Queer family: a perspective on the transformation of family relationships
The academic and political battles around the crisis of the modern family — which, as we all learn back at school, is that notorious “unit of society,” the basic social institution — are driven, not least, by the fact that this institution secures what is known as the “gender order.”
Following R. CONNELL, the gender order is understood as a historically established pattern of power relations between men and women, together with the ways in which those relations define what a society counts as feminine and what it counts as masculine /1/.
Why does the crisis of the family trouble people so much? Because the workings of this institution are directly tied to masculinity and femininity — key characteristics of our personality, our behavior, and our relationships with other people.
Why does the family acquire the status of a “sacred cow” in political discourse, and why is this institution sacralized to such a degree? Because power relations are bound up with a particular understanding of the family: who ranks higher, whose interests matter more, what chances we will have of satisfying them, what will be available and what will be out of reach for one group of people or another.
The term “institution” itself made its way into social knowledge from jurisprudence, where it denotes a body of norms regulating relations between partners /2/. The family as a social institution therefore has as its main function the organization of social life and the stabilization of ties in one particular respect — in the sphere of the most varied relations that concern a person’s sex and sexuality. This includes regulating the ways in which sexual pleasure may be obtained (the so-called “sexual function”), assigning responsibility for the new member of society who appears in the course of satisfying sexual desire (the “reproductive function”), transmitting culture from the older generation to the younger one (the “educational function”), and regulating relations of production and consumption (the “economic function”).
The main point, however, is that the definition of what a family is and who may belong to it, and the definition of the character of relations among the members of this group, always contains a power component that regulates the expression of sexuality as a whole. Since people who enter into relationships come together in various groups, they build those relationships on the basis of definitions of sexuality, among other things.
Any change in the normative definition of the social institution of “the family” entails serious changes in the social order as a whole. For centuries that order rested on a vertical of power, on domination and subordination, on dependence and unequal opportunity. The traditional family, the bourgeois family, the Soviet family — each in its own way reproduced and maintained this order at the level of interpersonal relations, determining who in the family is the key dominant figure and who are the subordinate, dependent subjects, depending on their sex and on the partners’ sexuality.
Most contemporary models of family relations rest on two principles: heteronormativity and patriarchy. Heteronormativity means establishing the forms of relationships common among heterosexual people as the standards or norms one is expected to meet. Patriarchy, in turn, is characterized by a rigid division of female and male roles, of female and male qualities and attributes, accompanied by assigning men the principal, leading role and by an a priori perception of everything “masculine” as the general norm.
One expression of heteronormativity is the conviction that people always fall into two opposing groups: men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, masculine or feminine, those who play the male role or those who play the female one. Heteronormativity fixes an order of gender relations in which people of different sexes, different sexual preferences, and different types of sexual behavior end up in different dimensions of a social space divided into a public sphere and a personal one (private, “invisible” to the majority).
Normativism as a settled way of seeing the world is essentially always bound up with dichotomy — with dividing the world into two competing parts that turn out to be unequal to each other: one part acquires rights and privileges because it is “normal,” while the other has its rights curtailed and is discriminated against because it is “abnormal.” Normativism goes hand in hand with various practices of excluding “abnormal” people from the space of “normal” social relations. But what exactly is normal, and why is one thing perceived as more significant than another? Until the 1990s, the answers to these questions remained outside any scholarly examination of normativism in general and of heteronormativity in particular.
The patriarchal character of family relations shows itself, first of all, in reducing the sphere of sexuality entirely to biological manifestations and in biologizing the behavioral roles played by men and women, including people with different sexual preferences. At the heart of patriarchy lies the conviction that the sex dichotomy is total in its manifestations and that the childbearing function of human sexuality takes priority. All the roles that men and women play in communicating and interacting with one another are viewed according to this principle — solely as an expression of a sexual organization which, as we know, distinguishes men from women only by the childbearing function. Yet the patriarchal mindset “glues” different facets of a personality into a single package: woman-and-mother, man-and-head-of-the-household, and so on. What gets “left out” in the process is the fact that a mother, for instance, is one of the agents of the social phenomenon of parenting — of adults accompanying a child’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and social development. And the link between this social phenomenon and the biological organization of one parent’s body is highly questionable.
