Lovers, legal strangers, and parents: Negotiating parental and sexual identity in family law

This is a study of meaning making and identity construction in child custody cases involving gay or lesbian parents. In it, I investigate the language of all such recorded decisions over the past 50 years, focusing on how judges-in interaction with the litigants before them-construct, negotiate, deny, and confirm the sexual and familial identities of the parents and would-be parents involved in these custody contests. Employing a constitutive framework and drawing on the social, scientific, and feminist literatures on sexuality, family, and law, I find that through multiple discursive processes, from self-representation to imposition to negotiation of new spaces of compromise, family law actors bring together sexual and familial statuses often treated as exclusive of each other.