Discrimination and normalization as an effortful social practice: An analysis of LGBTQ+ families in Germany

Introduction

We should never underestimate the importance of being ordinary. It has helped transform the LGBT [community] and the wider world (Weeks, 2008: 792)

Democratic countries are increasingly providing legal recognition to same-sex relationships and families. As a result, these countries are witnessing intense debates regarding queer people’s assimilation within heteronormative values and power structures, changes in the neoliberal order induced by same-sex partnership or family law, and the potential decline in political activism for the broader recognition of queer life. Critical queer theorists and activists have also questioned whether seeking legal recognition for same-sex ¹ marriage and families is a worthwhile goal, because it only serves to stabilize the heteronormative order of coupledom and the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family. While pluralization and a greater recognition of diverse families is a core value in present-day democratic societies, Butler (2004: 105) considers this as an ‘ambivalent gift’ because this gift of legal equality and recognition comes at the price of the partial acceptance of other gender identities and orientations and their assimilation into heteronormative structures. Duggan (2002) famously framed these processes as homonormativity.

While supportive of these analyses, Ahmed (2010) notes that homonormativity is not simply ‘a sign of assimilation’ but ‘it is the struggle to have a bearable life’ (Ahmed, 2010: 114). Emphasizing these struggles for a bearable life is especially important for the LGBTQ+ community ¹ who continue to experience everyday discrimination and hate crimes on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity (e.g. Lüter et al., 2020), which harms their mental and physical health (Kasprowski et al., 2021). As deviation from the heteronormative order can lead to discrimination, the desire to be normal should be interpreted as a wish for a less precarious and endangered life. This desire results in a constant struggle among sexual minorities, such that they are ‘not queer enough from the queer perspective and too queer for conservatives’ (Mizielińska et al., 2018: 977). Commenting on the debate of regulation versus recognition of queer life, Weeks (2008) suggests studying the social reality of intimate life instead of building frontiers. Same-sex couples and families want ‘validation, not absorption (…) for the ordinary virtues of care, love, mutual responsibility’ (Weeks, 2008: 792). Hence, scholars should focus on everyday practices for understanding what happens ‘at a grass-roots, sub-political level, often at first outside and beyond the visibility of historians and sociologists’ (Weeks, 2008: 789) to understand social, legal, and political changes.

This study focuses on the normalization of LGBTQ+ families from the micro perspective of social interactions (doing normality). Drawing from qualitative data on LGBTQ+ families from Germany, ² we first elaborate on the (subtle) discriminations they experience. Based on this, we argue that normalization practices require arduous efforts within heteronormative societies. In our analysis, we found that normalization practices were a response to (anticipated) discrimination. LGBTQ+ families are always expected to adhere to and perform the heteronormative norms. Hence, we argue that normalization is not simply an apolitical practice of obeying the heteronormative neoliberal social order, but that the resulting interactions in the so-called private sphere also have the potential for inducing social change.

Theoretical background and the state of research

Over the past decades, diverse families and same-sex relationships have increasingly gained legal recognition in many places (e.g. Ayoub, 2016; Kollman, 2015; for Germany: Raab, 2011). The European Union has seen significant legal changes brought about by feminists and LGBTQ+ social movements. In Germany, registered civil partnerships (Eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft) were introduced in 2001, and same-sex marriage was legalized in 2017. Since then, same-sex couples have the right to marry and adopt children, although LGBTQ+ families still face other forms of legal discrimination in Germany. ³ At the same time, queer-theoretical debates and empirical studies have critically examined the inherent ambivalences in the legal recognition and social equality of same-sex couples and families. Focal points include vigorous fights for the institutions of marriage and parenthood, through which states regulate which forms of cohabitation can enjoy legal legitimacy and its associated privileges (Butler, 2004; Duggan, 2002; Warner, 1999). This intricate ambivalence is further complicated by the persistence of the society’s heteronormative structure, which causes social, institutional, and legal discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, while limiting the choices of people and families that deviate from the norm of heterosexuality and the gender binary. Hence, non-normative families are still discriminated against, and must engage in a distinct set of social practices to compensate for their deviation from the norm.

