Beyond choice: family and kinship in the Australian lesbian and gay 'baby boom'

Abstract: Planned parenthood within the lesbian and gay communities attracts considerable attention internationally among researchers, the media, and law and policy-makers. This Australian study situates the phenomenon - also known as the 'gayby boom' - within the contemporary Australian socio-legal setting and the more international historical and political contexts of Gay and Women's Liberation. It investigates how beliefs about nature, kinship, the sexed and reproductive body and political ideologies of family intersect in lesbians and gay men's decision-making and stories of living their lives as parents. Two fields of intellectual enquiry are generative: the interest in families of choice and family practices within sociology and the post-modern anthropological critique of Western kinship in the era of assisted reproduction. This is a qualitative study informed by a critical humanist approach. It is based on in-depth and key informant interviews conducted with 20 lesbians and 15 gay men (parents, 'donor/dads' and prospective parents) as well as 7 people engaged in legal, health or therapeutic support to prospective and current parents. Also incorporated into the analysis are a range of other primary sources, including a substantial media debate, submissions to an assisted reproduction law reform process and primary documents supplied by participants such as parenting agreements and letters. The study argues for the need to look beyond unitary concepts such as families of choice when theorising lesbian and gay parenthood. It is important to consider the historical, political and biographical conditions that make some notions of relatedness and decisions about having children seem more feasible, and indeed, natural than others. It explores how various notions of biological relatedness remain important in the formation of parent/child relationships, and the extent to which lesbians and gay men rely on strategic appeals to choice and biology in enacting families. Continuing constraints on who is eligible for clinically assisted reproductive technology in Australia lead to imaginative and harmonious, yet also fraught reproductive relationships.

Originally part of the Australasian Digital Theses (ADT) database.

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy [to the School of Public Health (Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society)], Faculty of Health Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.