“Queer Stepfamilies” Shows “Our Families Exist”

Much previous research on queer parents and our children has focused on intact queer families (mostly with gay male or lesbian parents) formed through adoption or assisted reproduction, including surrogacy. Less attention has been paid to queer families formed when one or both parents had children from a previous relationship of any kind or had started their family as a single parent before partnering. A new book on queer stepfamilies helps to remedy that and sheds new light on what it means to be a queer family.

Georgia State University Associate Professor of Sociology Katie Acosta, author of Queer Stepfamilies: The Path to Social and Legal Recognition (New York University Press), came to the topic not only because of her professional expertise but also because of her personal experience. She had her child in a heterosexual relationship, raised him as a single parent for a number of years, and then met and married her wife. She and her son are Afro Latinx and her wife is White, and they live in a conservative state with a history of banning interracial couples. Wherever they went, she tells us, no one ever saw them as parents of their children. She thus became interested in seeing how other queer stepfamilies “do family,” defining who is in their family and what their rights and responsibilities are. Her book looks at the “messiness”—but also the resilience and strength—of families engaged in “plural parenting” involving three or four parents, often of varied sexual and gender identities, who are also navigating “legal and social systems that are ill-equipped to accommodate their needs.”

While grounded in academic research, the book generally avoids jargon, quotes extensively from the family interviews, and feels readable for anyone interested in the subject. it is based on interviews with 51 individuals in 43 stepfamilies living in 18 states and the District of Columbia, primarily in southern states. Twenty-nine families had children originally conceived or adopted in a previous heterosexual relationship, 11 had children originally conceived or adopted in a previous same-sex relationship, and three had children conceived by single parents. Thirty-five participants identified as White, three as Asian, six as Latinx, three as African American or Black, and four as biracial and/or multiethnic. Twenty-two of the 43 families, however, included at least one member who identified as other than White. Acosta limited the study to people assigned female at birth, explaining that regardless of their actual identities, family courts would have seen them as mothers and stepmothers, and thus they would have had similar experiences through the legal system. While most were cisgender women, some were genderqueer, gender nonconforming, and/or gender ambiguous, or partnered or plural parenting with a transgender person.

Most of the interviews were conducted in 2013–17. Because marriage equality was only available nationwide starting in 2015, only 16 of the subject families had legal recognition as stepfamilies, since in most states, a “stepparent” is defined as someone raising a legal spouse’s children.  Even today, Acosta observes, “There is no national standard for how these families or the children they are raising are to be treated in family court, which leaves judges with a great deal of discretion to decide who does and does not count as a parent.”

Same-sex couples and their children may experience stepfamily formation differently than different-sex couples, she notes. Children with “origin parents” of different sexes may suddenly have to deal with the stigma of being raised by queer parents. For queer stepparents, it may be hard to construct a parent identity given “the lack of social and legal validation of their roles.” And for same-sex origin parents, it can be “agonizing” to navigate ending a relationship “in the same courts that refused same-sex couples the right the marry in the first place.” Yet queer stepfamilies are also finding ways to create plural parenting arrangements as “testaments that families can and do include individuals with whom we do not share biology or legality.”

Acosta turns first to what plural parenting looks like for the families in her study, and looks at how the arrangements vary depending on whether the children originally came from a same- or different-sex relationship. She then explores the various roles that stepparents take on in their families. Next, she focuses on the mixed-race families in the study, noting that monoracial stepfamilies (like Natasha and Marie) can sometimes capitalize on being (mis)recognized as a legal family in a way that mixed-race families cannot. She looks, too, at the considerations for queer stepfamilies who brought additional children into their families; the experiences queer stepfamilies had in court during their children’s custody cases; how their general distrust of family courts impacted how they planned to protect their families; and the legal vulnerabilities that remain.

One of the most important findings was that the parents and their children in the study “were actively and intentionally involved in the process of rejecting existing prescriptions not only of heteronormativity but also of homonormativity.” She explains:

They present their families not as the same as middle-class heterosexual couples’ but as unapologetically distinct. The study families send cues that their family’s existence follows a dissolution. In allowing for plural parenting, they are embracing that history and are not just saying our families are like heterosexual people’s families. Instead, they are saying, “Our families exist.”

The children in these families facilitated the recognition of their families, “by redefining what it means to be siblings and have more than two parents in their lives and by emphasizing the uniqueness of their formation stories.” They encouraged others to recognize these queering efforts “by inventing language to name the members of their families whose affinity to them is not captured by existing categories.” This happened organically for the children, without the burdens of societal expectations, Acosta says. While their parents felt the weight of those expectations, “their choosing to develop kinship with their (or their partner’s) former partners was a radical act of love and resistance.”

Those engaged in plural parenting will likely value this book for sharing the stories, solutions, and struggles of others in similar situations. Others involved with supporting, advocating for, or writing about LGBTQ families in general, however, should read it, too, in order to better understand the full range of what being part of a queer family may encompass.