Furthermore, structural and social discriminations of LGBTQ+ people persist beyond the legal spectrum. Studies measuring their experiences with discrimination in Germany found that individuals who identify as bi- or homosexual have a 65.9% risk of being discriminated against, which is 30.4% higher than that among heterosexual people (35.5%) (Beigang et al., 2017: 108). Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity occurs in many fields of society, such as education (Krell and Oldemeier, 2017), the labour market (De Vries et al., 2020), housing, and access to health care (Beigang et al., 2017). In 2020, 782 hate crimes were committed against LGBTQ+ people in Germany, which included 154 violent crimes (BMI, 2021). These figures reveal ‘how strongly a homonegative climate still prevails in Germany, in which non-heterosexual persons are subjected to massive insults, degradation and physical assaults in their daily lives’ (Beigang et al., 2017: 295). ⁴

These experiences and the anticipation of discrimination, rejection, and hatred have severe effects on the mental and physical health of LGBTQ+ people, resulting in disproportionately higher incidences of sleeping disorders, nervousness, or dejection. More than a quarter of them eventually suffer from depression in the course of their lives, compared to only 10 percent cisgendered heterosexual people. Compared to cis-gendered individuals (9%), 39% of trans* people were diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at least once. The same is true for severe physical health issues: heart diseases are more than twice as prevalent among LGBTQ+ people compared cisgendered heterosexual people, and chronic back pain is also found more often among LGBTQ+ (Kasprowski et al., 2021: 45).

International psychological research has studied the consequences of these forms of discrimination because of minority stress (Meyer, 1995, 2003) ‘to which individuals from stigmatized social categories are exposed as a result of their social, often a minority, position’ (Meyer, 2003: 675). Minority stress can result from stigma, stereotypes, prejudices, and experienced violence and discrimination, which explain the higher prevalence of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation among LGBTQ+ populations compared to heterosexual people (Meyer, 2003: 691). Discrimination can entail more overt forms, for example, legal discrimination, in structural and institutional terms, which are referred to as objective stressors. Additionally, discrimination can involve more subtle slights or insults encountered in day-to-day interactions. These microaggressions (Farr and Vázquez, 2020; Sue et al., 2007) are also called subjective or subtle stressors, as they pertain to people’s personal experiences, including the anticipation or expectation of a homophobic social environment; however, they are difficult to pinpoint. In fact, in our empirical study, our interviewees did not always frame these subtle discriminations as ‘open discriminations’, when asked about whether they experienced discrimination.

Both individuals and LGBTQ+ families experience multiple forms of exclusion (Teschlade et al., 2023). Research on LGBTQ+ families shows that families tend to emphasize their normality, which can be interpreted as a wish for a less precarious and endangered life. For example, non-normative families often interpolate the narrative of the ‘perfect family’ (Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2010: 186) to fend off any perceived reservations against their family. This includes assumptions that their familiar situation might have caused or contributed towards any problems or deficits that their children might have. Similarly, research on German non-normative families shows, for example, how two-father families engage with society’s expectation that every child should have both—a mother and a father (Teschlade and Peukert 2019), or how lesbian mothers queer normative presumptions of parenthood and family at the practical and discursive level (Peukert et al., 2020). Simultaneously, adherence to family norms has been criticised as a means of assimilating to traditional heteronormative values. Duggan (2002) framed this as homonormativity—a symptom of the neoliberal agenda of privatization oriented towards domesticity and consumption. In this context, normativity has been described as ‘queer theory’s axiomatic foe’ (Wiegman and Wilson, 2015: 2), whereas an investment in antinormativity seems to be at the heart of a queer project (see the special issue in Distinctions, 2015). Within the German debate, this discussion has been expanded through concepts such as heteronormalization (Hark and Laufenberg, 2013) or affirmative assimilation (Tichy and Krüger-Kirn, 2020), to address the rise of normalization according to a hegemonic heteronormative discourse. Such a discourse sets family ideals such as romantic love, monogamy, or gender binary at the centre and glosses over individual aspects of sexual orientation. Consequently, sexual minorities are in a constant struggle of either conforming too much to the norm (and not being ‘queer enough’) or deviating too much from the norm (and are ‘too queer’) (Mizielińska et al., 2018: 977). Furthermore, these debates tend to institutionalize a new hierarchy among sexual minorities (Heaphy, 2018).

