Jacqui Gabb

Lesbian M/Otherhood Strategies of Familial-linguistic Management in Lesbian Parent Families

In this article I examine how parental identities are negotiated in lesbian parent families. I argue that lesbian mothers’ extraordinary maternity is not dependent on a feminist egalitarian ethic but instead comes from families’ strategic articulation of same-sex parenthood, whereby gender is done and undone in multiple and contradictory ways. Focusing attention onto the ‘other (non-biological) mother’, I suggest that her lack of social status and (progenitor) maternal role disrupts simple readings of gendered parenthood. I demonstrate that children’s creative familial-linguistic management of ‘family’ facilitates an inclusive conceptual framework, representing families as process. The data cited in this article comes from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 lesbian mothers and 13 of their children, who live across the Yorkshire region in the UK.

Home truths: ethical issues in family research

This article interrogates the shifting ethical contours of research on contemporary childhood and family living. I reflect on increases in ethical regulation and the role of ethics review panels. Drawing on original data from empirical research I examine some of the ethical issues that arise in studies of family life with particular attention to qualitative mixed methods research and the use of psychosocial approaches. I propose that multilayered in-depth approaches require us to consider carefully ethical standpoints, affecting how we thread together individual and/or family case studies. Unsettling stories in research on emotional—social worlds refine our understandings of ‘harm’ and ‘distress’ and reconfigure ideas of ‘responsible knowing’. Qualitative mixed methods research situates ‘messy’, conflicting and unfavourable data as part of ordinary parenthood, reformulating ethical and epistemological dilemmas for researchers of personal lives.

Critical differentials: querying the incongruities within research on lesbian parent families

Contemporary research on ‘lesbian families’ tends to portray them as progressive examples of non-nuclear parenting that challenge traditional kinship formation. In contrast my data revealed that, in many instances, it remains the ‘birth mother’ who is figuratively and literally left ‘holding the baby’, and traditional understandings and experiences of family persist. This article calls into question the representativeness of radical models and addresses the differences between research findings on lesbian parent families. Rather than contest the accuracy of others’ research, I argue that the reasons for differences between analyses can be found in the research process. Thus I query the epistemological and methodological foundations of radical research into lesbian parent families.

Family Lives and Relational Living: Taking Account of Otherness

Contemporary research has shown that families are constituted through everyday practices of intimacy with affinities being fashioned around the structuring principles of openness and reciprocity alongside or superseding traditional ties of obligation and responsibility. Paradoxically in many instances powerful differences and inequalities among intimates remain intransigent, undermining claims on the democratisation of intimacy. In this article I want to examine how people make sense of difference and significant otherness in family lives, focusing attention on embedded practices that span across interpersonal, human-object, natural-cultural boundaries. I focus on three examples; these are relations between humans and animals, parents and children, people and objects. These relations are structured through species, gendered, generational and subject-object differences, but these categorical distinctions do not set apart the self and other. Instead they demonstrate how otherness is part of everyday relational living. Thus, to put personal relationships and families in context, I contend that we need to reframe the analytical lens around an ethics of otherness.

Troubling Displays: The Affect of Gender, Sexuality and Class

In this chapter I engage with Janet Finchs concept of display as an academic lens through which to understand family relationships, focusing on the utility of the concept but also asking questions about what (or who) gets omitted through this analytical paradigm. Finch (2007) suggests that it is not sufficient for families to be done they must also be seen to be done in order that these sets of practices are afforded cultural meaning. I concur that the concept of display may be a useful addition to the sociological toolkit but not primarily because it elucidates how family relationships are presented and rendered meaningful – although it certainly does add clarity to understandings of these processes. Instead I think that it is most useful precisely because it brings into sharp relief the determining factors that shape displays and in doing so the people and forms of relating that are omitted when emotions and interactions are not readily recognisable. In this sense its analytical use is as a sensitizing concept, highlighting the need for us to be more attuned to those practices and identities that are in different ways troublesome to display.

