My dissertation broadly examines the impact of legal inequality on planned lesbian families, and particularly on co-parents. Data come from in-depth interviews with 27 women in planned lesbian families who conceived a child (themselves or with a partner) via artificial insemination. I explore how co-parents’ legal inequality affects their ability to create equitable families and also how co-parents negotiate a parental identity in a hostile legal and social climate with no institutional scripts to draw on.
The first part of my dissertation sheds light on the importance of the availability of legal second-parent adoption for achieving equality in lesbian relationships and illustrates how crucial power is in relationships, even when partners are same-sexed. Previous research found that the majority of lesbian couples tend to value and accomplish parity in their relationships, providing grounds for optimism about the diminution of power as a component of intimate relations in such families. However, due to sample accessibility, previous research has been limited to states where both women had parental equality under the law. In contrast, the present study finds that the quality of the couple relationship is profoundly affected by legal strictures. I apply Lipman-Blumen’s (1984) concepts of marcomanipulation and micromanipulation to understand how legal inequality creates conditions that lend themselves to a power dynamic in lesbian families that mimics traditional heterosexual marriage.
The second part of my dissertation explores the process by which co-parents construct parental identities when there are no institutional scripts to draw on. Previous research assumed that co-parents seek a mother identity, but this study illustrates that not all co-parents desire that status. Rather, they actively carved out a parental identity that reconciled their sex, gender identity, and role in the family. Co-parents’ identity construction was made difficult due to threats from legal and social discrimination, along with incongruence between their gender identities and motherhood norms. As a result of these struggles, co-parents in this study identified in one of three ways: 1) As “mathers,” 2) as fathers, or 3) as other mothers. Insofar as co-parents successfully unhinge the relationship between woman and mother, they provide a provocative challenge to gendered family arrangements.
