“It’s the gender question my mom really has an issue with”: Understanding Cisnormativity in Families

• In Event: 40466 - Child Gender, Parenting, and Intergenerational Relationships Across the Life Course

Abstract

Families are often a gender and sexuality factory oriented towards the production of cisgender, heterosexual people. Successful parenting or being a “good” parent is linked to whether a child is heterosexual, cisgender, and gender conforming, but the entire family works together to produce cisgender, heterosexual people. Generally, scholars have theorized about how families in the U.S. reproduce heteronormativity, but have paid less attention to cisnormativity, or the systematic normalization of cisgender gender subjectivities and embodiments. Studying cisnormativity in family life is critical for sociological knowledge about gender, as the family might be “the prime institution for the reproduction of cisnormativity." Using qualitative interviews with 60 youth from the longitudinal study, Family Housing and Me (FHAM) Project, we examine how transgender and nonbinary youth who also identify as minoritized sexual identities navigate disclosure around gender identity differently than sexual identity with their families. We use trans family systems framework, which articulates the interactional processes by which family members uphold cisnormativity in family life. We believe that the logic that youth use around disclosure of gender identity illustrate the complex ways that cisnormativity operates within family life. In this disclosure, youth may incrementally disclose aspects of their gender or sexual identity and engage in "strategic outness", or the "continual contextual management” of disclosure around gender and sexual identity. This management of disclosure reveals some logics of how cisnormativity operates in family life. Family investments in gender conformity and cisgender identity diffuse throughout this process.

Authors

• Amy L. Stone, Trinity University

• Brandon Andrew Robinson, University of California-Riverside