Heteronormativism and patriarchy are closely connected and reinforce each other. After all, what is the “normal” family that is “going through a crisis” in our time? It is a hierarchical structure with rigidly fixed gender roles. Husband and wife — a married couple who at the same time are at least potentially a father and a mother — perform repressive functions: each in their own sphere and in relation to different family members.
The internal hierarchy of the members of a “normal” family and the character of the power relations among them in fact reproduce and sustain the larger systems of hierarchy into which this “unit” of society is embedded. The family acts as a “mediator” between individual people (the individual level of human existence) and the large social systems they belong to (professional, ethnic, national and civic groups, and so on). This is precisely why, in order to be included in — rather than excluded from — normal social interaction, a person has to belong to a family that will be considered “normal” from the standpoint of the dominant social representations. If gender in the prevailing social representations is arranged hierarchically by sex and by sexual preference, then the family, in order to count as normal, must likewise be built in accordance with that hierarchy and will be judged by how well it matches the norm upheld by the dominant gender. If gender exists in social representations as a binary opposition, then a family will be considered normal only when it contains a hierarchical structure built on the binary opposition that is key to this institution.
From the standpoint of heteronormativity and patriarchy, only a heterosexual family that reproduces the dominant gender hierarchy can be considered “normal.” Yet since, alongside rigid normativism, a normativism of assumptions is also possible — one that takes into account the reality of the shared relationships that people of different sexes and sexual preferences actually enter into — a social system may develop a continuum of families with varying degrees of “deviation” from the heterosexual norm that rests on male dominance and female subordination. In any case, in a society based on the principle of heteronormativity, only the “healthy” heterosexual family will be seen by everyone as the ideal model, one to be imitated as closely as possible in order to count as a “normal” member of a gender-hierarchical society.
And once patriarchy is mixed into it as well, only a family that comes as close as possible to binary heterosexual relations, in which the “truly” masculine and the “truly” feminine are clearly separated, will be regarded as normal. It is the principle of patriarchy, incidentally, that produces such phenomena in non-heterosexual relationships as the division of sexual partners into the “active” and the “passive,” with “masculine” or “feminine” qualities ascribed to them accordingly. And the mechanisms of social influence that work through gender expectations shape corresponding personality traits in non-heterosexual partners who have been split into opposites by their sexual roles (“you called yourself the ‘active’ one, so be a ‘man’ — and the other way round”). It is the same principle of patriarchy that produces the phenomena of asymmetrical parenting in heterosexual relationships (when the mother is given preference in raising the children, while the father has the role of “family breadwinner” imposed on him).
Under rigid heteronormativism, no families other than those made up of partners of opposite sexes will be considered “normal.” However, as the author notes, such a rigid normativism of heterosexuality in family relations is possible only where “sexuality is fixed on childbearing alone rather than on pleasure,” and where “the freedom of personal self-expression, sexual self-expression included, is valued far less than the social conformity/typicality that guarantees ‘normality.’”
Today’s reality is that sexuality increasingly takes on the character of an individual choice centered on pleasure rather than on childbearing. The informal public sphere is expanding — a sphere in which forms of intimate relationships and assessments of sexual behavior other than the dominant ones also operate. As E. ZDRAVOMYSLOVA and A. TEMKINA note, substantial changes in sexual practices had already begun in Soviet society in the late 1970s, changes in which non-reproductive sexuality was acquiring the features of cultural legitimacy /3/.
This movement is broadly consistent with the changes around sexuality across contemporary European culture as a whole. As the value of individual freedom relative to the group grows stronger, the degree of social control over sexuality decreases, including the control exercised through the institution of the family. Where personal freedom is valued, the family ceases to perform the function of controlling sexual behavior — at least in the forms and to the extent that it did so before. Sexuality as such is becoming a sphere autonomous from family relations. Against this background, as E. ZDRAVOMYSLOVA and A. TEMKINA point out, sexual behavior is becoming separated from reproductive behavior, the age boundaries of sexual activity are widening, and more attention is being paid to the sexual attractiveness of the body.
