Róisín Ryan-Flood

Contested Heteronormativities: Discourses of Fatherhood among Lesbian Parents in Sweden and Ireland

This article explores discourses of fatherhood among lesbian parents in Sweden and Ireland, based on interviews with 68 participants. Swedish lesbian parents generally expressed a strong preference for a known donor who would play an active parenting role. In contrast, Irish participants usually chose an uninvolved donor, but nonetheless one whose identity was known, albeit usually only to the lesbian parents. The significance of biology to kinship was both destabilized and reinforced, while gender and parenting discourses were also reinvented in complex ways. Reproductive decision-making among lesbian parents reflects hegemonic discourses of fatherhood in both countries. The ways that these discourses are subverted and reinscribed reveals the situatedness of lesbian parents in national contexts, where the ‘Other’ is deeply embedded in local discourses.

Queering Representation: Ethics and Visibility in Research

This article explores some of the ethical and epistemological dilemmas that arose from a cross-national research project on lesbian motherhood in two European countries, Sweden and Ireland. The differing contexts for sexual citizenship presented particular challenges in relation to negotiating wider norms regarding visibility. Lesbian mothers in Sweden presented a discourse of openness that strongly advocated visibility and the importance of social research in contributing to social change. In contrast to their Swedish counterparts, lesbian mothers in Ireland were more constrained in their efforts to negotiate their claims via visibility and this led to complex choices for the researcher, particularly in relation to contact with popular media.

Que(e)rying Methodology: Lessons and Dilemmas from Lesbian Lives: An Introduction

Questions of ethics, accountability, and representation have long animated the social sciences. Feminist writing has played a key role in highlighting the significance of power relations at all points in the research process. The personal identities of the researcher and researched are understood to affect the knowledge produced. Thus, the situatedness of the researcher and participants influence how they interact, the empirical data produced, and the epistemological terrain within which it is interpreted (Oakley, 1981; Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002). The identities of the researcher and respondents are understood as plural and addressed in relation to gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and other axes of belonging. It is acknowledged that differences in identity can also constitute differences in power (Letherby, 2003). In short, the research process is not an objective, clean business but rather is riven with power relations and is often a messy, complex interplay of subjectivities, identities, and emotions (Fonow and Cook, 1991; Maynard and Purvis, 1994; Stanley, 1997). Rather than viewing these complexities as a shortcoming of the research process, using reflexivity and other analytical tools allows the researcher to reflect upon the dilemmas and challenges of research. This process helps to illuminate wider social relations and modes of intersubjectivity. Social and cultural research on lesbian lives can present particular challenges. Work on sexuality and intimate life requires navigating sensitive issues. Writing about minority groups brings certain expectations and

Welcome from Feona Attwood, Roisin Ryan-Flood and Travis SK Kong:

Over the past 15 years, Sexualities has become the leading journal in the field of critical sexualities studies. This is in no small part due to the efforts of its founder, Ken Plummer, whose own scholarship in the field of sexualities studies remains hugely influential. As the new editors – Feona Attwood (Middlesex University), Róisı́n RyanFlood (University of Essex) and Travis SK Kong (The University of Hong Kong) – we will continue to build on the strengths of the journal, as well as developing new areas for growth and expansion. We will retain Sexualities’ distinctive identity as an inter-disciplinary and qualitative journal that presents cutting-edge research and debate on the material dimensions of sexualities and the social history and theoretical/critical analyses of these. Looking back at the agenda that Ken originally set out for Sexualities in 1995, we believe that the list of topics identified then are still of central importance for critical sexualities studies today. We have retitled a few of these: ‘Hi-tech and the new technologies of sexualities’ becomes ‘the new technologies of sexualities’; ‘sexualized identities’ becomes ‘sexual identities and cultures’; ‘cross-generational sexualities’ becomes ‘cross-generational sexualities, life course and ageing’; ‘love and intimacy’ becomes ‘love, family and intimacy’; and ‘gender blending’ becomes ‘trans* and sexuality’. The journal retains a central concern with questions of equality, human rights and citizenship. The following topics are ones that we would like to expand.

