20 Corinne P„ Hay den The complicated historical relationship between ideas about homosexuality and concepts of "the family" in American culture makes the idea of gay and lesbian families - "chosen" or "created" - a provocative one in the study of American kinship. Insofar as lesbians and gay men have been ideologically excluded from the realm of kinship in American culture (Weston 1991:4-6), it is perhaps not surprising that claims to the legitimacy of gay and lesbian family configurations are often articulated and contested in terms of their perceived difference from (or similarity to) normative ideologies of "the American family." In her pivotal work, Families We Choose (1991), Kath Weston argues for the distinctiveness of a certain configuration of gay and lesbian kinship in which biological ties are decentered and choice, or love, becomes the defining feature of kin relationships. For Weston, gay and lesbian chosen families are neither derivative of, nor substititutes for, "straight," biological families; rather, they are distinctive in their own right (1991:210). Eilen Lewin takes a markedly different approach to the value of distinctiveness in her recent book, Lesbian Mothers (1993). By her own account exceeding the goal of her earlier work on maternal custody strategies - showing that lesbian mothers are "j ust as good" as heterosexual mothers - Lewin finds that "motherhood" in American culture constitutes a defining feature of womanho that indeed supersedes the "difference" of 1( bian identity (1993:3). In this reading, iherc nothing particularly unique about the \v;ivs which lesbian mothers negotiate related™ and relationships. Though they are not explicitly foreground in such terms, I would argue that these t\ pivotal ethnographies together sugge.sr tl "biology," broadly conceived, is a cruci-il a; around which claims to the "distinctiveness" gay and lesbian kinship revolve. Thus the rel tive centrality of biology in gay and Icbbi. families might be seen to signal a corolla assimilation into, or departure from, "'tra itional" forms of American kinship. In rl logic, the argument would read as follow when biological ties are displaced (as in Vft ton's work), claims to distinctiveness c in made; where biological ties are central iesr cially in the case of motherhood), claims difference lose their relevance or legitimacy I want to disrupt the flow of this argnme on several levels. To that end, this article is. exploration of the ways in which many Icíbi; mothers employ notions of biology, in the eo text of donor insemination, to articulate cht own sense of uniquely lesbian kinship. í ofŕi then, an ethnographic reading of specific luii' of claims I have encountered in recent lesbia feminist writings, newspaper articles, cot GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 379 back and forth between "new" and "old" ideas allows for the possibility of reformulating existing symbols in creative and meaningful ways. - and informal conversations. I must stress these particular articulations of lesbian Hal desire in no way offer a "representa-1 stance on parenting within lesbian and communities.1 On the one hand, the ques-0f whether or not to become a parent has a and complicated history for many gay and lesbians; for lesbians in particular, entrality of motherhood to American cul-narratives of womanhood has long made lering a particularly potent site of contest-i. Current articulations of the radical po-al of lesbian families must be placed in the context of continuing debates over nductive "choice" - and the choice not to ier _ within various lesbian and feminist minifies. q the other hand, for lesbians and gay men are parents, the two-parent "intentional" ly (Lewin 1993} is obviously not the only si. Lesbians and gay men have children ■igb previous heterosexual relationships; adopt children; they are single parents or children with several co-parents. More-gay and lesbian parenting families have existed, and certainly predate the current est in "alternative" families. I focus specif-r on lesbians who create families through ■ >r insemination not because they are a de-g model for lesbian kinship (if there could ich a thing) but rather because of the par-ir ways in which biology is made both cit and mutable in these visions of a "dis-" family configuration.3 Moreover, these is to a uniquely lesbian kinship often chal-: the (heterosexual) gender configuration is foundational to American cultural >ns of kinship. These articulations of les-families thus provide a context in which to nue important theoretical discussions of elationship among gender, sexuality, and lip (see Collier and Yanagisako 1987; n 1975; Weston 1991). want to follow Marilyn Strathern in :ing the temptation to argue for wholly 1 conceptual developments in ideas about lip, though I do hope to retain space imagining how "images pressed into new :e acquire new meanings" (Strathern -b:15). Such an approach assumes from cutset that there is nothing "truly new" r the sun; at the same time, the continual Taking on "American Kinship" The claim to a distinctive gay and lesbian kinship elicits questions about the elasticity of American kinship as a symbolic system and implies the possibility of transforming the dominant model of American kinship. Such moves call for a clarification of exactly what kind(s) of kinship one has in mind and how one chooses to define dominant, transformative, or derivative versions of American kinship. Though it has been challenged on many fronts, the foundational model of American kinship laid out by David Schneider (1980[1968]) more than 25 years ago remains an enduring one. Discussions of gay and lesbian kinship, and arguments about its sameness (and therefore derivative nature) or difference (implying the potential for transformation), continue to resonate with the terms that Schneider set forth in 1968. American kinship, he argued, is a symbolic system resting on the two contrasting but mutually dependent elements of blood (shared biogenetic substance) and love (a code for conduct both legitimating the creation of blood ties and governing the behavior of those who are related by blood). Characterizing Americans' (and American anthropologists') understanding of kinship as a "folk theory of biological reproduction," Schneider declared the symbol of (hetero) sexual intercourse -mediating and mediated by blood and marriage - as central to American kinship (1980[1968]:37-38). Not surprisingly, this premise has been made problematic by lesbians and gay men, who have been symbolically excluded from the realm of kinship. The supposed exclusion from, and threat to, family that marks gay men and lesbians has amounted to a virtual denial of their cultural citizenship, as Weston has noted (1991:4-6). Indeed, one has only to glance at the most basic manifestations of homophobia in the United States to grasp their foundation on the interdependent web of kinship, sexuality, gender, and procreation. Exemplified by the pseudo-evolutionary theory 380 CORINNE P. HAYDEN that homosexuals must recruit progeny because they cannot reproduce themselves, this particular version of the "threat to family" argument highlights the ways in which hetero-sexuality, gender, and kinship are mutually constituted.4 The perceived centrality of procreative