The rising value of individual freedom, together with the development of everyday technologies, is gradually shifting the hierarchical system of gender relations toward egalitarianism: tolerance in the sphere of sexual morality is growing, which leads to the normalization of homosexuality at the level of everyday relations in the private sphere.
Placing the emphasis on sexual pleasure makes heteronormativism less rigid. If pleasure can be obtained with different sexual objects in the private sphere, then it can also be normalized within the format of traditional, patriarchal heterosexual relations as the ideal model of any sexual relationship — provided it stays out of public view.
Thus, where attitudes toward sexuality have been liberalized, heteronormativism “switches” attention from the question of choosing the sex of the sexual object to the question of how closely a relationship with a sexual object of any sex conforms to heterosexual relations. This gives rise to a tendency to legitimize types of families in which the partners are not heterosexual, but in which relations are normalized as though the partners were heterosexual.
Normativizing all gender relations on the model of relations in the patriarchal heterosexual family makes them recognizable and accepted under conditions of liberalized sexuality. But how far does this imitation reflect the real desires and real practices of all people? In any case, there remain those “abnormal” people who do not enact the heterosexual patriarchal norm. Does that make them bad members of society?
The liberalization of heteronormativism merely widens the boundaries of the acceptable; it still leaves out the question of why a heterosexual union in particular should be regarded as the only correct norm. Appeals to biology, according to which heterosexuality is the objective norm, are no more than the ideological foundation of heteronormativity. In nature, entirely different criteria of normality may apply — for example, the concept of the biological norm in P. K. ANOKHIN’s theory of functional systems /4/.
According to that theory, a normal organism combines a multitude of smoothly interacting functional systems that belong to different structural formations or to the same ones and that, through their joint work, ensure homeostasis and the adaptation of living beings to their environment. Homeostasis and adaptation can be secured just as well by the childbearing function of sexuality as by its hedonistic one.
Reducing the degree of control over human sexuality makes it autonomous with respect to the other components of the gender order — the content of gender categories (who counts as “normal” men and women) and the distribution of gender roles.
The liberation of sexuality therefore undermines both traditional heteronormativity and the basic principle of hierarchical power relations (patriarchy). The binary opposition of masculine and feminine in normative representations begins to blur. As a result, heteronormativity, working in tandem with patriarchy, starts to make spontaneous personal self-expression difficult in relationships that do not fit the former gender order. As the value of a person’s individuality and freedom rises, heteronormativity comes under critical review in various spheres of public consciousness. The recognition of how the principle of heteronormativity shapes the character of gender relations as a whole, and the forms and directions in which family relations are being transformed, gave rise to a new term — queer.
The word queer appeared in English in the 16th century as a derivative of the German quer (“across,” “athwart”) and originally referred to any socially non-normative, unacceptable behavior. At the end of the 19th century its meaning began to narrow to “unacceptable” sexual and gender behavior: it was increasingly used for effeminate homosexual men who were assumed to enjoy being the passive sexual partners of other men.
As the idea that the heteronormative social order is unjust spread through public consciousness, unidentified participants handed out a leaflet with the provocative title “Queer Read This” at one of the gay Pride events held in New York in June 1990. The leaflet was an open protest against the use of the word “gay” (cheerful, lighthearted) as the only positive name for homosexual men. Its authors wrote: “Yes, we are gay at times, that much is true. But when many of us — lesbians and gay men — wake up in the morning feeling angry, we are not gay. So it is better to call us queer, honestly; at the very least, that will remind us how the rest of the world sees us, and not only how we see ourselves. We do not have to be witty and charming people in a straight world where we are expected to live discreetly and only on the margins of life. We use the word ‘queer’ both as gay men who love lesbians and as lesbians who love being queer. ‘Queer,’ unlike ‘gay,’ is not only about men” /6/.
This call began the process of giving a term of abuse a different meaning, and it challenged the dominant idea of normality in a social system built on compulsory heterosexuality. Its political subtext quickly turned the word “queer” into an “umbrella” term for the entire community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (LGBTQI+).
