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This book brings together empirical work on polyamory on the one hand and feminist, queer, and critical race theory on the other fill a theoretical gap in understanding the role of monogamy in legitimating and perpetuating relations of social and cultural inequality. The two central theoretical goals in the book are to (1) begin unpacking the links between compulsory and institutionalized monogamy and heteromasculine privilege and dominance as it intersects with race and sexuality, and (2) develop a theoretical framework for identifying and cultivating what the author calls polyqueer sexualities—sexual and relationship intimacies that include more than two people and that, through plurality, open up possibilities to “undo” race and gender hierarchies in ways that would not otherwise arise within the context of dyadic sex or monogamy. Given the role of compulsory monogamy in legitimating and perpetuating race, gender, and sexual inequalities, the author argues that polyqueer challenges to mononormativity can, if done collectively, undo at least part of those systems of domination within the context of intimate relationships both in terms of their symbolic meaning and their embodied practice. The author does so by exploring narratives of cheating, constructions of the “Down Low,” and erotic threesomes, as well as her own experiences of polyamory.

India is the top provider of surrogacy services in the world, with a multi-million dollar surrogacy industry that continues to grow exponentially. Some scholars have exulted transnational surrogacy for the possibilities it opens for infertile couples, while others have offered bioethical cautionary tales, rebuked exploitative intended parents, or lamented the exploitation of surrogate mothers—but very little is known about the experience of and transaction between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of the many agencies that control surrogacy in India. Drawing from interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore, as well as twenty straight and gay couples in the United States and Australia, this book focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy. It interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. The book argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet the interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. The book explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development. Itdelineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore's surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions.

The decision to have a child is seldom a simple one, often fraught with complexities regarding emotional readiness, finances, marital status, and compatibility with life and career goals. Rarely, though, do individuals consider the role of the law in facilitating or inhibiting their ability to have a child or to parent. For LGBT individuals, however, parenting is saturated with legality—including the initial decision of whether to have a child, how to have a child, whether one’s relationship with their child will be recognized, and everyday acts of parenting like completing forms or picking up children from school. Through in-depth interviews with 137 LGBT parents, the authors examine the role of the law, family law in particular, in the lives of LGBT parents and how individuals use the law when making decisions about family formation or parenting. They explore the ways in which LGBT parents participate in the process of constructing legality through accepting, modifying, or rejecting legal meanings about their families. Few groups encounter as much variation in access to everyday legal rights pertaining to the family as do LGBT parents. This complexity and variation in legal environments provides a rather unique opportunity to examine the manner in which legal context affects the ways in which individuals come to understand the meaning and utility of the law for their lives. The authors conclude that legality is constructed through a complex interplay of legal context, social networks, individual characteristics, and familial desires.

The Moral Project of Childhood argues and demonstrates that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. Drawing on materials published in periodicals intended for women and mothers from the 1830s to the 1930s, the book examines how mothers—and, later, commercial actors—found themselves compelled to consider children’s interiorities: their perspectives, needs, wants, pleasures, and pains. In this process, the child’s subjectivity progressively, albeit unevenly, arises as a form of authority in a variety of contexts, including discourses about Christian motherhood, the elements of cultural taste, and the discipline and punishment of children, as well as in machinations about play and toys, questions of children’s property rights, and the uses of money by and for children. The book considers the Protestant origins of the child consumer—a somewhat unlikely pairing—and makes visible and relevant the prefigurative elements and rhetorics from which the child consumer emerges as a contemporary, dominant, and normative ideal.

The meaning and significance of the institution of marriage has engendered angry and boisterous battles across the United States. While the efforts of lesbians and gay men to make marriage accessible to same-sex couples have seen increasing success, these initiatives have sparked a backlash as campaigns are waged to “protect” heterosexual marriage in America. Less in the public eye is government legislation that embraces the idea of marriage promotion as a necessary societal good. This book uncovers broad cultural anxieties that fuel on-the-ground practices to reinforce a boundary of heterosexual marriage, questioning why marriage has become an issue of pervasive national preoccupation and anxiety, and explores the impact of policies that seek to reinstitutionalize heterosexual marriage in American society. From marriage workshops for the general public to relationship classes for welfare recipients to marriage education in high school classrooms, the book documents in meticulous detail the inner workings of ideologies of gender and heterosexuality in the practice of marriage promotion to fortify a concept of “one marriage,” an Anglo-American ideal of Christian, heterosexual monogamy.

