Lesbian and Gay Parenting - Securing Social and Educational Capital (Electronic book text)

Much current work on lesbian and gay kinship still overlooks the significance of socio-economic status. This book explores the intersections between class and sexuality in lesbians' and gay men's experiences of parenting and the everyday pathways navigated therein, from initial routes into parenting and household divisions of labour, to location preferences, schooling choice and community supports. In a context of international legal changes, this study seeks to situate parents as both sexual and classed subjects, interrogating the relevance of class and sexual (dis)advantages. Frequently lesbian and gay families are positioned at the vanguard of transformations in intimacy while often empirically absent in such declarations: they are misplaced in this dual over-emphasis (as agents of social change) and sidelining (under-investigated when compared to the research on heterosexual families). This book utilizes the concept of social capital, combining a Bourdieusian notion of capital as specifically classed, alongside that evidenced in the 'families of choice' literature. The theoretical opposition of different frameworks of 'social capital' advances class conceptualisations, exploring too the ways that (middle) classed capitals sometimes do not pay off, as a result of occupying non-normative sexualities.