Abstract
Why would two men want an infant? Ellen Lewin poses this question to her male subjects in her latest ethnographic work examining gender, kinship, and culture in twenty-first-century United States. Gay Fatherhood might be viewed as Lewin’s gesture toward gender equity in her own catalogue, since her earlier work focused on unpacking the identity dilemmas of lesbian mothers. This study of the male side of gay family creation confirms it as a highly self-conscious act requiring normalizing discourses and practices. It also provides a fascinating portal into contemporary sources of identity and legitimacy.
Gay Fatherhood’s prologue discusses “queer fundamentalism,” which “understand[s] queerness to be the foundation of a distinctive culture, and frame[s] the family aspirations of some gay people as a repudiation of that culture’s essential attributes and as a threat to its continuity” (p. 6). Lewin rightly notes that this mirrors the position of heteropatriarchal discourses that view gay marriage and family as threatening to the continuity of world civilization. Gay people who have or want kids are caught squarely in the middle of the so-called culture wars. But for Lewin’s gay dads, it’s mac-n-cheese that occupies their mental space.
Chapter one offers the defining statement of the entire work: “these men do not just happen to be fathers. Their visibility derives from their insisting upon the right to bring children into their lives, to organize their time around the exigencies of childrearing, and to constitute their identities in a manner that resembles neither popular images of men in general nor of gay men more specifically” (p. 18). What man organizes his time around the “exigencies of childrearing”? And are men who do this still men?
Lewin examines these questions carefully. Gay men who survived the HIV/AIDS epidemic, cared for loved ones, and experienced catastrophic loss may have gravitated toward the safety of domesticity, monogamy, and parenthood. On the gender identity question, Lewin observes that fatherhood is not a mandatory component of manhood. She presses a key question with her subjects. Since they have demonstrated a “passionate yearning” (p. 28) for childrearing—a capacity for mothering, in fact—do they feel like they are mothers? Most of the fathers were puzzled by the question, with one dad responding categorically: “How can I be a mother? I’m a man and I’m not confused about that” (p. 86).
Parenthood is not a source of gender identity for these men. Indeed, the implications for gender structures are even more radical. Lewin presents couples who clearly experienced strong postpartum feelings and whose fathering differed significantly from their own fathers’. Taking responsibility for the care of new human life, and experiencing the feelings associated with it, coupled with certainty in one’s masculine identity, might well be understood as a postpatriarchal formation.
If parenthood is not a source of gender identity, it may be one of political legitimacy. Lewin’s eponymous claim is that these men are building citizen status by becoming parents. The path wends its way through what Lewin terms “moral mobility,” a reverse Goffmanian moral career in which, rather than moving deeper into the sources of stigma (as did Goffman’s mental patients), Lewin’s fathers disassociate from gay stigma when they incorporate children into their lives. The philosophical and psychological basis of this “moral mobility” is a turning away from egoism in favor of altruism. This virtuous action is integral to the achievement of adulthood and emotional maturity.
A chapter on consumption illustrates a simple fact of market society: gay men who wish to become fathers must purchase procreative or adoption brokerage services, and food and medical care for the mothers of their children. Also evident is the whimsical, if droll, assessment of the superiority of one geographic location over another for adopting, based on the cuisine of the region. Other fathers discussed “playing the part [of ‘all-American father’]” (p. 56) via consumption and performance by, for example, wearing Izod sweaters.
The concluding substantive chapter, “We’re Not Gay Anymore,” suggests that gay fatherhood may be a fully paved road to assimilation in American heteronormative society. An important observation needs to be made, however. In contrast to the erasure of gay identity both implied and explicitly described by Lewin’s fathers, the lesbian mothers who were the subjects of my research in The Family of Woman experienced affirmation and integration of the various parts of their personal and social identities. Lewin’s final chapter suggests that her fathers may get to this place of interior and exterior harmonization, but not before a period of further identity fragmentation and loss.
Ellen Lewin deserves our gratitude for a learned, sensitive, study. Gay fatherhood may well represent a bellwether and beacon amid dramatically turbulent social forces operating now and just over the horizon.