A playdate is an organized meeting where parents come together with their children at a public or private location to interact socially or “play.” Children no longer simply “go out and play,” rather, play is arranged, scheduled, and parentally approved and supervised. This book focuses on the parents of young children in New York City to explore how the shift from spontaneous and child-directed play to managed and adult-arranged playdates reveals the structures of modern parenting and the new realities of childhood. It shows how the playdate has emerged as not just a necessity in terms of security and scheduling, but as the hallmark of good parenting. Based on interviews with parents, teachers, childcare directors, and nannies from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island, the book provides a first-hand account of the strategies used by middle-class parents of young children to navigate social relationships—their own and those of their children. The book shows how parents use playdates to improve their own experiences of raising children in New York City while carefully managing and ensuring their own social and cultural capital. It illustrates how the organization of playdates influences parents' work lives, friendships, and public childrearing performances, and demonstrates how this may potentially influence the social development of both children and parents. Ultimately, the book shows that the playdate is much more than just “child's play.”

Sexual beliefs, behaviors and identities are interwoven throughout our lives, from childhood to old age. This book critically examines sexuality across the entire lifespan. Rooted in diverse disciplines and employing a wide range of research methods, the chapters explore the sexual and social transitions that typically map to broad life stages, as well as key age-graded physiological transitions, such as puberty and menopause, while drawing on the latest developments in gender, sexuality, and life course studies. The book explores a wide variety of topics, including puberty, sexual initiation, coming out, sexual assault, marriage/life partnering, disability onset, immigration, divorce, menopause, and widowhood, always attending to the social locations—including gender, race, ethnicity, and social class—that shape, and are shaped by, sexuality. The book ultimately speaks to important public policy issues, such as sex education, aging societies, and the increasing politicization of scientific research. It captures the interplay between individual lives and the ever-changing social-historical context, facilitating new insight not only into people's sexual lives, but also into ways of studying them, ultimately providing a fresh, new perspective on sexuality.

In an age when fathers are spending more time with their children than at any other point in the past, men are also facing unprecedented levels of work–family conflict. How do fathers balance their two most important roles—that of father and that of worker? This book captures the real voices of fathers themselves as they talk about their struggles with balancing work and family life. Through in-depth interviews with a diverse group of men, the book introduces the concept of “superdads,” a group of fathers who stand out by making significant changes to their work lives in order to accommodate their families. They are nothing like their fathers, “old dads” who focused on their traditional role as breadwinner, or even some of their peers, so-called “new dads” who work around the increasing demands of their paternal roles without really bucking the system. In taking their family life in a completely new direction, these superdads challenge the way we think about long-held assumptions about men's role in the family unit. The book provides an overview of an emerging trend in fatherhood and the policy solutions that may help support its growth, pointing the way toward a future society with a more feasible approach to the work–family divide.

In a world that is responding to ever-changing ideas and expressions of gender, this book adds new insights on transgender children and the parents who support them. Drawing on in-depth interview data with more than fifty parents, the book examines parents’ shifting understandings of their children’s gender and how they come to help their children make sense of their identities and their bodies. Throughout these processes, the book shows that parents’ meaning-making and decision-making often challenge LGBT rights discourses, as well as queer political tenets, in unexpected ways. These dynamics surface in three key areas: (1) gender and sexuality, (2) the gender binary, and (3) the body. Throughout parents’ understandings, gender identity and sexual orientation do not always present as radically separate aspects of the self, but are more fluid and open to reconsideration, given new cultural contexts, opportunities, and phases of the life course. And despite increasing cultural visibility around nonbinary identities, “gender-expansive” child-rearing often looks, fundamentally, very binary and gender-stereotypical, per the children’s own assertions and expressions. Lastly, parents often utilize highly medicalized understandings of transgender embodiment, which nevertheless resonate with some children’s sensibilities. Altogether, these families depart from conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and the binary, but in ways that prioritize child-centered shifts, meanings, and parenting models, not necessarily LGBTQ politics or paradigms. This marks new ground for understanding the mechanisms and parameters of the (trans)gender change afoot.

Unexpected is a feminist meditation on parenthood and disability in an age of genomics. It examines a rich array of cultural narratives about parenting disabled children, particularly those with Down syndrome: published memoirs and excerpts from Alison Piepmeier’s interviews with parents and prospective parents, as well as the pronouncements and implied narratives of bioethicists, cultural critics, and disability advocates. The book splices Piepmeier’s scholarly work with life writing about the experience of being a single parent to a daughter with Down syndrome and her own disabling illness.