Negotiating Sexual Citizenship: Lesbians and Reproductive Health Care

This chapter explores lesbian women’s experiences of reproductive health care and the extent to which such health care is characterized by het-eronormativity at different spatial scales. A growing number of lesbian women are embarking on parenthood in the context of an openly lesbian lifestyle. Recent changes in ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer, 2003) include the separation of sexuality and reproduction, and the achievements of the lesbian, gay and bisexual rights movement. These changes have influenced reproductive decision-making among lesbian women, for whom a lesbian identity and motherhood may no longer appear incompatible. Although lesbians have always been parents — from previous heterosexual relationships — the new generation of lesbians who become parents after coming out is a decidedly new development. This pioneering generation of lesbian parents therefore constitute a new figure within the broader domain of new femininities and one whose experiences are profoundly affected by the wider context of sexual citizenship. However, the reproductive pathways of lesbian parenthood remain relatively unexplored in the academic literature, particularly outside the UK and US. This chapter will argue that lesbian experiences of reproductive health care reflect processes of social exclusion, with reference to lesbian parenthood in Sweden and Ireland. This exclusion occurs in relation to inequitable sexual citizenship, such as legislation that denies them access to assisted conception for example. These discriminatory processes may force some lesbian women with sufficient financial resources to explore transnational options in reproductive technologies. Lesbian women without the neces-sary financial capital are therefore doubly excluded. Discrimination is also experienced in relation to homophobia from medical staff during prenatal and antenatal care.

Sexualities twentieth anniversary editorial introduction

The challenges facing journal editors are many: appealing to key areas of the market, maximising impact factor, finding reviewers, managing contributors, reviewing the direction and growth of the journal, to name but a few. Of course the work itself is often exciting and invigorating – and includes reading cuttingedge work, supporting new directions in research, and contributing to wider theoretical debates. Yet editors are also often faced with complex pressures and considerations about what a journal is for – what are its aims? How should it evolve and grow, while meeting both the intellectual and activist goals of the editors and the publishers’ requirements? In short, what is an editorial vision? Why does it matter? When Ken Plummer founded the journal Sexualities, he committed a radical act – the setting up of a journal that was desperately needed in the context of burgeoning sexualities research. It offered a major scholarly resource in the face of an often unsupportive wider academic environment. As Irvine highlights in this issue, Sexualities remains an imperative resource for scholars in the field, both in terms of alerting them to new intellectual content, but also as a place of publication. Some of the early challenges that Ken faced seem happily antiquated now – his story of an urgent meeting called by publishers to discuss the inclusion of some, at that time, controversial images springs to mind. Yet the journal’s existence as a showcase for original, timely and fascinating research in the field remains. As the journal has become well-established – now in its 20th year and constantly inundated with high quality, interesting articles for submission – this celebration of two decades of Sexualities offers a useful moment for reckoning and reflection. As scholars, particularly when working within neoliberal REF culture, we are constantly exhorted to publish in ‘high impact’ journals. Editors are similarly encouraged to try to improve their impact factor in order to attract the best calibre of work. Yet the relationship between ‘specialist’ journals and the more mainstream, typically higher impact ones is rarely acknowledged or called into question Sexualities 2018, Vol. 21(8) 1201–1203 ! The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1363460718803347 journals.sagepub.com/home/sex

Conclusions: Beyond Assimilation and Transgression

This book began with an acknowledgment of the growing phenomenon of a new generation of lesbians embarking on parenthood in the context of an openly lesbian lifestyle. The preceding chapters have attempted to contextualise lesbian parents’ experiences and unravel some of the implications of this relatively new family form for theoretical and empirical work in relation to gender, sexuality and kinship. While much previous research has been centrally concerned with the effects of lesbian and gay parental sexuality on children, this study has integrated lesbian parents’ narratives into contemporary theoretical analysis and debate. The relational choices and perspectives of lesbian parents in Sweden and Ireland have been explored and their experiences have been addressed with reference to the importance of socio-political context and place. In addition, the teleological nature of the discussions concerning the relative similarity or difference of lesbian parent families to their heterosexual counterparts, or to a heteronormative standard, has been challenged through a deconstruction of the heterocentric polarity at the heart of these debates. This concluding discussion consists of five sections, in which the implications of the research findings and theoretical concerns of this work are explored: a brief overview of the key findings; suggestions for further research; lesbian parenthood in a comparative perspective; a reconceptualisation of lesbian Otherness; implications for theoretical work on family practices; and finally a reconsideration of the question ‘Is kinship always already heterosexual?’ (Butler, 2002).