sexuality to the stability of "the family" underlies such familiar statements as, "I have a problem with homosexuals who flaunt what they're doing... before the public in an effort to destroy and break down family life___The family creates. Homosexuals only cause trouble. They can't create anything" (Glasgow quoted in Green 1991:1-2}. It is likewise this notion of creativity that figures so strongly in claims to the legitimacy of gay and lesbian families, with or without children. At stake in such contests over creativity is the meaning of sexual intercourse in American kinship and, subsequently, the ways in which blood and love are privileged as defining features of families. Weston notes the ways in which chosen families complicate "traditional" notions of biood and love: "Familial ties between persons of the same sex that may be erotic but are not grounded in biology or procreation do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage" (1991:3, emphasis added). Weston's work focuses on families of friends and lovers -"chosen families" that challenge the sanctity of blood and marriage as the sole determinants of legitimate kin ties. Although these chosen families bring up crucial questions about kinship without biological connections (or without the expectation of creating biological kin through procreation), quite different questions arise in the creation of lesbian and gay parenting families in which biology, via procreation, reenters the picture. Using Weston's work as a foundation for exploring lesbian and gay critiques of the central premises of American kinship, I will focus below on the complicated intersections of biological procreation and lesbian kinship. I am interested not simply in the assertion that biology is mobilized in articulations of "uniquely" lesbian family configurations; my concern lies more in the ways in which the symbol of biology is unpacked, dispersed, and distributed within these configurations. In this way, certain articulations of lesbian kinship provide important ground on which to theorize biology as a s that is continually refigured within the coi symbolic field(s) of American kinship. Love Makes a Family7 Weston implicates chosen families in an cit challenge to the dominant model of Á can kinship and its foundation in proci and biological ties. In Families We Cboo writes, The very notion of gay families asserts people who claim nonprocreative sexual tities ... can lay claim to family ties of own. ...Theirs has not been a propns number gay families among variaiions in "American kinship," but a more comprehensive attack on the privilege accorded m a fc;t)_ genetically grounded mode of derer in inin» what relationships will count as kinship [1991:35, emphasis in original] The families to which Weston refers arc farr ilies forged out of ties to friends and lover United by choice and love, not by biologic; ties or the expectation of creating such, uhcb families clearly set themselves apart from th dominant model of American kinship and ii maxim that "blood is thicker than waler. Without denying that blood ties "work (Strathern 1992b), chosen families nonethelei level a profound critique at the cmirality i American kinship of heterosexual, prncreativ relationships and the biogenetic ties that aris from these relationships. Weston clearly believes that chosen ŕamilk are neither imitative nor derivative of the dorr inant model of American kinship. Kuthcr, sh argues that they constitute a distinctive form c kinship, contrastive rather than analogous t straight kinship (Weston 1991:211)." Süll, sh maintains that choice cannot be read as Ijcens to create a family structure unfettered by cor ventional notions of kinship. Situating chose families within the bounded symbolic univers of American kinship, Weston's analysis posits continuum in which gay, chosen families hav emerged in explicit opposition to, but coexist ing with, straight, biological families. Thus th very idea of chosen families become-, tnctininij ful only in the context of the cultural belief i the power of blood ties (Weston 199 1:211). GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 381 "here is another dimension to chosen fam-,' position within the dominant symbolic ■rix of American kinship. In her review of families We Choose, Strathern writes that per-. pS the fundamental critique enacted through '-[■»sen families is that they "make explicit the ilC[ that there was always a choice as to .father or not biology is made the foundation 0f relationships" (1992b:3). This, indeed, is one of Schneider's centra! points throughout American Kinship: though Americans believe riiiu blood determines family, there is and 'hvciys has been a necessary element of choice n [he degree to which blood ties become '■relationships" in any given family (not to mention the ways in which blood ties ■x:c conceived in the first place) (Schneider pJS0[1968]:62-63; see also Strathern 1981). St hneider's and Strathern's reminders of the cení: ality of choice in heterosexual kinship dis-loilííe biology from its privileged place in that iiinJel; they assert unequivocally that there is iniLĽJi more at work in the creation of kinship m American culture than a fervent belief in the sdr-evidence of blood ties might allow. In the co-rext of lesbian and gay kinship, this distil.!., ement of biology as the central and defining -eature of family connotes a challenge to thť Jirect, exclusive correlation that is assumed between heterosexual procreation and the production of kin ties. hi Strathern's analysis, chosen families challenge the privilege enjoyed by straight kinship bv shifting the emphasis from blood to choice these women associate with heterosexual ilies. Such understandings of lesbian pare allege, on the one hand, that hetemscxi contains built-in power inequities; b) con lesbian mothers claim to offer gender eq. and therefore parental equality. Counteracting the accusations that same-sex relationships are^ by definition, pathological (and therefore detrimental to children's development), manv mental health professionals and theorists contend that the gender configurations of gay and lesbian relationships are indeed as healthy as, if not healthier than, those of their straight counterparts.10 Contributing to this compensatory project is psychologist Margaret Nic I ink who writes, In my experience, far too many heterosexual relationships become bogged down in ihe mire of sex-role conflicts and never transcend these conflicts to a point where both partners1 see each other as full human beings. 1 du not mean to imply that lesbian and gay rcLirinri-ships are without conflict, simply that the conflicts... are certainly much less likeU- to exhibit the vast power differentials rh.u c:n be found in many heterosexual telation-.bis.is. [1987:102] If the absence of gender difference is. portrayed as a positive attribute, then the gendering of both partners as female is seen to multiply the benefits exponentially. Suzanne Cusick writes that a lesbian relationship is a relationship based on non-power - lhar .»