Querying the Discourses of Love: An Analysis of Contemporary Patterns of Love and the Stratification of Intimacy within Lesbian Families

This article looks at the discourses of love through an analysis of the ‘stratification of intimacy’ within lesbian families. I suggest that traditional discourses of love effectively reify our emotions into socially prescribed categories, where ‘mature love’ is conflated with sex and desire. The love that mothers feel for their child(ren) is set apart, ‘instinctive’, wholly separate to adult (sexual) love. However this ‘stratification of intimacy’ obscures the lived experiences and feelings of many parents. In this article the author argues that whom we love is culturally constituted: it is unnecessarily quantified whereby monogamy is (mis)read as the sign of true (adult) love. I illustrate how lesbian mothers’ location on the social margins enables them to construct new ‘patterns of love’ within their ‘families of choice’ in ways that challenge these traditional discourses of love. This theoretical analysis is based upon ‘patterned variations’ drawn from qualitative research with 20 lesbian families with children living within the Yorkshire region in the UK.

Telling Moments and Everyday Experience: Multiple Methods Research on Couple Relationships and Personal Lives.

Everyday moments and ordinary gestures create the texture of long-term couple relationships. In this article we demonstrate how, by refining our research tools and conceptual imagination, we can better understand these vibrant and visceral relationships. The ‘moments approach’ that we propose provides a lens through which to focus in on couples’ everyday experiences, to gain insight on processes, meanings and cross-cutting analytical themes whilst ensuring that feelings and emotionality remain firmly attached. Calling attention to everyday relationship practices, we draw on empirical research to illustrate and advance our conceptual and methodological argument. The Enduring Love? study included an online survey (n = 5445) and multi-sensory qualitative research with couples (n = 50) to interrogate how they experience, understand and sustain their long-term relationships.

Couple Relationships in the 21st Century

This book presents an incisive and engaging account of love, intimacy and personal life in contemporary Western society. The authors draw on rich qualitative and large-scale survey data to explore how couples communicate with each other, negotiate the pressures and pleasures of parenthood, and the vagaries of sexual desire and intimacy across life course. Focusing on ‘the everyday’, Couple Relationships in the 21st Century unpicks the ordinary and often mundane relationship work that goes into sustaining a relationship over time, breaking down the dichotomy between enduring relationships of quality and good enough or endured relationships. It contests the separation of couples into distinct relationship types – defined through age, parenthood or sexuality. Looking through the lens of relationship practices it is clear that there is no ‘normal couple’: couples are what couples do. With a foreword by Dr Reenee Singh, Director, London Intercultural Couples Centre and Co-Director, Tavistock Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre, this new extended edition provides an invaluable critical insight on contemporary experiences of coupledom and will be essential reading for scholars and students, clinicians working in couple and family therapy, and those involved in relationship support services.

The uses of emotion maps in research and clinical practice with families and couples: Methodological innovation and critical inquiry

We explore how “emotion maps” can be productively used in clinical assessment and clinical practice with families and couples. This graphic participatory method was developed in sociological studies to examine everyday family relationships. Emotion maps enable us to effectively “see” the dynamic experience and emotional repertoires of family life. Through the use of a case example, in this article we illustrate how emotion maps can add to the systemic clinicians’ repertoire of visual methods. For clinicians working with families, couples, and young people, the importance of gaining insight into how lives are lived, at home, cannot be understated. Producing emotion maps can encourage critical personal reflection and expedite change in family practice. Hot spots in the household become visualized, facilitating dialogue on prevailing issues and how these events may be perceived differently by different family members. As emotion maps are not reliant on literacy or language skills they can be equally completed by parents and children alike, enabling childrens perspective to be heard. Emotion maps can be used as assessment tools, to demonstrate the process of change within families. Furthermore, emotion maps can be extended to use through technology and hence are well suited particularly to working with young people. We end the article with a wider discussion of the place of emotions and emotion maps within systemic psychotherapy.

Embodying Risk: Managing Father–child Intimacy and the Display of Nudity in Families:

This article interrogates how parents manage public–private practices of father–child intimacy and how the dis/embodied male impacts on the display of nudity in families. Drawing on empirical research, it examines some of the tensions which crystallise around intimate fatherhood and the meanings and practices of family photography. Focusing on the visual and how this can shed light on different dimensions of everyday experience, it explores how parents set boundaries around notions of decency and adjudge appropriate behaviour, with particular attention to the (in)significance of children’s age and the impact of class and social context. Notwithstanding cultural changes which prize intimate fatherhood, the management of masculinity and the paternal body remain a source of anxiety. This article interrogates how gender and ideas of ‘risk management’ are shaping embodied interactions between fathers and children and thus what children are learning about men, masculinity and intimacy.