This new political meaning of the word in its provocative usage was taken up by feminist scholars. According to Katherine WATSON, the term “queer” was introduced into academic circulation by the American thinker Teresa de LAURETIS in 1991 /5/. Its new content was to designate everything that does not fit the patriarchal heteronormative order and falls outside the notion of the “normal.” In other words, the word “queer” denotes everything that lies beyond a “normal” society founded on the gender dichotomy. And since the phenomenon of gender identity, which reflects the social division of people into distinct gender groups (by sex and by sexual preference), is also bound up with the gender dichotomy, the term “queer” came to draw attention to how conventional and unstable the boundaries of any clear definition of gender identity are — definitions expressed in the most varied behavioral practices.
The term queer sharpens our attention to the fact that in everyday, routine life it is impossible to fix the boundaries of sexual certainty. The urge to define oneself as a straight woman or a straight man, as a lesbian or a gay man, or as bisexual (which is in fact even more problematic, because markers of gender certainty get mixed in with sexual preference), and likewise the urge to define oneself — to prove to oneself and to others — as a “real woman” or a “real man” (even when one’s preferences are not strictly heterosexual) arises only under a patriarchal heteronormative order. That order demands a clear-cut answer along the lines of “so, are you for the Left or for the Reds?” Such self-definition, in turn, sets the normative place of the subject in social space (public or private) and shapes a particular order of thinking that inscribes them in the dominant gender system.
Under heteronormativity, the various private practices of heterosexual partners living a family life that are “indecent” from the standpoint of social expectations turn out to be hidden and shameful at the level of publicity. Here it is worth recalling an important clarification of the notion of publicity made by J. HABERMAS. There is an official public sphere, formed by public authority, by the state (that is, political publicity), and there is an “unofficial” public sphere, formed by particular social groups and private individuals around aspects of life that are significant only to them /7/.
At the level of the unofficial public sphere, individuals may well pursue liberal tendencies in the development of sexuality and see nothing wrong in it, as long as this remains their private life, or life within a limited community of people who “understand,” of like-minded peers. The refusal of the official public sphere to keep up with society’s changing attitudes toward sexuality leads, on the one hand, to the emergence of a so-called “hypocritical” sexuality and, on the other, to entirely predictable attempts by those in power to roll back the liberalizing trend in sexuality that is emerging at the level of the unofficial public sphere. After all, that trend undermines the former social order in a fundamental way. This is where the hysteria about the moral decay of society comes from, along with attempts to fight it through legislation, resistance to any change in the legal framework of family law, and the panic over the legalization of same-sex marriage. All of this really is connected with a change in society’s value system “from below.” Yet once the process of liberalization has been set in motion, the idea of critically re-examining the existing heteronormative and patriarchal foundations of the family as an institution cannot be left out of our reflection on this experience.
The liberalization of attitudes toward sexuality and the development of the institutions of the unofficial public sphere, along with a critical understanding of the influence of heteronormativity, encourage the appearance of various queer family practices (practices that do not fit heteronormative patriarchal models of relationships within a family union or partnership). The rejection of the rigid frame of binarity, which the term “queer” is bound up with, blurs models of the family based on binary relations. This suggests that some models of partnership realized within the LGBTQI+ community in fact show us possible directions in which the heterosexual family may develop. Since queer practice is precisely about disregarding the principles of patriarchy and heteronormativity in relationships, it is clear that heterosexual couples can be queer too, while homosexual couples may perfectly well be non-queer, fully inscribed in the space of heteronormativity.
What does a queer family mean in its LGBTQI+ version? It is not even a legalized same-sex union — or more precisely, it does not come down to legalization and to equality between heterosexual and LGBTQI+ people in marriage and family law. If by a de facto family we mean any union of two people regardless of its legal status and of whether they are required to live together, then an LGBTQI+ couple is fully a family in substance (ad rem). Only it is a family that is not recognized at the level of the official public sphere.