■., a relationship in which a porous bnunJ.iry GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 383 ists at all moments between she who seems have the power and she who doesn't, owing for a flow of power in both directs. No one in the relationship is formed to the power figure, though all can play at it. 991: 10, emphasis added] eroticizing this last point for a moment, the ,is of equal or fluid power - given the prem->f non-power - forms the basis of a politici view of the potential for difference in ain lesbian co-parenting families. Thus, ring and raising a child in a lesbian house-J is understood as a tool for "radical -herhood" to combat "heteromothering" oper 1987:223); a "unique opportunity in ory to raise children in a home with two jnts with potentially equal power" (Polik-1987: 329); or, on the other side of the coin, iaps creates a perverse environment in ch men and women do not "adhere to r roles" (Polikoff 1990:560). i urther, as Cusick's erotic gender equation amply suggests, gender roles within kinship are inextricably linked to the act and symbol of sex icself. Schneider contends that sexual intercourse is a central symbol in American kinship huause it is through sex (or the symbol thereof) that blood ties are created and family relationships mediated: Sexual intercourse (the act of procreation) is die symbol which provides the distinctive fea-:■.! res in terms of which both the members of v.e family as relatives and the family as a LLilture unit are defined and differentiated. 11980 {1968):31] He continues, "Father is the genitor, mother I he genetrix of the child which is their m'Kpring___Husband and wife are lovers and the child is the product of their love as well as the object of their love" (1980[1968]:43). In i hoe terms, lesbian parents do not fit easily into American kinship. Genetrix and genitor .ne not interchangeable; to replace one with ihe other is dramatically to change the character of the union between parents. The union between man and woman (as husband and wife) is one imbued with deep symbolic mean-iiäji in American culture, not the least of which it, as Schneider says, the means through which family relationships are created and thtlerentiated. Strathern notes that this symbolic union is also deeply imbued with gendered relations of power: In... Euro-American formulations, male and female parents are differently placed with respect to parenthood: an equal union is also an asymmetric pairing___The relationship of the sexual act to conception is not, therefore, simply a technical one. It serves to reproduce parenthood as the perceived outcome of a union in which the parties are distinguished by gender. Apart from anything else, it thus plays a conceptually significant part in procreation. [1992a:4, emphasis added] In an analysis conscious of gender and power relations, a family mediated by lesbian sex arguably makes kinship look different than a family "unified" through the sexual relationship between mother and father. Strathern clearly implicates sexual intercourse in the symbolic reproduction of structural gender relations. For those invested in a feminist reworking of parental roles, the unity symbolized by lesbian lovers as mothers reproduces a different gender and power configuration through which the lesbian family is organized. To follow the logic of Collier and Yanagisako's argument that gender and kinship are mutually constituted, this particular understanding of lesbian kinship carves out its own place along the spectrum of American kinships precisely because it refigures the alignment of gender and power roles which have traditionally marked the American family. All Lesbian Mothers Do Not Create Equally As might be expected, this somewhat Utopian, egalitarian vision of lesbian kinship runs into trouble in the face of a legal structure that retains its historic commitment to the equation of blood ties with family. The promise that some women see in lesbian families - the opportunity to raise children in an environment of gender equality - is often thrown into disarray when one partner bears a child. Having children through donor insemination automatically introduces its own asymmetry into the relationship among lesbian parents and child. The "birth mother" has a validated and 85 GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 385 immediately recognizable relationship with her child, while her partner (as neither a biological parent nor a legally recognized spouse) is doubly excluded from the realm of kinship. Her marginality is expressed in the dearth of established, much less positive, terms for the role of the "co-mother." Often represented as the proverbial "lack," she is the "nonbiological mother," the "nonbirth mother," the "other mother" (Riley 1988:89). This structural inequality is perceived to have profound repercussions for the dynamics of lesbian families. Psychologist Sally Crawford writes, When the relationship between parents is unrecognized... then no matter how defined the system may be internally, ex-lovers, ex-husbands, and members of the couple's family of origin can often walk in and walk out at will, as though the family unit does not exist. [1987:203] One mother notes, "If the family structure is not reflected legally, then our families are distorted, they're not supported, and we're not able to function fully as the families we are" (Keen 1991:8) While both mothers may talk of the ways their family is distorted by the lack of legal recognition, co-mother and birth mother often express significantly different concerns. Toni Tortorilla writes, There is no readily definable slot [for nonbiological parents in a lesbian or gay relationship]. The parameters of society's vision are stretched by our very existence___And yet, though standing outside the protection and sanction of the system, many aduits still choose to enter into a parental role with the children of their lovers. They commit time and energy to loving, nurturing, and supporting these children while risking the changes which could lead to separation from those whose lives they nourished and formed- It is a risk the biological parent often minimizes or fails to recognize in her own need for support with childrearing. [1987: 174] Another woman writes of feeling like a fraud "if I act like he's my baby. I'm afraid someone will ask me about labor or my husband or something. I have to keep telling myself he is my baby and he will be perceived that way because it's the truth" (Gray 1987:1 If phasis in original). Though not articulated as frequent iv tl a flip side to this imbalance, which one w terms "The Comother's Choice." She wr, Kathleen is angry that I have [a choice J. vj doubts - "I don't know if I can do my wrilino and be in This Situation" - all poim to the imbalance between us. She can't chuose anv more-----Andrew is the new life. Thai's not the choice I made. That's the choice ol the biological mother. I chose parenting without complete sacrifice. [Gray 1987:137] The dilemmas engendered by the absence o a biological tie between a child and ai-moihc illuminate the centraHty of blood tics to thi dispensation of familial rights and obligatio» in American kinship. The element ol choice ú these families simultaneously heightens tin sense of "risk," "creativity," and trecdon from "complete sacrifice" for the nonbiologica partner. The myriad ways in whiJi leshiai mothers attempt to legitimize their f.miih structures by rectifying this asymmeirv, svm bolically and legally, demonstrate the complex ity with which the symbol of