Abstract

This UK research explored underlying complexities in creation of lesbian led families. Considerations of implications and future significances lesbian led families and other relationships to the lesbian family have led to broader approaches to understanding new forms of family and kinship (Malone and Cleary, 2002). Eighteen women in lesbian relationships embarked upon a new form of motherhood. Thus, a process of change, flux and fluidity began. I found that impactful changes are brought to collective understandings of family and kinship by new transgressive developments in family formation. Lesbian parental couples, for example potentially disrupt normative heterosexual meanings of family, parenting and gender. Respondents could potentially subvert the meaning of motherhood and gendered parental identities. The problems they faced were both cultural and structural. These processes were underpinned with the material realities of class differences. Also, differences of cultural capital and access to social and economic resources shape this experience and deep in the cultural definers of self lies constructions of race and ethnicity. Evidence from this study revealed a firm base of egalitarian ideals amongst respondents. Other definers of identity caused contradictions and tensions. These included culture, disability, ethnicity, class, gender and religious background. Intersections of identities in their negotiated families presented potential sources of tension for the respondents. Through detailed considerations, their decision making, they negotiated their own maternal and parental identities. My study revealed the complexity of intersectionality in their negotiated families. These issues presented sources of tension for the respondents. This research included detailed accounts of their internal and external struggles to resolve their own maternal and parental identities in relation to class and other definers of self.