Elizabeth A. Suter

Lesbian couples' management of public-private dialectical contradictions

This study explores the processes by which a group of lesbian women report managing public-private dialectical contradictions at the external border between their relationship as a couple and networks, social norms, and laws. Specifically, 18 dyads and 2 individuals, all of whom had been in a committed relationship for at least 1 year, were interviewed about the rituals that are part of their relationship. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Participants reported using the dialectic response strategies of integration and segmentation to manage the inclusion-seclusion and revelation-concealment dimensions of the public-private contraction.

Negotiating Lesbian Family Identity via Symbols and Rituals

This study reports how lesbian families negotiate their family identities via symbols and rituals. Sixteen couple interviews were conducted with lesbian co-mothers (for a total of 32 participants) who had their children via donor insemination in the contexts of their current same-sex relationships. Interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Framed by symbolic interactionism, this study reports how these families negotiated affirmation and disconfirmation of their identities when interacting with families of origin, social networks, sperm donors, and community institutions.

Discursive Negotiation of Family Identity: A Study of U.S. Families with Adopted Children from China

Research suggests that social interactions may challenge the identity of families with adopted children from China. Yet, both the extent of challenge experienced, and how families negotiate these interactions remains unknown. Thus, this project investigates the degree to which questions or comments from others either support or challenge family identity, as well as the degree to which response strategies used by parents either support or challenge family identity. A volunteer national sample of 245 parents with adopted children from China completed a survey with both closed- and open-ended questions. This study found that the majority of comments and questions were experienced as challenging. Simultaneously, language functioned as a resource for parents to respond in ways that validated the family as a construct and the relations between members as familial.

About as Solid as a Fish Net: Symbolic Construction of a Legitimate Parental Identity for Nonbiological Lesbian Mothers

Nonbiological lesbian mothers lack not only biological ties to their children, but have no legal ties even if those children are intentionally conceived through donor insemination in the context of a committed relationship. This article explores symbolic attempts to construct the nonbiological mother as a legitimate parent in the absence of such ties. Sixteen families whose children were conceived through donor insemination are analyzed in this study using constructivist grounded theory. Findings suggest that address terms for the nonbiological mother, childrens last names, and legal moves are primary symbolic ways lesbian families attempt to construct a legitimate parental identity for the nonbiological mother. These strategies suggest the potential for increased social recognition of nonbiological mothers.

“How much did you pay for her?”: Decision-making criteria underlying adoptive parents' responses to inappropriate remarks.

Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria change across time. Framed by the concept of discourse dependency, we report on the results from a written survey completed by a volunteer national sample of 245 parents with children adopted from China. Parents were from 38 states, tended to be female (84.1%), White (95.0%), ranging in age from 31 to 65 years. We found that parental decisions about how (and whether) to respond were relationally and interactionally contingent. Decision making criteria changed across time, with experience, and as children developed. Most often, parents made changes to better manage the adopted childs privacy boundaries. Applying Social Constructionism, we discuss our results in terms of the positionality of the family implied by outsider remarks, and the identity-work accomplished via changes to parental responses. We conclude with practical implications for improving family communication and directions for future research.

Discursive Constructions of the Meaning of “Family” in Online Narratives of Foster Adoptive Parents

Framed by relational dialectics theory, discursive constructions of the meaning of “family” were examined in 100 online foster adoption narratives. Parental narratives manifested struggles between biogenetic and discursive constructions of “family,” identified here as the discourse of biological normativity (DBN) and discourse of constitutive kinning (DCK). The DBN reinscribes the dominant cultural and foster care system preference for biogenetically connected families. The DCK resists the DBN, maintaining that enacted behaviors and shared affections, rather than shared genetics, constitute legitimate families. Contrapuntal analysis revealed a high degree of polemic interplay; both discourses competed to be centered rather than marginalized through the discursive practices of negating, countering, and entertaining. Implications for theorizing definitions of family and studying families in context are discussed

Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.

Parental management of adoptive identities during challenging encounters: Adoptive parents as ‘protectors’ and ‘educators’:

This interpretive study utilized Owen’s ((1985) Thematic metaphors in relational communication: A conceptual framework, The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 1—13) metaphoric approach to identify and understand the cognitive structures undergirding transracial, international adoptive parents’ sense-making and management of familial and personal identities during interactions that challenge familial and personal identities. Twelve focus groups with 69 parents with adopted children from either Vietnam or China were examined inductively. The results found the metaphors of adoptive parent as protector and adoptive parent as educator manifest in parental discourse. Protectors aim to guard identity, enacting defensive, somewhat reactive discourse, meeting invasive remarks straight-on, using confrontational, strategic, and toughening discourse. Seeking to build identity, educators enact less reactive and more intentional discourse through discourses of preparation, modeling, and debriefing. Based on these findings, we suggest improvements to pre-adoptive training.

Do Lesbians Change Their Last Names in the Context of a Committed Relationship

SUMMARY This exploratory study begins to redress a critical gap in the literature on committed same-sex relationships and last name practices. Data were gathered from an Internet survey, which included 16 lesbian respondents currently in a same-sex relationship. Analyses explored individual, couple, and family of origin factors associated with changing or not changing ones name. Name-changing was cited as a strategy for securing external recognition and acceptance of family status by outsiders. Not changing was cited as a strategy to preserve each partners individual identity. Contrary to our expectations, changing ones last name was not associated with having a commitment ceremony. Instead, name-changing was ritualized on other occasions, special to the individual couple, such as an anniversary, a partners birthday, or an intimate dinner party among friends.

Negotiating Identity and Pragmatism: Parental Treatment of International Adoptees' Birth Culture Names

The current study advances the extant literature on how internal boundary management processes (naming, discussing, narrating, ritualizing) impact identity by demonstrating how naming fosters identity in the context of international adoption. The study examined: (a) parental treatment of their childrens birth country names in the naming process and (b) parental motives for various naming forms (i.e., placement of the childs birth culture name within the full name). Focus groups were conducted with 32 U.S. White American parents with an adopted child from either China or Vietnam. Results present a catalog of four international adoptee naming forms, with parents choosing to retain, alter, create a new, or exclude the birth culture name. Parents were found to appeal to two primary motivations—identity and pragmatism—to justify and explain these differing naming forms. This study found that naming promoted three identity source domains: family identity, ethnic identity, and individual identity.