Sticky Gender Stereotypes and the Unfulfilled Promise of Alternative Family Forms

Abstract

Reproductive technologies, in mediating the conceptual fracture of parenthood, have generated a strong impetus to re-evaluate what it means to be a legal parent. Given the increasing visibility of family forms that deviate from the heterosexual, nuclear norm, this moment of legal uncertainty presents a unique opportunity to re-imagine the parent in an expanded, more inclusive manner that reflects and affirms the social transformation of the family. This paper examines trends in the adjudication of parenthood and investigates the interplay of those trends with the legal affirmation of non-traditional family forms. I argue that the stickiness of stereotypically gendered notions of maternity and paternity continue to restrain and distort the legal re-imagination of parenthood, despite the destabilizing challenges to those notions posed by non-traditional families and reproductive technologies. I then argue that this sexist vision of parenthood serves to restrict the legal affirmation of non-traditional families, hindering an inclusive legal response to the social transformation of the family. In other words, gender remains highly relevant not only in the adjudication of legal parenthood, but also in the legal affirmation of family form.