Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between grandparents and lesbian daughters in the context of childbirth, looking specifically at the role that pregnancy plays in shaping kinship affinities. Gender, sex, and heterosexuality are fundamental to Euro-American kinship discourse and practice; lesbian couples’ parenthood through donor conception represents a significant departure from prevailing tropes of kinship. Thus, questions arise about how lesbians experience becoming and being parents, and about how their own parents may respond to becoming a genetic or nongenetic grandparent. This article draws on original data from interviews conducted in the United Kingdom with lesbians who became parents by donor conception, and grandparents with lesbian daughters in those situations where the older generation was not originally supportive of their daughters. It explores the negotiated meaning of pregnancy and how relationships with grandparents may be shaped by whether or not it is the daughter of the family who gave birth.
Highlights
Euro-American kinship system is built on and structured by ideas of sex, gender, andsexuality. In her seminal feminist analysis of a sex/gender system of kinship, Rubin (1997) argued that men and women are constructed in a political economy in which women are “trafficked” between men; she thereby made the point that kinship is constituted through binary constructions of gender
Strathern (1992) went on to show how sex, gender, and heterosexuality are all components of a system of kinship in which family relationships are culturally perceived as relationships “based in nature” through connections of blood or genes
The same-sex relationship represents in itself a significant detour from the idea of the heterosexual couple being the basis for family life
Summary
Euro-American kinship system is built on and structured by ideas of sex, gender, and (hetero)sexuality. When a lesbian couple goes on to have children, the act of procreation does not produce the culturally expected mother and father, but instead it reproduces two mothers and a donor, in other words, a “cultural unknown.” Third, same-sex parenting upsets rules about genetic connections in the family as the grandparents on the side of the nongenetic mother have no genetic relationship with the child; their daughter has not been pregnant.
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