and misogyny originating from prevailing child rearing arrangements’.76 For psychoanalytical feminists, gender inequalities were based on an individual’s unique psycho-sexual development, not their biological differences. Early childhood experiences were key to the construction and promotion of gender roles in wider society, as boys and girls learn to be different by internalising the traits of masculinity and femininity that they witness in adults. Chodorow highlights the centrality of mothers in orienting boys and girls into different developmental paths. For example, boys learn to separate themselves from their mothers and identity with their fathers, and hence assume male supremacy. This departure results in boys developing autonomy and a less dependent persona, and reduces their capability for intimate and emotional relationships, which in turn suits them better as they mature and enter the public domain and assume their role as breadwinners. On the other hand, girls are not allowed to identify with their fathers but only with their mothers, which makes them less prepared for life in the public sphere but better suited to private spaces, including the family. They are also taught to perform traits of intimate personal and emotional relationships such as nurturing, care, and support.77 The solution identified by psychoanalytic feminists was dual parenting, which they envisioned would enable children to break away from viewing parenthood in a gender-categorised way. As ←47 | 48→a consequence, children would be able to experience both parents as self and other, and participate equally in private and public domains.
Gay Men, Lesbians and the Family
The very formation of the traditional family is built upon heterosexuality, so it could not historically accommodate gay men and lesbians. Starting from early childhood experiences, boys and girls are raised successively in line with the image of the dominant man and the submissive woman. Early on, children are indoctrinated into playing with the ‘right’ toys, those that connote boyishness and girlishness, even when these do not correlate with the individual child’s inclinations. When it comes to their adolescence, they are ‘expected to prove [themselves] socially to [their] parents as members of the right sex by either being a “right” man (oppressive) or a “right” woman (oppressed)’.78 According to heteropatriarchal ideology, a ‘right’ man is attracted to women; a ‘right’ woman is attracted to men. The attributes of hegemonic masculinity and femininity and heterosexuality embodied in the traditional family are presented as biological and hence unchangeable. Therefore, any deviation from these attributes is met with alarm and considered within the range of ‘abnormality’. As such, people who do not conform have been labelled as ‘deviants’, ‘neurotic’, ‘sick’, or ‘bent’, and as a potential threat to the family unit and social stability. Consequently, gay men and lesbians have been thrown out of their homes, not allowed to have family, pressurised into marriage, ostracised from social groups and sent to psychiatrists who historically deemed same-sex desire a mental disorder to be treated. For example, APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included homosexuality as a sexual deviation in the form of a pathologic behaviour from the first edition in 1952 up until 1973.79 The term was updated when the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council declared homosexuality not an illness. Gay people contested the claim that differences between men and women were normal, viewing it as propaganda of the patriarchal family and sexism, rather than the truth. In this way, they stepped out of the traditional notion of the family arrangement and rejected gender roles designed by society. Their critique of the heterosexual family puts the entire sexist culture ←48 | 49→and its institutions into question, alarming politicians and prompting them to call for a return to ‘family values’.
The first manifesto of the Gay Liberation Front was declared in London in 1971, which was followed by the first Gay Pride in 1972. The manifesto details the oppression of homosexual people through ‘physical violence and by ideological and psychological attacks at every level of social interaction’, including in both the public and private domains of family, school, media, employment, community, and the law.80 It offers solutions for gay people to bring revolutionary change to the whole society rather than temporary reforms, and contends that a real change for all lies in subverting the patriarchal family and sexism by allying with the Women’s Liberation Movement: ‘The end of sexist culture and of the family will benefit all women, and gay people’.81 Therefore, the manifesto calls gay people to rise up and step out of imperatives determined by the dominant heteronormative society and family.
Political lesbians and lesbian separatists contributed to the validity of non-normative families in challenging homophobia and backlash against lesbians. During the 1970s many lesbians had their children taken away from them based on the assumption that a lesbian could not be a ‘proper’ mother. During the 1970s and 1980s, a group of radical feminists voiced their support for political lesbianism, which fought against what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality and sexism by advocating lesbianism as a positive solution to women’s oppression.82 The divergence of political lesbianism from mainstream feminism moved the discussions of family into a new phase, in which women were invited to reject heterosexual relations and to embrace liberation in practice. For example, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Alice Echols considered married women to be ‘hostages’ trapped in the ‘anti-feminist’ institution of marriage and heterosexuality.83 Shelia Cronan suggested the abolition of marriage for women’s freedom, ←49 | 50→as it ‘constitutes a slavery for women’.84 Roxanne Dunbar stressed the importance of demanding ‘full-time childcare in public schools’ to free many women and enable them to make decisions, suggesting that the demand ‘alone will throw the whole ideology of family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and [they] can fight collectively’.85 Andrea Dworkin called upon women to renounce ‘all forms of male control and male domination’, and to destroy ‘the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison [women] in invisibility and victimization’.86 For Dworkin, the patriarchal system created a timeless cycle of victimisation for individuals:
Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.87
Marilyn French critiqued the family as promoting female subjection through male control of women’s sexuality. She further added that while women have always been subjects of disempowerment, degradation, and subjugation, men, particularly in the West, have ‘exploded in a frenzy of domination, trying to expand and tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature—people of color and women’.88 Marilyn Frye highlighted the connection between male dominance and naturalisation of female heterosexuality for perpetuating patriarchal systems.89 Shelly Jeffrey co-wrote Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism (1981) with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, arguing that ‘[a];ny woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations ←50 | 51→stronger’.90 Claiming that ‘[f]eminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’, political lesbianism critiqued the idea of reconfiguring familial arrangements as impractical as long as the heterosexual relations continue.91 Their solutions, though radical in tone, challenged the single form and meaning of the family, and celebrated families of choice.
Queer Kinship and Families of Choice
A significant challenge to the traditional family has come from lesbians and gay men, who have destabilised the heteronormative nature of the family by living outside traditional family arrangements. Judith Stacey introduces the concept of the postmodern family condition, in which as she contends, choice determines family composition. She maintains that the postmodern family ‘is not the next stage in an orderly progression of stages of family history;