While appreciating these critical interventions, we draw attention to the everyday practices of LGBTQ+ families in Germany. We argue that they engage with the dilemma of deviating from the norm, through overt displays of normality as a family to minimize discrimination. Following Heaphy’s (2018) work on ordinariness and normativity, we reconstruct these practices as LGBTQ+ families’ attempts to (re)negotiate heteronormative structures. In the debates about queer assimilation and homonormativity claims to normality surely reproduce certain family norms, by incorporating the ‘ordering power of marriage and family as social institutions’ (Heaphy, 2018: 174) in their everyday lives. However, this does not mean these families do not challenge normative family ideals. Doing and being a queer family gives them the potential to transform what has been considered normal and taken for granted, which could help undermine the foundations of heteronormativity (Butler, 2004: 118). In doing so, we extend the existing research on LGBTQ+ families, and how they reproduce and/or challenge heteronormative family ideals (among others Heaphy, 2018; Nay, 2017). We do this by addressing German LGBTQ+ families and especially by adding a micro-sociological and praxeological perspective on doing normality of LGBTQ+ families by theorizing normalization as a social practice.

In a Foucauldian sense, normalization refers to a prescribed set of norms that orient people’s behaviours. As a technology of power, normalization is productive: it always produces what is perceived as normal in relation to the population (Foucault, 2009: 56ff). According to Butler (2009), whether someone is recognisable as normal depends on their compliance with the norm: to become intelligible as a non-normative family and consequently recognised as family, they must conform to and engage with normative conceptions of what a family is supposed to be.

In line with theories on symbolic interactionism (e.g. Blumer, 1954; Goffman, 1959; Mead, 2015 [1934]), we argue that normality is not only produced by social discourses but is performed and expressed during interactions (doing normality). Empirically, we reconstruct different practices of normalization which allow adherence to social norms, while simultaneously undermining them. Individuals appropriate certain rules of conduct by aligning their family practices with those expected from a normative family, such as a monogamous two-parent family. Butler’s (1990) conception of performativity allows for a further understanding of the simultaneous subversion and reproduction of norms, as the processes of repetition are always based on an impermanence that allows for shifts, alterations, or displacements in the norms. However, they are always interlinked with power relations. The parodic repetition of ‘the original […] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original’ (Butler, 1990: 41). Consequently, what constitutes the (hetero)norm can always change.

Data and methods

Our research project titled ‘Ambivalent Recognition Order? Doing Reproduction and Doing Family Beyond the Heterosexual “Nuclear Family”’ (MO 3194/2-1, PE 2612/2-1, WI 2142/7-1) focussed on how LGBTQ+ families create, become, and remain (or do not remain) a family against the backdrop of increasing legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Germany. From a macro perspective, we analysed the legal inequalities that LGBTQ+ families in Germany continue to face. From a micro perspective, we reconstructed the everyday practices of the families we interviewed. Our study was guided by the following research questions:

(1) How do LGBTQ+ families realize (or not realize) their wish for a child (doing reproduction)?

Our research was designed as an explorative qualitative study involving 13 self-identified non-heterosexual families that participated in a total of 19 interviews as families, couples, and individuals. We used the term ‘family’ as a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) for anyone who takes care of a child, or intends to do so in the future. In order to depict the heterogeneity of LGBTQ+ families, our sample represented a large variety with regards to sexual orientations, family constellations, genders as well as people who did not have children during the interview period, but planned to do so in future. Ten families lived with children, one family had (already grown up) children from previous relationships and currently lived with an 18 year old foster son, and two families were planning to become a family with children.

