LGBTQ+ Families

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including community-based and probability-based samples and administrative records, these papers examine how sexual and gender-diverse people "do" family, attending to the everyday practices, negotiations, and labor through which they form partnerships, raise children, and "queer" the processes and institutions that shape family life. Two studies examine how dominant reproductive norms around gender conformity, aging, and the timing of family formation shape the reproductive desires and decisions of sexual and gender-diverse individuals, and how LGBTQ+ people both internalize and creatively subvert those expectations. A third study situates the experiences of trans-parents and their children, investigating how parental gender transition reorganizes family life and redistributes responsibility intergenerationally. A second set of studies examines what legal and social recognition makes possible and what it leaves unresolved, investigating how partnership and marriage shape physical health and earnings trajectories and for whom those benefits materialize. Together, these papers show how sexual and gender-diverse people "queer" the processes and relationships through which families are defined, while also revealing how the institutions that structure family life distribute their benefits unevenly.

Sub Unit

• Family Section / LGBTQ+ Families

Presider

• Christopher Adam Julian, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Circulating Responsibility: Children’s Emotional, Interpretive, and Interactional Labor in Trans-Parent Families - Jaclyn Ann Tabor, Lincoln Land Community College

• Conformity, Compensation, and Resistance: Gender Conformity and Fertility Desire across Sexual Orientations - Jisu Park, Pennsylvania State University; Hyunjae Kwon, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• How Much and for Whom Does Partnership Protect Sexual Minorities from Physical Health Disparities? - Stefanie Mollborn, Stockholm University; Bethany G Everett, University of Utah; Richard Bränström, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

• Queering the ‘biological clock:’ Age and family formation among LGBTQ+ parents - Katherine Sobering, University of North Texas; Amanda Jean Stevenson, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Unequal Unions? Marriage, Earnings Trajectories, and Intrahousehold Inequality in Same-Sex and Different-Sex Couples - Chih-lan (Winnie) Yang, University of Alberta

Discussant

• DLane R. Compton, University of New Orleans

Session Organizer

• Christopher Adam Julian, Vanderbilt University