the blood tit retains its salience even in the midsr of an ex plicit challenge to certain "traditional" notion: of American kinship. Blood and Other Fluid Symbols In contrast to the attempts by chosen familic: to decentralize biology in kinship, many gaj and lesbian co-parenting families often .ittemp to create equality between parents precisely b; establishing a figurative or literal sharing o. blood between the nonbiological modier anc her child. Whether calling up the meiaphor o shared blood ties or creating a more direc genetic link between co-mother and child these families employ biology as an iiiiportaiv symbol that can be articulated and embodied ir a number of ways. In the recent case Alison D. v. Virginia M (552 N.Y.S.2d 321), in which the co-morhei petitioned for a hearing for visitation right: after she and her partner separated, one Amte. Curiae brief (Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition et al. 1990) delineated explicit action: generally taken by co-parents to indicate fheii [tfiition to enter into a fully functioning parita! role with their children. The brief cites tions that imply a desire to maintain an equal .:titionship between parents vis-ä-vis the iild. These actions include combining or hy-»iviiating the co-parents' names to form the iilid's surname, "a practice which identifies the child with both co-parents," and having t|ie child call both parents names that reflect clUiai parental obligations, as in "Daddy Yt'ayne and Daddy Sol," or "Momma G and Momma D" (Gay and Lesbian Parents Coaii-[wn et al. 1990:29-31). Further, they often "manifest their equal roles as parents by having the parents and siblings - on both sides - par-tkipate as aunts, uncles, and grandparents" ;(,,iy and Lesbian Parents Coalition et al. [vV0:31, emphasis added). Kinship terms thus hcLome one medium through which gay and leóian co-parenting families declare equal cairns, for both parents, to a legitimate relationship with their children. These relationships and their assertion of familial love L;L.irly infer blood ties (and the rights and obligations that accompany blood relations) among children, parents, and extended family. The mobilization of kinship terms is part of an overall display of "deliberateness," a symbolic flag that signals partners' commitment to to:-ning a "real" family. As the Amid brief si.ues, "The acts and declarations of co-parents leave little doubt that they intend to assume all the obligations of parenthood, including financial support, on a permanent basis" (Gay and 1 e^bian Parents Coalition et al. 1990:29). Part of i he determination of intent to form a family is, arguably, co-parents' extensive deliberation over the decision to have a child: "These couples take the act of parenting very seriously" (Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition ft.il. 1990:29). This strategy leads to an intriguing attempt to locate the metaphor of biological, generative power in the co-parent. Claiming that co-parents engage in a joint decision to raise a child, the Amid brief argues that lesbians and gay men claim an active role, both figuratively -md literally, in the creation of the child: \'- is because both co-parents wish to act as parents that a child is brought into their home. The non-biological co-parent is thus partly re- sponsible for the child's presence in the home, or even for the child's very existence___The non-biological co-{mother] typically participates in every step of the... pregnancy to the fullest extent possible. [Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition et aí. 1990:32, emphasis added] By asserting the co-parent's responsibility for the existence of the child, gay and lesbian parents make clear their investment in the central relationship between procreation and unity within the family. On one level, such a declaration of procreative agency is equally significant for both gay men and lesbians, given the context of a cultural logic in which gay and lesbian relationships are deemed illegitimate because of their figurative impotence/sterility. Further, the appropriation of generative power specifically by a lesbian co-parent places her squarely in the realm of (male) authorship. She grounds her claim to chosen motherhood in the image of agency and biological creativity - an image that has defined American cultural conceptions of the male contribution to procreation. As Carol Delaney (1986) has argued, the cultural narrative of paternity as authorship positions the male contribution as central and irreplaceable to the identity of the product of conception. Thus paternity "has meant the primary and creative role" (Delaney 1986:502}. Despite a general sense that men and women contribute equally to the genetic makeup of their progeny, this symbolic asymmetry persists (Delaney 1986; Rothman 1989). Thus the woman is not a co-creator but a provider of a nurturant environment; "female receptivity" is glorified at the expense of "female creativity" (Delaney 1986:495).n Lesbian co-mothers who take on a generative role in the conception of their children claim space for female creativity. In so doing, the co-mother does not attempt to become male; rather, she carves out a distinctive but recognizable place in the birth of her child.1 Nancy Zook and Rachel Hallenback write of their experience performing donor insemination at home: The jar [of semen] was handed over, hugs exchanged, and he was on his way. "With Nancy's hips on pillows at a forty-five degree-angle, Rachel, taking a quick breath, inserted the 386 CORINNE P. HAYDEN semen into Nancy's vagina with a sterile syringe. ... Rachel's participation in conception was crucial to us, as this was to be her child as well. [1987:90] By impregnating Nancy, Rachel becomes intimately connected with the act of conception in a way that challenges the dichotomy between (female) gestation/receptivity and (male) authorship/agency. Central to this transformed reading of generative power is the "uncertainty" of the physical bond of paternity. Generation becomes less a genetic concept than a kinetic one; it is less an issue of the ownership of biogenetic substance than one of placing this substance in motion, of being responsible for starting off the "unseen process unfolding in Nancy's body" (Zook and Hallenback 1987:90). Rachel's claim to generative power and the sharing of her identity with the child's thus constitutes a powerful reworking of the idea of genetic authorship. The act of begetting is separated from authorship; shared parenthood can be demonstrated through active participation in the process, without necessarily laying claim to a genetic relationship as well.13 Where such claims to female creativity can remove the sperm donor's genetic contribution from the picture, other strategies unreservedly embrace the underlying American cultural understanding of genetics as a defining feature of personhood, an indicator of health and personality, a blueprint for appearance and disposition. Thus some lesbian co-mothers use donor insemination in ways that more directly establish biogenetic ties within the family. In cases where each woman bears a child, the same donor is sometimes used so that the children will be related (Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition et ai. 1990:30-31). This