Abstract
This chapter explores how parents in same-sex parent families access, construct, and represent parenthood and its challenges in contemporary Italy. Same-sex partners having children together face a series of specific hurdles to parenthood and ongoing challenges in their parenting practices. This situation of uncertainty is a consequence of the lack of legal recognition of their reproductive and parental rights as well as to discourses and institutional practices either explicitly reaffirming heterosexuality as the prerequisite to (good) parenthood or neglecting the existence and needs of same-sex parent families. Based on qualitative data of a project exploring constructions of parenthood on insecure grounds, the chapter aims to provide knowledge about same-sex parenting challenges and practices in everyday life and against the background of ambivalent orders of recognition. The chapter contributes to a better understanding of how Italian same-sex parents construct and make sense of their parenthood and how they display family between claims of recognition and feared or experienced practices of exclusion.
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Notes
- 1.
Park describes monomaternalism as an ideological doctrine that “resides at the intersection of patriarchy (with its insistence that women bear responsibility for biological and social reproduction), heteronormativity (with its insistence that a woman must pair with a man, rather than other women, in order to raise children successfully), capitalism (in its conception of children as private property), and Eurocentrism (in its erasure of polymaternalism in other cultures and historical periods)” (Park, 2013, p. 7).
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The information used for this paper originated from the project Constructions of Parenting on Insecure Grounds: What Role for Social Work? (CoPInG). Grant Program: PRIN 2017 – Funding from the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research for research projects of national interest (grant number: 2017ZKSE5N).
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Monaco, S., Nothdurfter, U. (2022). Same-Sex Parenting in Contemporary Italy: Constructing Parenthood on Insecure Grounds. In: Gilley, B.J., Masullo, G. (eds) Non-Binary Family Configurations: Intersections of Queerness and Homonormativity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05367-2_12
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