Queerly Familial: Canadian Histories of Queer Reproduction, Parenting, and Activism, 1968-2005
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the first federal Divorce Act in 1968, Canadian family law judges considered a parent’s sexuality relevant to divorce, child custody and child access determinations. In particular, judges were concerned about the potential impact queer parents might have on their children’s psychosexual development. As a result, queer parents who were deemed to be discreet were more likely to retain custody or access. Motivated by queer family law cases, social scientists responded to judges’ concerns, asking whether queer parents were in fact more likely to raise queer children without challenging the underlying heteronormativity of the question. A consensus quickly developed that there was no difference in the outcomes of children raised by lesbian mothers compared to those raised by heterosexual mothers. Print media subsequently translated these findings to a wider public. Media also reported on specific family law cases, although mainstream, right-wing, and alternative periodicals framed such discussions in dramatically different ways. Queer parenting activists in turn developed robust media strategies to influence public opinion and to respond to the heteronormativity of family law courtrooms. Queer parents and their allies organized initially in defence of custody rights before going on to fight for access to fertility clinics and sperm banks, and for the legal recognition of planned queer families. Through an examination of legal, medical, media, activist, and oral history sources, I put expert and experiential discourses in conversation with one another. I argue that, since the 1970s, normativity is the primary structure through which queer families have been understood. Whether through judges’ emphasis on discretion or the no-difference consensus among social scientists, experts compared queer parents to their heteronormative counterparts, and deemed it a success when they approximated normativity. Queer families have had to respond to this hegemonic discursive framing of queer family life even when they have explicitly rejected a politics of normativity. In the following chapters, I explore how the uneven, incomplete, and at times bitterly resisted normalization (and thus homogenization) of queer family experience has played out in specific contexts: in family law courtrooms, social scientific research, print media, and activist organizing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".