tactic is often utilized not only by women who want a consistent "male presence" for their children but also by those who desire an anonymous donor while retaining genetic connections within the family (Hill 1987:112). One couple interviewed in Politics of the Heart (1987) alternated donors to make the identity of the father unclear, only to decide later that they wanted to identify him in response to their daughter's fascination with a friend's father. The mothers imply that the father, if known, will become the donor for the next c though they do not envision that he will' a relationship with the children i 1987:111).14 In such instances, the donor gains significance within the family, nor through his direct involvement as ;i Dcrson who is a "relative" (Schneider 1980 119681) but rather through his ability to provide the substance that will ensure biogenetic continuity between offspring. Biogenetic substance itself becomes the object of importance, separate from the identity of the donor. Biology here is abstracted and dispersed in a way that challenges the cultural assumption of the primacy of the male seed (Delanev 1986} Though lesbians may take great care in choosing a donor, the act of insemination, b> eliminating direct physical contact, is often seen to minimize the man's role as a gendered individual in conception. The focus is then not on the person of the donor, but rather on semen "making the procreative pair (if any) woman plus sperm, gendered person plus gender signified (Weston 1991:171). Weston suggests that lesbians are somewhat unique in creating a distinction between male personhood, on the one hand, and the male's physical contribution to conception, on the other; such a distinction does not seem to be an inevitable consequence of the technology itself (1991:171). She cites a 1989 study indicating that married heterosexual women associated insemination with adultery and extramarital sex, and believed that insemination would allow an unwanted third party into their marriage relationship. The lesbians surveyed by Weston (1991:171), in contrast, did not view insemination as a substitution for something that would otherwise have come from their sexual partners; their link to the donor was patently nonsexual. This dis-juncture allows the nonbiological mother to take on a parenting role without the danger of displacing another (male) individual who is also a parent; she is the other parent. Though genetic continuity is powerful as an abstracted, disembodied signifier of family, it is also employed as a literal signifier for kinship and love in a more "connected" or "owned" sense (Laqueur 1990:212). A couple may choose ;i donor whose physical characteristics in some way resemble those of the co-mother, suggesi- GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 387 ins again the sharing of substance and the reproduction of her image. Or, the brother of the ponbiological parent-to-be may be the donor, giving both women a biogenetic link to the child- Thus, when the donor possesses desirable traits (i.e., a genetic relationship with, or physical resemblance to, the co-mother), lesbian mothers may choose to incorporate those traits into their notions of family. Genetic continuity, whether literal or implied, becomes an integral resource in such attempts to bring a certain unity to lesbian parenting families. Finally, in the most old-fashioned sense of biogenetic relatedness, the donor might be incorporated into the family, whether as a gendered individual (the proverbial "male presence") or as a co-parent. Of course, such relationships are not always simple matters of unilateral choice. On the one hand, they can be complicated by donors' contestatory attempts to secure paternity and parental rights; on the other hand, not uncommonly, lesbian mothers may rethink their initial decision on the matter and attempt to create a more (or less) involved relationship with the donor than they had originally planned. As the myriad examples above suggest, lesbian mothers' strategies to gain symbolic legitimation for their families (in the context of donor, insemination) effectively disperse the "biological connection" as it has been conceived in American kinship. Insemination is perceived to give lesbian parents space to negotiate the degree to which a donor's sperm is imbued with (or disabused of) distinctive features of identity. In many cases, the mobility of disembodied sperm allows the deployment of genetic ties in the service of unifying lesbian families. Thus genetic substance itself can become the referent for relatedness (as when the same anonymous donor is used so that the children will be related); a donor may be chosen on the basis of features that he shares with the "nonbiological" mother, thereby implying a biogenetic connection between her and the child; or the donor, by virtue of his biogenetic connection to the child, can be incorporated into the family configuration. On the one hand, these moves reify the importance of genetic continuity in the construction of kin relations; however, insofar as they allow for varying gradations of the separation of genetic substance from its "owner," they disrupt the cultural narrative of paternity as authorship. But, again, just as genetic ties retain their appeal (in dispersed form), so too does this notion of authorship persist though it is rein-scribed here with a different kind of gender/ genetic symbolism. Within the logistics of insemination, the act of begetting can be separated from the ownership of genetic substance. Here, a kinetic reading of generation, of bringing into being, supersedes genetic connection as the privileged signifier of relatedness. The notion of biological relatedness in this context takes on an excess of meanings. One effect of this excess is that biogenetic connection explicitly becomes a contingent, rather than immutable, feature of relatedness. Yet, as is apparent above, its contingency does not signal trivial ization. Instead, the creative lengths to which many lesbian mothers go to inscribe their families with genetic continuity speak eloquently to the tremendous, continued salience of biological relatedness. Reformulating the "Single" Mother The enterprising mobilization of genetic/kinetic relatedness in these visions of lesbian kinship often calls up an arguably "old-fashioned" notion of motherhood as the quintessential fulfillment of womanhood (see Lewin 1993). Indeed, as I noted earlier, the very distinctiveness of lesbian families is often predicated on the fact that they offer a multiplication of femaleness; it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the cultural narrative of motherhood as the ultimate expression of female identity often finds its way into these claims. This, arguably, is the central paradox that arises in casting lesbian motherhood as "unique"; just as the gender configuration of lesbian co-parenting families promises an ostensibly different model of parenthood, the supposed naturalness, and therefore universality, of motherhood both highlights and undermines that uniqueness. Thus the virtues of lesbian families are articulated in terms of the virtue of having not just two parents, but two mothers; at the same time, motherhood can eclipse the difference encoded in a lesbian identity. Thus, as