Introduction — Charting the Lesbian Baby Boom

On February 14th 1999, a national newspaper in the UK carried the headline ‘LESBIANS CAN MAKE BETTER PARENTS’. This claim was extraordinary in a number of ways. Firstly, in a socio-political context that is frequently unsupportive of lesbian parents, the fact that a newspaper — the Sunday Express — would carry a leading story about lesbian mothers that was very positive, seemed entirely unexpected. Secondly, the nature of the story, which referred to research by the British sociologist Gillian Dunne, suggested that lesbians could perform better as parents than heterosexuals. This appears to be a radical claim given the fact that lesbian and gay parenting is more often seen as a problematic anomaly in popular culture, particularly British tabloid press. The article loosely referred to Dunne’s conclusion that lesbians were more likely to engage in egalitarian divisions of labour in the home and to find creative ways of achieving this. She did not in fact at any time claim that lesbians could make ‘better’ parents, rather, that lesbian relationships potentially allowed for new ways of managing work and care that did not rest on a traditional sexual division of labour. The headline is also revealing for its comparison between lesbian and heterosexual parents, the latter being the norm to which other families are inherently always compared. In a sense then, the newspaper article echoes a number of questions that are also present in academic work on lesbian parenthood.

In Search of Doctors, Donors and Daddies: Lesbian Reproductive Decision-Making

Lesbian parents disrupt normative assumptions about the linear connection between heterosexuality and parenting. The most common representations of motherhood in Western society take place within a heterosexual matrix. Lesbians are actively discouraged from parenting by legislative prohibitions that restrict them from access to adoption, fostering and assisted reproduction. This is reflected in popular assumptions that a lesbian identity is incompatible with parenthood. During fieldwork in Sweden, I was introduced to a middle-aged Swedish man who enquired about my research topic. When I explained that I was interviewing lesbian mothers, he replied in a puzzled voice: ‘Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?’ Although new reproductive technologies have developed at a rapid pace and despite the advances of the lesbian, gay and bisexual movement, including at that time almost daily articles in Swedish newspapers about homosexual parenting, procreation/ reproduction often remains linked to heterosexual sexual activity in the popular imagination, as this example illustrates. In fact, alternative insemination is a straightforward process and requires little or no medical assistance. It is also the case that some lesbians become parents through fostering or adoption. Nonetheless, the fact remains (but perhaps not for much longer, given recent developments in gynogenesis1) that in order for a woman to become pregnant, a donor is required.

Gender, Families and Social Change

Bell & Binnie (2000) argue that all citizenship is sexual citizenship. In other words, citizenship is mediated by sexual identity. The ability to have your partnership legally recognised, to seek redress for sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace, to become an adoptive parent, to feel safe in expressing your sexual identity in public spaces — through words, physical affection with a partner, or appearance: all of these are mediated by the nation-state context in which you live. Narratives of citizenship often assume a heterosexual citizen (Valentine, 2001). Thus, welfare states traditionally developed policies that catered largely to a heterosexual nuclear family. Discussions of family, particularly references to ‘the family’ often assume that the two parent model of kinship is an inevitable expression of biological reproduction. Yet, as Schneider (1984: 75) pointed out, kinship is an ‘empirical question’, not a ‘universal fact’. Stacey (1990: 2) similarly described family as ‘a locus not of residence, but of meaning and relationships’. Cross-cultural studies have illustrated the variety of understandings of kinship in place (Herdt, 1984; Bauer & Thompson, 2006). The heterosexual nuclear family model is one type of family form but many others have and do exist across time and place. Welfare states and public policy are increasingly forced to respond to the plurality and individuality of kinship forms in contemporary society.