Thus, our sample contained a very diverse set of family constellations, including five lesbian families (single and two-parents), three multi-parent families (three to four parents), three trans* families (two and three parents), one gay parent family, and one polyamorous parent family. The interviewees are between 27 and 57 years old, received college or higher education, have European citizenship and identified as white and middle-class. All of them live in Germany: some in cities, others in urban areas and some in the countryside. Generally, the sample represents a small and privileged group of people because we did not systematically adapt a more diverse set of criteria in the sampling strategy. However, this should be obligatory for future research on LGBTQ+ parents in Germany (e.g. Moore and Brainer, 2013).

The recruitment started with a call for interview participation that was widely disseminated via social media and mailing lists throughout Germany. The call led to broad response from lesbian single- and two-parent families, trans- and multi-parent families. However, gay parent families or people who became parents through surrogacy or an adoption process are underrepresented in our sample. All participants provided informed consent to participate in the study.

We conducted in-depth couple and/or family interviews to understand the participants’ intra-familial negotiations about family and parenthood, as well as the embedded conflicts and orientations (Heaphy and Einarsdottir, 2012; Wimbauer and Motakef, 2017). Hence, we did not interview the children, but we interviewed all the adults who considered themselves to be part of their families. The semi-structured narrative interviews began with the question, ‘How did you become a family?’ Follow-up questions were asked about how the family members got to know each other or became a couple, how they negotiated having a child together, whether reproductive technologies were used, and why, and how they shared their workload and organized their daily lives. Further questions dealt with legal and social recognition, as well as experiences of discrimination. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. The excerpts used in this paper were translated from German to English and minimally edited for clarity. The interviewees’ names have been anonymized using pseudonyms, and we ensured the use of their preferred personal pronouns.

For data analysis, we used the grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin and Strauss, 2015). We analysed the initial sequences and selected key passages from the interview transcript following hermeneutic sequence analysis, which involved a word-by-word or line-by-line interpretation to reconstruct the social meaning and social significance of social (inter)actions of becoming, doing, and being a family in the narratives of the families. The interviews were open coded using MaxQDA software, followed by focussed coding, which helped developed categories emerging from the interview material (Charmaz, 2014). Finally, the cases were compared and condensed to a theoretical generalisation (Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr, 2014).

Day-to-day discrimination, devaluation, and marginalization

Although discriminating people based on their sexual orientation is officially prohibited in various legal texts in Germany, as in the EU, in reality, it persists in many areas of life (see above). Furthermore, discrimination may not be measurable in the sense that they are sometimes difficult to track, for example, malicious staring or devaluating interjections. In this section, we discuss subtle aspects of discrimination and how our sample families interpret, handle, and integrate them in their daily lives.

Statistically speaking (Beigang et al., 2017; Kasprowski et al., 2021), open hatred against LGBTQ+ is a matter of fact. Furthermore, religious, conservative, and right-wing nationalist movements that actively oppose same-sex marriage and parenthood have attracted numerous followers who oppose gender equality and family diversity (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). As a result, there is a growing support for radical right-wing parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AFD). ⁵ In almost all the interviews, the family members considered the growing influence of the AFD as a danger to their livelihoods. Nils Kott, for example, remarked that after transitioning as a trans* man, he belongs to a minority group that is constantly attacked and pathologized in public discourses such as chat groups or online comments. Furthermore, the public comments or speeches of AFD politicians affect him emotionally. These discursive practices bring about an omnipresent fear for his life and physical integrity. ⁶

In addition, less obvious discrimination against non-normative families is also an integral part of LGBTQ+ families’ lived experiences. Often, these include interjections or gazes that may seem inconspicuous, but are nonetheless violent and harmful. Upon asking whether they experienced discrimination, most of our interviewees replied that they were ‘never openly discriminated against in personal contact’. However, considering the subtext of other people’s looks or reactions, the interviewees sensed that they were not being recognized or were being devalued. Interestingly, all the interviewees recounted discriminatory experiences, but without necessarily framing them as such.