one woman notes, "even when someone knows I am a lesbian my 388 CORINNE P. HAYDEN motherhood makes me seem normal" (Polikoff 1987:53). Lewin's work (1993) is particularly instructive regarding the ways in which motherhood can become the core of identity for heterosexual and lesbian mothers alike. Quite apart from my focus here, her concern is with single mothers. Arguably, the challenges of single parenthood magnify the centrality of motherhood to the identities of the women Lewin describes. Lesbians who enter into motherhood with one or more co-parents confront slightly different demands, including negotiating the place of the so-called nonbioiogical mother within the family configuration. It is here, in the space occupied by this "other mother," that the radical potential of lesbian co-parenting is often envisioned.15 How then does the "naturalness" of motherhood intersect with negotiations of non-biological motherhood in lesbian family configurations? Quite in line with conventional American cultural constructions of maternity and paternity, it is the perceived singularity or unitariness of biological motherhood that might be seen, in the first place, to impel the mobilization of genetic continuity (associated with paternity) in creating a biogenetic connection for the "nonbioiogical" mother. For, unlike paternity, which is understood in terms of alienable relationships and mobile biogenetic substance, maternity is understood to be less easily dispersed (see Barnes 1973). If it is "inconceivable to Euro-Americans that a child could be born motherless" (Strathern 1992a:12}, it has been equally inconceivable that a child could have two biological mothers - thus the troubling legal and symbolic asymmetry between the biological mother and her partner. Of course, current possibilities for "assisted reproduction" - especially in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood - are fragmenting, in popular and legal views, the supposedly self-evident idea of real, biological motherhood.1 In the context of these reproductive technologies, maternity has become thinkable in tripartite form, divvied up among genetic mother, birth mother, and social mother. Awareness of such possibilities informs what is sometimes imagined as the obvious and "perfect" option for lesbian families: one woman could contribute the genetic material, and her partner could become the gestational/ birth mother. The implied self-evidence of techno-fantasy of distributed maternity ■ gests the degree to which biology is operát in the imaginings of some women, even as dispersed. More commonly practiced on front is a kind of dual motherhood, in w| each mother gives birth. If the same done used, the children will be related to each ot To complete this particular circle of biolos and legal unification, it is becoming incr ingly common for courts to grant lesbian p ners the right to adopt each other's (biologi children.17 In one sense, this move does little to unse the supposed unitariness of maternity. Yet tl is an important slippage implied here bclw "maternity" and "motherhood." Materni-suggest, signals the epitome of embodied i tionality - that is, gestation and birth - who motherhood connotes both this physical t tionship and a gendered, naturalized code conduct. This biologized desire to nun he expressed quite nicely in the euphemism of the maternal instinct. I would argue thai the so-called naturalness of motherhood - nut only as a biological relationship but also as a supposedly nurturing, explicitly feminine propensity - in some ways makes intelligible the notion of the two-mother family. Implied bote is a latent split between the "natural" and the "biological"; if biological motherhood can re-naturalize a lesbian's womanhood, so coo. I would suggest, does the mothering performed by a so-called nonbirth mother become imelli-gible as natural in the name of women's propensity "to mother."18 While I do not want to make too much of this (rather speculative) point, I consider it an important clement within the amalgamation of ideas that both makes sense of and asserts dissonances in the notion of a family composed of mothers - who are lovers - and their children. Conclusion Underlying this entire discussion, as I noted .it the beginning of this article, is a persistent cultural narrative denying the naturalness of lesbian and gay sexuality quite explicitly he-cause it is perceived to be inherently nonpro-creative. As a key context from which these lesbian procreative families emerge, this narra- GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 389 rive lends a complex oppositionality to many jgsbians' mobilization of the "naturalness" of iflorherhood, as well as to their desire to endow c0-parenting families with biogenetic continuity. When put into service in the name of creating a uniquely lesbian kinship configuration, these "old" ideas of what constitutes related-ness are both made explicit and reformulated. The so-called core symbols of American kinship, blood and love, are mediated here by very different unifying symbols (and gender/power configurations} than the central emblem of (hetero) sexual intercourse described by Schneider. On the one hand, lesbian sex provides a different model for love partly, to build on Strathern's (1992a:4) argument, by reproducing a gender configuration that is seen to promise gender equality rather than asymmetry. At the same time, the symbol of blood, also inscribed as biogenetic substance or biological relatedness, is deployed to give unity to families that are marked both by proscribed gender relations and the particular asymmetries of biological and nonbioiogical motherhood. In the process, these lesbian mothers simultaneously affirm the importance of blood as a symbol and challenge the American cultural assumption that biology is a self-evident, singular fact and the natural baseline on which kinship is built. Biology is not understood here to stand on its own as a defining feature of kin, nor does biogenetic connection retain any single, transparent meaning. The dominant idea of American kinship as Schneider describes it posits a belief in the genetic tie as a baseline, elaborated into a relationship through certain kinds of behavior. In the negotiations of lesbian motherhood discussed above, the creation of blood ties - varying in kind and degree - instead becomes an indicator (if not enhancement} of parent-like behavior. The baseline then becomes the co-mothers' generative agency, broadly conceived. Central to this subtle reformulation of the blood/love symbolic hierarchy is a disruption of the once taken-for-granted matrix of paternity, authorship, generation, and genetic substance. As the perceived meanings of these notions of blood and code, authorship and agency, are made contingent rather than self-evident, these lesbian mothers set forth quite complex notions of what constitutes both distinctiveness and unity in the creation of their kin ties. As the symbol of the blood tie is both embraced and dispersed within certain lesbian families, so too does the dichotomy between straight biological families and gay and lesbian chosen families become muddied. Rather than trying to determine which understanding of gay and lesbian kinship promises a more radical critique of American kinship, I have