Good and Healthy Parents. Non-Heterosexual Parenting and Tricky Alliances

Does a challenge to heteronormative assumptions on parenting also involve a challenge to an imperative of good parenting bearing the responsibility of raising healthy, well-developed children, endowed with the resources to achieve happiness, and to avoid social and personal pathologies? Or is this notion, and the medicalised frame upon which it is grounded, rather mobilised for the social and legal recognition of diversity in the forms good parenting can take? Seeing non-heteronormative parenting as an intergenerational issue, involving parents dealing with LGBT children as well as LGBT adults as parents, the article explores the appeal of medical frames in collective self-representations of their advocates, drawing on international literature to read the Italian context. Some problematic implications of this appeal concern who gets voice as legitimate expert, which models of good parenting are sustained, and how they contribute to upholding social hierarchies

Putting families of origin into the queer picture

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) individuals have been socially constructed as “family outlaws”, but in relation to partnership and parenting, far-reaching changes have taken place in the last decades, and research has kept an attentive eye on these changes. This chapter introduces the issues regarding families of choice and families of origin. It also introduces the chapters in the book that present research on families of origin and shifting discourses and constructions of family. It also suggests directions for future research and critical thinking

Beyond the Client: Exploring Men's Sexual Scripting

Sexual scripting theory, with its de-essentialising potential, is a powerful weapon in dismantling simplistic, classificatory, and derogatory understandings of men as clients of commercial sex, allowing us to explore how making sense of paying for sex is an everyday accomplishment for men in the scripting of heterosexual masculinity. Drawing upon middle-aged and elderly Italian men\u2019s accounts of their heterosexual sexual biographies, we point to directions along which the potential of scripting theory can further unfold in research on purchasing sex, by considering scripting as a situational, biographical and boundary-drawing process

Il fascino discreto delle famiglie omogenitoriali: dilemmi e responsabilità della ricerca

Facing the deep changes in the visibility and recognition of experiences of non-heterosexual parenthood in Italy, and the growing attention research has been devoting to them, this article proposes a sociological contribution to a needed reflection about dilemmas and responsibilities regarding the definition of the object of research, and the frames provided in the training of workers and volunteers in addressing these experiences. Prompted by an experience of training on family diversity in Torino, these reflections focus on how to recognize and avoid the risks of a categorising approach. The perspective of family practices is proposed as a possible analytical strategy to give account of the plural and situational ways by which actors give sense to their doing family in everyday life, without refraining from dealing with the symbolic and institutional weight of this term

Il fascino discreto delle famiglie omogenitoriali: Dilemmi e responsabilità della ricerca

Facing the deep changes in the visibility and recognition of experiences of non-heterosexual parenthood in Italy, and the growing attention research has been devoting to them, this article proposes a sociological contribution to a needed reflection about dilemmas and responsibilities regarding the definition of the object of research, and the frames provided in the training of workers and volunteers in addressing these experiences. Prompted by an experience of training on family diversity in Torino, these reflections focus on how to recognize and avoid the risks of a categorising approach. The perspective of family practices is proposed as a possible analytical strategy to give account of the plural and situational ways by which actors give sense to their doing family in everyday life, without refraining from dealing with the symbolic and institutional weight of this term