Nils Kott, a trans* man, was one of the few interviewees who explicitly described uncomfortable experiences in personal contact and explained that a lot of aversion remains implicit. Although open hatred is not necessarily expressed publicly, he often got the impression that his family was perceived as strange or unwanted. He mentioned the announcement of their intention to expand their family by having a child was met by others with an ‘ahaaa’, while cis-gendered heterosexual couples usually receive euphoric responses such as ‘wow, how nice!’. These reactions evoke a feeling that he describes as ‘Wow, you're exotic’. While he cannot recall any actual structural and or institutional discrimination, his feeling of being subtly discriminated against materialises, for example, in the fact that they fear they will not get a foster child.

The interviewees often talked about how they anticipate and expect hostile comments and remarks, which they try to avoid by modifying their behaviour. For example, Carolin and Mara Callas, a lesbian couple, elaborated on their expectations as a two-mother family or a lesbian couple with a child. Mara believes that being a two-mother family is not yet considered normal. According to Carolin, both of them try to be understanding when people are ‘irritated’ after they first ‘find out’ that they are a lesbian couple with a child, while Mara remarked that she is always hyperaware about people’s reactions, indicating her scepticism regarding how a situation will turn out. Carolin explains:

So often we […] feel […] [that] people like us have to be friendly and nice as individuals so that so that [other] people don’t grumble or nag. You have much more pressure to please the public or to be liked. Simply because you are afraid that when people notice that you are a couple and also have a child, it will lead to hostility.

They feel that not only do they have to ‘please the public’ for themselves as individuals but also because they represent an entire group of lesbian parents by being—as they phrase it—‘somehow special’, and because they are not yet normalized as a family constellation. According to Mara, if you mess up, you mess up for the entire ‘category [of lesbian women]’. She also stressed that she constantly feels like she stands out like a ‘colourful dog’ and is consequently under ‘more surveillance’.

These narratives reveal the extent to which heteronormativity is structurally interwoven in the society. The manifest power of the hetero norm is revealed not despite but rather because of their subtleness. All the sample families referred to (1) the social practices they adopted to avoid judgment (e.g. being overly friendly) and (2) the (discursive) objections they felt or anticipated due to their sexual orientations, gender identities, and/or family constellations (e.g. offenses and prejudices by outsiders), which we will elaborate on in the next section. They also talked about their fear of exclusion and violence. We take these responses as a starting point to discuss the social practices adopted by these families. In the following section, we interpret their narratives of normalization, as a practice to protect themselves and their families from experienced or anticipated harm. We show that these practices are not merely pragmatic but are arduous ways of acting under uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations. Nor are they apolitical. Rather, normalization as a practice also changes what is considered normal.

Normalization practices as an arduous effort

In this section, we focus on the everyday practice of normalization. We first elaborate on normalization as a discursive practice, and reconstruct how normality and (heteronormative) family ideals are constructed in narratives about the family. Second, we show that normalization as a social practice demands arduous efforts and is hard work. Thereafter, we theorise our empirical findings and summarise these normalization practices as an exhaustive investment. Although these social interactions are situated in the so-called private, intimate sphere, we consider them as having the potential for social change.

Normalisation as a discursive practice

Our sample families often evoked notions of the ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary family’ in their narratives about the family. These narratives served to present the interviewees as well-functioning families that did not deviate from the common aspects of family life, to prevent outsiders from judging or perceiving dysfunctionalities within their families. We reconstructed these narratives as discursive practices that served to present them as ‘normal’ during the interview. We analytically distinguish presentations of the self as normal from presentations of practices as normal.

A common narrative in many of the interviews was the families’ assertion of their normality through their self-presentation. For example, Conny Herwald, a non-binary parent who lives with their female-to-male trans* partner and their two children in a small village in the countryside describes themselves as ‘we are a normal square [read: bourgeois] family’. Similarly, Niklas Naumburg, who co-parents with his partner and a lesbian couple, strongly emphasized his family’s normality throughout the interview:

[W]e are not wild and do not dance in high heels. […] Considering our upbringing within a system of values, we are quite normal and quite a normal family, but we are always portrayed as not being like that at all. But in principle, we are probably not much different from other families.