been concerned here with drawing out some of the ways in which the so-called core symbols of kinship - the ideas that define what constitutes relatedness - are reworked and recontextua-lized. As reproductive and genetic technologies continue to proliferate, blood and love will surely continue to be (re)inscribed in notions of relatedness, in often predictable but perhaps also surprising ways. The ways in which lesbians and gay men negotiate such reinscrip-tions make explicit not only the contingency of these symbols but also - equally important in theorizing kinship - the dynamic, mutual construction of gender, generation, kinship, and sexuality. NOTES 1 I thank Eilen Lewin for her helpful comments on this subject. The question of representativeness is here, as ever, not a simple one. First, my intention is to examine certain articulations of distinctiveness; I do not claim to represent a "critical mass" of lesbian families. I recognize also that access to reproductive technologies (rhough donor insemination is one of the most low-tech practices on the menu) is a key foundation for the visions of lesbian motherhood discussed in this paper. Access inevitably raises questions of class, as well as race; the creation of lesbian families through insemination is, arguably, an option most available to a largely white, middle-class clientele. Though insemination can certainly take place without the intervention of sperm banks or health care providers (as attested to by the legendary turkey-baster joke), laws protecting women from donors' paternity suits encourage the institutionalization of such arrangements. Thus a California statute on insemination protects married couples from "any claim of paternity by any outsider," 390 CORINNE P. HAYDEN regardless of physician involvement, while "unmarried" women are provided such protection only if they broker their insemination through a physician (Jhordan C. v. Mary K. 1986). The implication is that although access to sperm banks is not necessary to the creation of these families, it is certainly made desirable in terms of maintaining their legal integrity. And insofar as many lesbians choose gay male friends as donors, the specter of HIV transmission also contributes to increasing medical intervention in the insemination process. 2 For a rich contextualization of the recent "lesbian baby boom" vis-ä-vis ongoing lesbian and feminist debates on motherhood, see Pollack and Vaughn's anthology, Politics of the Heart (1987). Jan Clausen, for example, writes, Most interesting and most painful is a totally irrational feeling of betrayal: I thought other lesbians were with me in the decision not to give birth, in that defiance of our expected womanly role - and now here these new lesbian mothers go, showing me up, proving that the fact that I'm a dyke is no excuse for my failure to have a baby. [1987:338] See also Lewin (1993:14) for a discussion of the heightened salience, for lesbians, of the narrative or motherhood as an "achievement." Paralleling shifts in American cultural notions of gender and reproduction, the notion of achieved motherhood indexes the complexities with which women's assertions of autonomy and individualism circulate within existing narratives of conventional femininity (see Ginsburg 1990 and Ginsburg and Tsing 1990:7). 3 See Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future (1992), for a discussion of the ways in which new reproductive technologies provide a context for making the "natural" mutable. 4 Several pivotal feminist works speak to this argument for the mutually instituted categories of heterosexuality, gender, and kinship, including Collier and Yanagisako's Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987), Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality" (1984), and Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" (1975). 5 I use the phrase "expectation of creating biological kin" in anticipation of the question of how same-sex couples (which are onlv facet of chosen families) differ from her sexual couples without children in r{> of their relation to blood and cht Expectation here is a simplified refcrc to the complicated cultural belief in interdependence or heterosexual inarri biological procreation, and social rep uction. Legal scholar Hannah Sch\ zschild quotes a 1971 Minnesota duci denying same-sex couples the right marry: The state's refusal to grant a [marriai-license ... is based upon the state's recogi tion that our society as a whole view* m; riage as the appropriate and desiral: forum for procreation and the rearinp children.... [I]t is apparent that no sair sex couple offers the possibility of the bit of children by their union. Thus the rem-of the state to authorize same-sex marria results from such impossibility of repmdi tion. [Schwarzschild 1988:116] In this logic, all heterosexual coupk-s < ceptually have the potential to beget raise offspring; whether or not thev cai choose to is irrelevant to the defenders oi primacy of heterosexual marriage. Clu families, whether composed of friend1 lovers, or both, take on this assigned i procreative identity and challenge its in cations for their place in kinship. 1 Inns contestation emerges in their claim iliar ship can exist beyond blood and inirri both of which assume procreative ivlni as their central referent. 6 See Biddick 1993, Spillers 19H", Strathern 1991 for perspectives on di.ipe kinship and distributed maternity. 7 A popuiar bumper sticker sold in many bian and gay bookstores. 8 This point is highlighted in St im rhi.... review oi Families We Choose (199 i: J 96). 9 Personal communication with David Schneider, August 13, 1992. 10 See, for example, psychologist CharlnUe Patterson's landmark review article, "Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents" (1992). 11 Among those who make sperm their business, the assumption that the male role i'i conception is the creative one remains strong. Beautifully articulating the 19th-century vision of sperm as the "purest LE- GENDER, GENETICS, AND GENERATION 391 tract of blood" and the "sum and representation of its bearer" (Barker-Benfield 1974:49), the director of a California sperm bank distributed T-shirts with a picture of swimming sperm, captioned "Future People" (Rothman 1989:35). j2 The association of a nonbiological parent with the creative, generative aspect of conception also appeared in a 1985 custody case in slightly macabre form. In Karin T. v. Michael T. (1985), the two parties had been married, had given birth to two children through donor insemination, and Michael T. had signed the birth certificate as Karin T.'s husband. Upon their separation, Michael T. claimed to be exempt from child support. The grounds? Michael T. was actually a woman who presented herself to the world as a man. She argued that she should not have to pay child support because she was "a woman who was not biologically or legally related to the children." Given the usual legal response to such situations, Michael T. could reasonably expect to get away with such an allegation. But judicial interpretation is full of surprises: the court rejected her argument. "Defining parent as 'one who procreates, begets, or brings forth offspring,' the Court determined that Michael T.'s actions 'certainly brought forth these offspring as if done biologically'" (1985:784, emphasis added). This remarkable opinion is not the watershed lesbian and gay parents might hope for; the court clearly aims not to establish lesbian and gay co-parents' claim to children but rather to punish Michael T. for gender fraud. The court's assertion that she had an active part in bringing forth the children is apparently predicated on her appropriation of the male role, since she played "husband" by seeking out "men's work." In the interest of punishment, the court becomes curiously complicit in this game of gender-switching. 