femmes looked like any other image of women from the 1940s, women who looked strangely like my mother did in pictures from the same era—in her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• 1 FOREWORD Lesbian Family Life, Like the Fingers of a Hand: Under-Discussed and Controversial Topics
• 2 More than Surface Tension: Femmes in Families
• 3 Infidelity: Outlaws and In-Laws and Lesbian Relationships
• 4 Just Molly and Me, and Donor Makes Three: Lesbian Motherhood in the Age of Assisted Reproductive Technology
• 5 The Masculine Principle in Lesbian Families: A Jungian Understanding
• 6 Lesbian Mothering in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence
• 7 “Family” Support for Family Violence: Exploring Community Support Systems for Lesbian and Bisexual Women Who Have Experienced Abuse
• 8 Lesbians Grieving the Death of a Partner: Recommendations for Practice
• 9 Feeding the Hand that Bit You: Lesbian Daughters at Mid-Life Negotiating Parental Caretaking
• 10 Adult Daughters whose Mothers Come Out Later in Life: What is the Psychosocial Impact?
• 11 May–December Lesbian Relationships: Power Storms or Blue Skies?
• 12 Women Aging Together in Community
• 13 We Are Family: I Got All My Sisters with Me!
• 14 Choosing Family: Meaning and Membership in the Lesbian Family of Choice
• Index