The triumph of surrogacy: competing social scripts and the rise of family-normativity in the male-gay community in Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the development of social scripts and their acceptance as a norm using the case of fatherhood through surrogacy in the gay community in Israel. Gay fatherhood became normalized in Israel since the mid-1990s, and surrogacy has become the homonormative fatherhood choice during the last decade. The paper is based on two qualitative studies involving 60 in-depth interviews with Israeli gay men who chose to become fathers (by means of adoption, surrogacy or co-parenting, as singles, couples or multi-parent families). Their narratives give both a temporal account, of how the gay community in Israel used to perceive child-bearing practices in the past, as well as an overview of the practices and social norms that are manifested in the community today. We show that initially, during the 1970s and 1980s, counter-hegemonic scripts evolved, rejecting the heteronormative ideal of natality. Later on, during the 1990s a second script involved separating parenthood from couple-based relationships and developing separate co-parenthood relationships. Since 2005, with the appearance of surrogacy as a medical, social and legal option, these previous discourses subsided and were replaced by the new couple-based fatherhood script. In a society that embraces child-bearing and medically assisted reproduction, surrogacy offered gay men the possibility of becoming a family ‘like any other’.