When My Parents Came to the Queer Ball: Emotion Work in Adult Child-parent Relationships

• In Event: 431 - Regular Session. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies 2

Abstract

How do LGBT adults negotiate the participation of their parents in queer spaces? I contend that, like all relationships between adult children and parents, these negotiations are fraught with gendered emotion work. This paper analyzes how queer adults navigate the participation of their parents at masque ball events run by LGBT clubs or krewes in the Gulf South during Carnival season. These queer events include exhibitions of potentially disreputable aspects of queer culture, including drag, same-sex eroticism, and scantily dressed individuals, and preclude LGBT individuals from covering or downplaying their sexuality. Rather than a show of respectable queerness, these events initiate heterosexual parents who have little previous experience in LGBT spaces into queer culture. For this study, I conducted qualitative fieldwork during Mardi Gras events and 29 interviews with LGBT members of krewes in Mobile, Alabama, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I argue that LGBT adults navigate their own anxiety and their parents’ comfort in queer spaces through educating their parents, managing disreputability, and creating their parents’ comfort. These navigations are best understood as emotion work (Hochschild 1983) and vary depending on the gender of both parent and child. Most research on emotion work focuses on romantic or marital relationships to the neglect of the fraught and complex relationships between adult children and their parents. Parents’ successful integration into queer spaces results in “payoffs” of acceptance that are rich in emotional and symbolic significance for adult children.

Author

• Amy L. Stone, Trinity University