UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores explores how LGBT families with children experience and manage stigma in a sociohistorical moment marked by tensions between growing legal recognition and cultural acceptance and the persisting realities of heterosexism and homophobia. Drawing on intensive interviews with LGBT identified parents from 51 families, I find that, despite parents' low reports of direct hostility and overt discrimination in their daily lives, subtle expressions of stigma continue to shape the creation and day-to-day practice of their family relations. These experiences can be broken down into two categories: (1) anticipated stigmas, or the fear that oneself or one’s family will encounter violence, discrimination, or prejudice on the basis of their LGBT identities or queer family structure in the immediate or distant future; and (2) microaggressions, or subtle forms of insults, invalidations, and modes of discrimination that are consciously and unconsciously deployed in day-to-day interactions. Building on insights from the family practices and accounts scholarship in sociology, I found that parents manage these subtle forms of stigma through a range of family practices including: methods for having children, legal interventions taken in family building, how children refer to their parents, naming children, where they live, which schools their children attend, parent volunteerism in schools, and the degree to which a family is out in public spaces. I also found that parents’ stigma management strategies varied according position in family cycle and age of children. Parents with young children engaged in stigma management for their families directly and prepared children for future discriminatory encounters. Parents with adolescent and young adult children engaged in practices that, rather than directly manage stigma, provide children with a broad range of stigma management strategies that they may deploy in their day-to-day lives. These experiences of stigma and stigma management are also heavily shaped by normative expectations of monoracial families, whiteness, middle class norms, and biogenetic ties. However, I find in many cases that parents’ investment with normative cultural beliefs to be a pragmatic one that is marked with ambivalence. It is a stigma management strategy, a form of “protective normalcy” whose practice is, at least in part, motivated by concerns of heterosexism and homophobia that their families may encounter, now and in the future. This work has important implications for developing a better understanding of the subtle stigma experiences of LGBT families and other marginalized populations, even as overt discrimination and regressive policies diminish. It also expands theoretical understandings of stigma by closely examining how individuals think about stigma in relation to time. In other words, it is not just that experiences change over time but also how present day actions are shaped by hopes, fears, and aspirations for the near and distant future.