Response to Igartua: Parenthood as Politics

Abstract

This response to Karine Igartua's paper begins by noting the important role that the personal narrative has acquired in mental health scholarship, especially of marginalized groups. The author uses the content of Dr. Igartua's narrative as a stimulus to explore the anxiety that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people frequently experience in association with parenting. He argues that a significant root of the devaluing of GLBT parenting is the unfounded cultural idealization of hypernatural conception, defined as the parent/child's blood relation authorized by the state through marriage. The GLBT community has defended against this devaluation principally by trying to shift the definitions of the signifiers mother and father so that pairing them, that is, claiming that a family can have two mothers or two fathers, does not constitute a contradiction in terms. The author argues that this strategy is unlikely to succeed because it fails to defeat the connotative contradiction inherent in “two-mom” and “two-dad” families, is no match for the superior cultural support that the “natural” family receives, and because as a hetero-imitative practice it may encourage the very dogmas that harm us. He suggests that a better strategy might be for the GLBT community to tolerate the anxiety of anomie, that is, endure our exclusion from the current gender-based and naturalist system of naming and legitimating parent/child configurations, while we embrace the opportunity to consider new cultural forms.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• mother
• father
• idealization
• fertility
• two-mom
• two-dad
• GLBT
• natalism
• GLBT parent
• gay parenting
• gay adoption
• same-sex parents
• hypernatural conception
• gay parent narratives

David Schwartz is Member, Editorial Boards, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, is a graduate of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and is in private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Westchester and Manhattan.

Notes

1. The hierarchy of differently valued child-raising situations is roughly paralleled by a hierarchy of the relative values of different sexual behaviors that has been detailed by Gail Rubin (1992).

2. Unless, of course you agree with me, that insofar as tolerance and flexibility are desirable traits, these data show the superiority of gay/lesbian parenting situations.

3. I would argue that homophobia itself is a construction that arises out of the traditional gendered language of human ontogenesis. Homosexuality is the antithesis of reproduction, given the way our culture conceives reproduction, and thus a danger to society.

4. Some gay men have expressed to me their hesitancy to pursue parenting based on their worry that they will be deficient at doing the expected (and needed, they imply) masculine activities, such as playing ball, with their future sons. Others have coded their internalized dread of their gender deviance's harmful effect on children by reference to their “narcissism” (translation: femininity as per Socarides), as though narcissism were not itself a motivator to be a parent.

5. Historically children have been used as a bludgeon against the GLBT community as the right has shamelessly and mendaciously proffered images of recruitment and child molestation as the natural bedfellows of homosexuality.