13 This idea of generativity is in no way limited to articulations of lesbian and gay kinship. See, for example, Helena Ragoné's (1994) work on surrogacy, where the intent to conceive signals an act of generation. I am also reminded of international patent laws regarding biotechnological manipulation of DNA; legal ownership of genetic substance is not determined in terms of its original "source" but rather in terms of the party responsible for manipulating and replicating the DNA. Here, and in concert with other developments in the enterprising management of life itself, the act of replication or manipulation itself becomes the moment of authorship. Such developments suggest intriguing intersections among notions of reproduction, ownership, and (kinetic?) intervention. For discussions of replication, authorship, and ownership, see Lury 1993; see also Sarah Franklin's notions of auto-paternity in "Romancing the Helix" (1995). 14 Alternating donors is similar to the practice, used by some heterosexual couples, of having sexual intercourse immediately after the woman is inseminated. The scientific uncertainty of the paternal bond enables the couple to entertain the possibility that, if the woman does become pregnant, her (thought-to-be-sterile) husband is the father. Uncertainty here is used to fictionalize the identity of one specific father, whereas for lesbians, uncertainty can help perpetuate anonymity. 15 This is not to argue that couples are more radical than single mothers but merely to point out that the challenges racing co-parents are different than those facing single mothers; the implication is that the particular challenges of co-parenting also open up space for creating uniquely "lesbian" families. Of course, the location of radical potential in the second parent effects a somewhat ironic inversion of the argument that the valuation of the "mating pair" is a decisively conservative move (see Ettelbrick 1992). I am indebted to Anna Tsing for this insight. 16 For a discussion of negotiations of "natural" parenthood within surrogacy arrangements, see Ragoné 1994. For a discussion of anxieties surrounding the relationships engendered via surrogate motherhood and other technologies of reproduction, see Gallagher 1993 and Franklin 1993. 17 See, for example, Keen 1991, Sullivan 1992, The New York Times 1993. Of course, the legitimation of lesbian parental relationships conferred by these joint adoptions is by no means a new legal standard; Sharon Bottoms and April "Wade, a lesbian couple in Virginia, recently had their child taken from them on the basis of their "immoral" relationship. 56 392 CORINNE P. HAYDEN Without assuming too much coherence in the rationale informing these particular decisions, it is impossible to dismiss the significance of class here. Of the three successful cases cited above, one couple consists of two physicians, another of a physician and a Ph.D. In contrast, Sharon Bottoms and April Wade are characterized in court and in the press as working class. Their unfitness as parents - as charged by Sharon Bottoms' mother, Kay - rests not only on their lesbianism but also on the "instability" of their working-class home (see Kelly 1993). 18 Arguably, women's appropriation of genera-tivity is also made intelligible in terms of the naturalness of maternal desire. Again, see Ragoné 1994 for a discussion of the generative potential of intent. The other side of this logic, of course, is that the decision not to mother is often used to demonize women as unnatural. In addition to the vast literature on abortion in the United States, see Tsing 1990. 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Washburne, Carolyn Knott 1987 Happy Birthday from Your Other Mom. In Politics of the Heart: A Lesbian Parenting Anthology. Sandra Pollack and Jeanne Vaughn, eds. Pd Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. Weston, Kath 1991 Families We Cho York: Columbia University Press. Zook, Nancy, and Rachel Hallenback bian Coparenting: Creating Co In Politics of the Heart: A Lesbian Anthology. Sandra Pollack n n c Vaughn, eds. Pp. 89-99. Ithaca, NY: Books. Linda Stone : small suburban communities of the Ameri-soap opera represent highly unusual popu-ons. In soap communities, most of the ■pie are wealthy and very stylishly dressed ill times. Occupationally, there is an un-ally high proportion of doctors and lawyers ang them. Though most of the people, Tien and men, work outside the home, í enjoy great freedom of movement and rarely actually at work. Yet for some reason ! almost never go outside, confining themes largely to living rooms, bedrooms, and aurants. They become involved in complied tangles of love and deception. They are dent-prone, and, often as a result of those dents, suffer extraordinarily high rates of íesia. But perhaps what distinguishes soap ímunities more than anything else from any community in the United States is their voluted kinship connections and, indeed, r utter obsession with kinship. Figures I and 21.2 show kinship connections >ng characters on two popular soaps, One ■■ to Live and All My Children. A glance at !e figures demonstrates that in terms of kin->, these communities rival the so-called ihip-based societies that were once central ie work of anthropologists seeking to com-íend the exotic, tribal Other, involuted soap opera kinship does not re-: social life in suburban America, no more than do the innumerable cases of kidnappings and temporary amnesia now common in American soaps. Rather, it is through exaggeration and extremity, through sometimes overdrawn characters and often bizarre plots that soaps play upon American cultural concerns and in the process serve as a commentary on them. Kinship is writ large in soaps, and it is between these lines that we can discern some cultural ideas behind the current reformulation of kinship and changes in family formation now taking place in middle-class American society. This paper analyzes kinship in contemporary soaps in terms of concepts David Schneider (1968) developed for the study of American kinship in the 1960s. Particular attention is paid to Schneider's idea that biological relationships, or the sharing of "biogenetic substance," is at the core of American cultural constructions of kinship and central to an ideal American middle-class family of husband and wife living with their own biological children. Much has changed in "real" middle-class American kinship and family forms since Schneider's work. In real life many American middle-class households consist of single mothers with children, divorced and remarried couples, and assorted "blended" families of stepchildren and step-siblings (Stone 2001). In real life, we also have reports of reworkings of