One of the key differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships is the purely hedonistic use of the sexual function. Under heteronormativity and the hierarchical organization of the gender system, this use of sexuality becomes an important criterion of distinction and of the formation of a particular gender identity — one focused on the free satisfaction of sexual desire and on a playful conversion of statuses. Under rigid heteronormativism, homosexual couples may develop a clear division by sexual roles, realized largely in the public sphere, while in private that division will not necessarily prove rigid. Under “soft” heteronormativism, as the polarization of gender differences decreases, homosexual couples increasingly develop the phenomenon of “universalism,” a flexibility of sexual roles.
The emphasis on the hedonistic component of sexuality makes partners’ sexual fidelity secondary. Under heteronormativism this leads to a split between behavior in the public and in the private spheres of a partnership: fidelity in public and, in reality, “whoring around,” which is seen as an inevitable consequence of male homosexuality at the very least. Recognizing the influence of heteronormativism on such behavior — or disregarding it — creates the ground for queer family practices that are non-normative from the standpoint of the dominant gender order: an open discussion of the possibility, and the practice, of sex outside the couple that does not damage the relationship with the primary partner (agreeing on mutually acceptable arrangements for the free use of sexuality); a division of living space (the practice of relationships “on a schedule”) so as to make room for the free expression of sexuality. And all of these features of a relationship can be combined with stable, long-lasting, and satisfying sexual and emotional relations between the partners, with a shared household and a consolidated budget for the couple.
The absence of sexual fidelity together with the effort to maintain it at the level of publicity (of normative visibility); the intermittent character of the relationship (two or three days together, the rest of the time apart, for example); a high degree of autonomy for both partners; leisure spent separately; respect for a partner’s right to use their sexuality freely (giving notice when the schedule of meetings has to change, for instance) — all of this makes such relationships “queer” precisely from the standpoint of patriarchal heteronormativity. Relationships like these are hard to imagine in couples for whom childbearing is the leading function of sexuality, since this format makes fulfilling that function as difficult as it can possibly be.
Yet this format of relationship does exist. And it can easily be extended to those different-sex unions for which childbearing is likewise not the goal. The only thing holding that extension back is the restriction of freedom of choice imposed by official public heteronormativity, which sets the parameters of normal and abnormal behavior for members of the dominant gender groups (heterosexual men and women) and insists on a clear dichotomy between “true” and “queer” relationships between people (queer in the broad sense of the term, and not only in the sexual sense).
To sum up, one can put forward the thesis that some of the queer practices I identified earlier in my study of the specific features of partnerships within the LGBTQI+ community /8/ demonstrate the possibilities open to the family as an institution once the repressive binary model of gender relations, based on the principles of patriarchy and heteronormativity, is abandoned.
References:
- Connell R. W. (1987). Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Allen & Unwin.
- Glotov M. B. The social institution: definition, structure, classification // Sociological Studies. 2003. No. 10. Pp. 13–19.
- Zdravomyslova E., Temkina A. The Soviet etacratic gender order // The Russian gender order: a sociological approach: A collective monograph / Ed. by E. Zdravomyslova and A. Temkina. St. Petersburg: European University at St. Petersburg Press, 2007. Pp. 96–137.
- Anokhin P. K. Principles of the systemic organization of functions. Moscow, “Nauka,” 1973.
- Watson K. Queer Theory. Group Analysis. 2005. Vol. 38. Pp. 67–81.
- Queer Read This: Leaflet distributed at pride march in NY. Published anonymously by Queers, June, 1990. [Electronic resource]: http://www.qrd.org/qrd/misc/text/queers.read.this
- Habermas J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge.
- Vorontsov D. V. “Family life is not for us”: the myths and values of male homosexual couples // Family bonds: Models for assembly: Collected articles. Book 1 / Compiled and edited by S. Ushakin. — Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 2004. Pp. 576–607.
Author: Dmitry Vladimirovich VORONTSOV, PhD in Psychology, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Psychology, Southern Federal University (Rostov-on-Don, Russia)
How to cite: Vorontsov D. V. The queer family: a perspective on the transformation of family relationships // Models of the family: transformations and development trends. Proceedings of the conference of September 25, 2010: a collection of papers and abstracts / compiled by O. B. Sharygina, Kharkiv Women’s Association “Sphere” NGO. — Kharkiv: Tochka Publishing House, 2010. — Pp. 27–39.