Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America

Abstract

LGBTQ people of color in North America are raising children in significant numbers and are more likely than are White LGBTQ people to have children under 18 living in their homes. Emerging data point as well to significant numbers of queer parents globally, including many queer people who are raising children in the Global South and who are often left out of the discourse about LGBTQ-parent families. Rather than simply adding such families to existing models, scholars need to radically rethink the assumptions and models that we have built based on narrow samples of White, North American lesbian and gay parents. This chapter highlights theoretical insights and themes from a growing body of work on LGBTQ parenting in US communities of color and in global and transnational contexts. We explore demographic characteristics, structural inequalities, pathways to parenthood, and the rich variation in ways that heteronormative definitions of family are constructed and contested in and beyond North America. The studies we review recognize race, ethnicity, citizenship, and colonial legacies as central to the possibilities for queer family formation and to the daily lives of LGBTQ parents and their children.