He also sought to distance his family from behaviours that are considered ‘wild’, at least according to homophobic stereotypes about an indecent lifestyle. Owing to the (conservative) values they embody, they seemed aware of what are considered socially accepted manners within the context of the gender binary; for example, for men, it might mean not wearing sexualized and feminized shoes (high heels). The interviewees invariably expressed their concern about not passing as normal when declaring themselves as ‘quite normal’, potentially indicating how socially fragile their sense of normality was.

Second, the sample families demonstrated their ‘normality’ by referring to their lived family practices. In these narratives, the term ‘normal’ was not used to describe themselves, but was rather used to describe the practices perceived as typical and common for average families. Unlike their self-presentation, the interviewees did not simply assert the normality of their families, but provided evidence to support this claim.

During an interview with a three-parent family, the couple Gustav Gernsheim (G) and Levi Jung (L), and their friend Miriam Jung, the mother of their two children, we asked them what they found special about their family.

G: I have always felt that we were a model family. Because, well, we actually live up to conservative values quite clearly, I find. Yes?

In this conversation, Gustav and Levi normalize their family model, and ‘do family’ by referring to bourgeois conservative values and a middle-class socioeconomic status, which grants them prestige and recognition. Performatively, they conform with the norms of middle-class families, while excluding other family values. The demarcation line is drawn between full-time employment and unemployment, cohabitation versus uncertain and unstable living arrangements, and monogamy instead of promiscuity. In particular, Levi’s reference to the Sunday roast can be interpreted as an attempt to counterbalance their deviation in the aspects of (hetero) sexuality, parenthood, and citizenship. Consequently, they appear not only as a normal family but also as a model family—the ideal family type within capitalist societies, which reproduces through the procreation of employable citizens, and relies on the (free) moral service of caring for each other as a couple and their children as a family. This example illustrates what we diagnose as an ambivalent recognition of same-sex relationships: while homosexuality is being increasingly normalized and legally recognized, same-sex relationships must adopt monogamous coupledom and the bourgeois ideal of a nuclear family.

Anticipating being labelled as stiletto wearing Others, who lead a dissolute sex life, Gustav Gernsheim and Niklas Naumburg dismiss these practices to protect themselves from the prejudices and stigmas associated with being gay. They discursively produce their normality by distancing themselves from having ‘wild stories’. Instead, they concentrate on working hard throughout the week to provide for their families, and so that they can enjoy their Sunday roast. It is precisely this sexual morality that is evident in the conversation above: instead of ‘wandering around at night’, Gustav, Levi, and Miriam are, of course, already asleep.

Nevertheless, as gay fathers, they are possibly under more pressure to prove their parenting skills than two mothers would be. Mothers, even if lesbian, seem to be entrusted with motherhood as if it were a quasi-natural competence of their gender. In contrast, fathers, especially gay fathers, must substantiate their trustworthiness to be legitimised as a parent.

Proactive interventions to prevent anticipated exclusion and violence

In addition to these narratives or discursive practices and interventions regarding what ought to be perceived as normal, the families we interviewed described active engagements they participated in to avoid external judgment and hatred. In this section, we reconstruct normalization as a social practice. A central motive of normalization practices is to pre-emptively ward off previously experienced (direct or indirect) exclusion and devaluation. However, doing so requires anticipatory mental work and preoccupation with identifying a potentially threatening situation, or figuring out ways to behave around a particular (unfamiliar) group of people to appease them in advance.

