LGBTQ Family & Relationships

For the second full week of LGBTQ Pride Month, we’ve selected articles from our broad journals portfolio under the theme LGBTQ Family & Relationships. This collection explores the complexities of social, ethical, psychological themes of LGBTQ families and relationships, covering topics such as family planning, marriage equality, child development, sexual health, and many more. Enjoy this research freely through July 31, and don’t forget to comment and share below!

And, don’t forget to come back each Monday as we post think pieces from Wiley authors and LGBTQ advocates centered around a new theme. You’ll also get unlocked access to journal articles and book excerpts that examine the ethical, social, and philosophical issues faced by the LGBTQ community. Thanks for joining us as we continue the necessary conversation on LGBTQ rights, awareness, and support.

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Social and psychological creativity in gay male midlife identity management British Journal of Social Psychology | Early View

Performative family: homosexuality, marriage and intergenerational dynamics in China The British Journal of Sociology | Early View

Greedy Spouse, Needy Parent: The Marital Dynamics of Gay, Lesbian, and Heterosexual Intergenerational Caregivers Journal of Marriage & Family | Early View

Development of the Gay and Lesbian Relationship Satisfaction Scale Journal of Marital and Family Therapy | Early View

Religion and Public Opinion Toward Same-Sex Relations, Marriage, and Adoption: Does the Type of Practice Matter? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion | Early View

Religiousness and Support for Same-Sex Marriage: An Endogenous Treatment Approach Social Science Quarterly | Early View

Ambivalence in Gay and Lesbian Family Relationships Journal of Marriage & Family | June 2016

Identity Transformation During the Transition to Parenthood Among Same-Sex Couples: An Ecological, Stress-Strategy-Adaptation Perspective Journal of Family Theory & Review | March 2016

Queer Theory, Intersectionality, and LGBT-Parent Families: Transformative Critical Pedagogy in Family Theory Journal of Family Theory & Review | March 2016

Maybe “I Do,” Maybe I Don’t: Respectability Politics in the Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Analyses of Social Issues & Public Policy | December 2015

Meanings of Intimacy: A Comparison of Members of Heterosexual and Same-Sex Couples Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy | December 2015

Why Donor Insemination and Not Adoption? Narratives of Female-Partnered and Single Mothers Family Relations | December 2015

Queering the Martial Races: Masculinity, Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth-Century British Indian Army Gender & History | August 2015

The Personal Politics of Same-Sex Marriage Politics & Policy | August 2015

LG(BT) Families and Counting Sociology Compass | July 2015

Getting “Bi” in the Family: Bisexual People’s Disclosure Experiences Journal of Marriage & Family | June 2015

Sexual Health Risk Behaviors Among Older Men Who Have Sex With Men: Implications for Interventions Adultspan Journal | April 2015

Reminders of Heteronormativity: Gay Adoptive Fathers Navigating Uninvited Social Interactions Family Relations | April 2015

“An individual of ill-defined type” (“Un individu d’un genre mal défini”):  Hermaphroditism in Marriage Annulment Proceedings in Nineteenth-Century France’ Gender & History | April 2015

Intimacy and Emotion Work in Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Relationships Journal of Marriage & Family | April 2015

Relationship Preferences Among Gay and Lesbian Online Daters: Individual and Contextual Influences Journal of Marriage & Family | April 2015

Making Sense in and of the Asexual Community: Navigating Relationships and Identities in a Context of Resistance Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology | March/April 2015

Relationship Education and Therapy for Same-Sex Couples Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy | December 2014

Reducing Health Disparities and Enhancing the Responsible Conduct of Research Involving LGBT Youth The Hastings Center Report | October 2014

Gay men and intimate partner violence: a gender analysis Sociology of Health & Illness | May 2014

Adoptive Gay Father Families: Parent–Child Relationships and Children’s Psychological Adjustment Child Development | March/April 2014

Reductio ad absurdum objections and the dis-integration argument against merely instrumental sex Journal of Social Philosophy | September 2013

Outing Heteronormativity in Interpersonal and Family Communication: Feminist Applications of Queer Theory “Beyond the Sexy Streets” Communication Theory | May 2013

The Cross-Pressures of Religion and Contact with Gays and Lesbians, and Their Impact on Same-Sex Marriage Opinion Politics & Policy | February 2012

The Friends and Family Plan: Contact with Gays and Support for Gay Rights Policy Studies Journal | May 2011

‘Dealing with sperm’: comparing lesbians’ clinical and non-clinical donor conception processes Sociology of Health & Illness | January 2011

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Miss last week’s post on LGBTQ Rights? No worries! The research collection is free through July 31. Go here to read the latest on LGBTQ law, policies, activism, and more.

Undoing Gender: New Experiments in Social Deconstruction

‘The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl”,’ the American politician Shirley Chisholm once said. Exposed in this insight is the miraculous power of language; all that is required for something so fateful to be determined is not biological nature, not even social imposition, but, simply, speech. So seemingly simple is this mechanism, in fact, that some are doing their best to change it. It was revealed this week that a pre-school in Sweden has decided that the use of gender-specific pronouns such as ‘him’ (‘han’) and ‘her’ (‘hon’) is to be prohibited, in favour of gender-neutral terms, in an attempt to reduce the effects of linguistically determined gender-stereotyping.

The school, aptly name Egalia, is tackling an issue which has been firmly on the feminist agenda since Dale Spender’s influential book Man Made Language appeared in 1980. There Spender argued that, far from passively capturing the way that the world appears to us, language actively constructs the way that the world is. More specifically, the state of language, according to Spender, structures the world in a way that promotes males and inhibits females, whether by exclusion, alienation, control, or construction. The claim was supported by the famous studies in linguistics carried out by the American anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose extensive research on Native American languages led to the hypothesis that the structure of language restricts and determines our cognitive categories. It is hard to report an event in English without using the tense-marked words that the grammar requires, and it is hard to encode a fact in Hopi without marking its testimonial status, that is, whether it is first-hand knowledge, second-hand, third-hand, and so on, as required by the structure of the language. Importantly, it makes it hard to think outside of these limits, and, consequently, hard to behave outside of them. The way that we mark gender according to our grammatical structure is no different, an assumption which the new Egalia policy operates on.

Should parents – and not just their babies – be crying?

The costs and benefits of being a parent have been in the news a lot in the last few years.  Some studies apparently indicate that parenting is linked to unhappiness.  According to one study, “parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al., 2004), life satisfaction (Di Tella et al., 2003), marital satisfaction (Twenge et al., 2003) and mental well-being (Clark & Oswald, 2002) compared with non-parents.”

So why should anyone have children?  This is a reasonable thing to wonder about. We wonder about good reasons for doing and creating things all the time. Should we build that stadium? Should I go to school or get a new job? Should I make the pizza or the steamed kale? Given that child-rearing is seemingly a monumental task, it is reasonable to wonder if and why one has reason to do it.