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Sociology

How Queer Families Struggle for Recognition

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Prof. Mona Motakef, Dr. Julia Teschlade und Prof. Christine Wimbauer (v.l.n.r.) © Privat
Prof. Mona Motakef, Dr. Julia Teschlade, and Prof. Christine Wimbauer (from left to right) have investigated how LGBTQ+ families establish normality and fight for recognition as part of a DFG project.
In recent years, LGBTQ+ families – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer – have become more visible in society. Greater equality is increasingly embedded in German law, for example in the “Marriage For All” bill and the Self-Determination Act. Nevertheless, large-scale discrimination persists, and new forms of exclusion can also be seen. In this interview, Mona Motakef, Professor for Sociology of Gender Relations at TU Dortmund University, together with Dr. Julia Teschlade and Professor Christine Wimbauer from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, talk about findings from their joint research work. In a project funded by the German Research Foundation, the team spoke with LGBTQ+ families and examined how they create normality and struggle for recognition – and by so doing bring about lasting change in social attitudes.

Professor Motakef, where in everyday life do LGBTQ+ families still encounter obstacles?

Professor Mona Motakef: Sexual orientation and gender identity are still central causes of social inequality and accompanied by unequal scope for action and opportunities in life. For a long time, LGBTQ+ people were denied the right to start a family at all. The first obstacle, therefore, is for them to be able to imagine themselves as parents in the first place. Only then can they think about the options available to them and which ones they want to use – for the following reason: Who can, wants to, should or is allowed to become a parent and how they do it depends on legal, medical, biological and personal factors – it is often very complicated and expensive, especially when reproductive medicine is involved. Even after they have started a family, many people experience legal, institutional and everyday inequalities. Examples include the obligation for lesbian couples to adopt their stepchildren or the lack of rights for social parents in multi-parent families. Under the old Transsexuals Act, transgender parenting was even made legally impossible. To this day, it is still not clearly regulated – a transgender mother is still named as the father on her child’s birth certificate. In everyday life, this means that families must constantly prove they are “proper” families.

Dr. Teschlade, your research has shown that families “must create normality”. What does that mean in concrete terms? And what does it reveal about how society deals with the diversity of family forms?

Dr. Julia Teschlade: Normality is no easy feat for queer families – they must actively bring it about. In general, families with heterosexual parents do not have to do this because our society is still structured around heteronormativity. By way of example: A lesbian couple told us that they knock on all their neighbors’ doors with homemade cake when they move into a new home. They take preventive action out of fear that other people will speak disparagingly about them because they do not live in a heterosexual relationship. Others presented themselves to us as the “model family” and emphasized their “normality” – regular employment, monogamous sexuality, traditional values as far as raising their children is concerned. For us, this does not indicate apolitical conformity to heterosexual norms, but rather an existentially necessary response to experienced inequalities and discrimination. This creation of normality is complicated and exhausting, but essential for protecting their own lives from attacks, abasement and hurt. This tremendous effort is, however, usually invisible.

Professor Wimbauer, in your work, you talk about many different “struggles for recognition”. In your opinion, which of these struggles have particularly far-reaching consequences? To what extent do they contribute to changing the law and society’s normal conceptions of family?

Professor Christine Wimbauer: The struggles for legal equality have particularly far-reaching consequences – from “marriage for all” to the recognition of multi-parent constellations and transgender parenting–. But everyday practices of normalization can also be understood as a form of struggle for recognition. Moreover, it can also be seen in LGBTQ+ families that care responsibilities and other reproductive work is unevenly distributed depending on gender and often receives too little recognition. Gender inequalities come to light here that are well known in heterosexual couples, such as everyday care responsibilities, mental load, and more besides. Our research also sheds light on society’s non-recognition of queer reproductive work, which LGBTQ+ families are obliged to undertake and at the same time conceal in the face of the obstacles and extra effort involved in everyday family life. It is these struggles, however, that in turn contribute to changing dominant notions of family. They expand the legal and social norms of what parenthood and family are and can be.

New publication
The team led by Professor Mona Motakef, Dr. Julia Teschlade and Professor Christine Wimbauer recently published its research results in a new book entitled “Auf dem Weg zur Normalität? LGBTQ+-Familien und ihr Kampf um Anerkennung”.

To the book (German only)

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