Conclusion: Normalisation as effort and as a (sub-)political practice

Often, processes of normalization and adherence to a heteronormative lifestyle have been labelled as homonormativity (Duggan, 2002). Instead of conceptualizing normalization as apolitical and affirmative assimilation to bourgeois norms of heterosexuality, we analysed these practices within the nexus of structural heteronormativity, recognition, and normativity. Following Heaphy (2018), we reconstructed everyday normalization practices as attempts to (re)negotiate heteronormative structures. However, while, these practices reproduce the heteronormative order of the nuclear family, they simultaneously challenge hegemonic family norms by normalizing non-normative lives. Our key arguments are summarized as follows: First, the LGBTQ+ families emphasize normality, with respect to the ordinariness of their families and relationships. In doing so, they indeed reproduce certain (nuclear) family norms by investing in social institutions of marriage and family, incorporating the traditions and conventions attached to them (Heaphy, 2018). We argue these families engage in such behaviours because normalization is a social practice that is necessary in order to live a bearable life, against the backdrop of discrimination that LGBTQ+ families experience or anticipate as lurking around the corner due to society’s heteronormative structure.

Second, day-to-day practices of normalization are not merely a reproduction of the (hetero)normative order or a seamless assimilation with existing norms. Rather, these practices are very arduous, and the families we interviewed invest a lot of effort to perform them. We find that normalization is a discursive practice that requires active storytelling and performances involving their self-representations and day-to-day routines to produce normality. Furthermore, normalization is a proactive practice that seeks to prevent discrimination. We argued that doing normality encompasses what we framed as effort involved in not coming out. While this could be dismissed as ‘not-doing’ enough in terms of asserting their queerness, or being passive, we highlighted that this also requires considerable effort. People must engage in constant negotiations with themselves and their environment, to gauge whether, for example, it is safe to come out as a queer parent. We also framed the stringent commitment to the norm as hypernormalization. The families interviewed actively invested in normalization efforts to avoid being labelled as dangerous or a threat to heteronormative values. Finally, we suggested that these efforts are necessary to avoid ‘failing’ as an LGBTQ+ family.

Given that normalization practices are very arduous and demanding, they must be permanently actualised, and can be observed in active practices, such as mental engagements and decision-making, which are often invisible. However, the effort normalization demands cannot simply be rewarded by increasing visibility and recognition, because doing normality aims at passing as ordinary and, hence, at being an unquestioned norm. Thus, it is the invisible nature of doing normality that makes it more of an effort. Loretta Limburg vividly summarized these struggles during the interview by referring to the enormous effort she and the other three parents exert as LGBTQ+ families, with heavy costs to their health and careers, despite resistance and prejudices.

Third, when doing normality, LGBTQ+ families not only reproduce normative family ideals but also challenge them. In line with Butler’s concept of performativity, we argue that doing family as a queer family has the potential to change what has thus far been considered normal (similarly see Mamo’s (2007) analysis on queering reproduction, where she argues that lesbian families using assisted reproduction simultaneously give into and pull away from normativity). Normalization practices are useful and functional in the LGBTQ+ families’ daily struggles for social and legal recognition (see also Nay, 2017), because they can be normative while simultaneously undermining normativity. However, recognition of their rights is also simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. Alterations to the norm produce new or different minorities who are excluded from recognition and legitimation, such as trans* parent families, parents with polyamorous relationships, and multiparent families. Hence, we must be sensitive to the nuances in the context of assimilation, appropriation, and (mis)interpretation of existing norms that we cannot escape. Future research must address how non-normative families that cannot easily adhere to the heterosexual, two-parent family norms, such as polyamorous families, friendship-based families, or trans* parent families or families without children can become recognized and not discriminated against. Future research must address how non-normative families that cannot easily adhere to the heterosexual, two-parent family norms, such as polyamorous families, friendship-based families, or trans* parent families or families without children, can become recognized and not discriminated against.

To conclude, we argue that LGBT*Q families’ performance of normality can be conceptualized as sub-political. By displaying and emphasizing normality or by trying to appear as ordinary families, LGBT*Q families contribute to changing hegemonic normative perceptions of the family ideal. Their very presence broadens the notions about what a family is or should be. This type of inclusiveness is not only achieved by public political struggles but also by everyday sub-political practices. A popular saying goes, ‘constant dripping wears away the stone’. Hence, the steady and sometimes invisible efforts of normalization extends what is perceived as normal, and thus enables social transformation.