ABSTRACT
The State of Families: Law, Policy, and the Meanings of Relationships collects essential readings on the family to examine the multiple forms of contemporary families, the many issues facing families, the policies that regulate families, and how families—and family life—have become politicized.
This text explores various dimensions of "the family" and uses a critical approach to understand the historical, cultural, and political constructions of the family. Each section takes different aspects of the family to highlight the intersection of individual experience, structures of inequality—including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration—and state power. Readings, both original and reprinted from a wide range of experts in the field, show the multiple forms and meanings of family by delving into topics including the traditional ground of motherhood, childhood, and marriage, while also exploring cutting edge research into fatherhood, reproduction, child-free families, and welfare.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the family, The State of Families offers students in the social sciences and professionals working with families new ways to identify how social structure and institutional practice shape individual experience.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section I|28 pages
Defining Families
part Section II|28 pages
Rules of Dating and Courtship
part Section III|44 pages
Regulating Relationships: Marriage and Partnerships
chapter 12|9 pages
The Language of (In)Visibility
chapter 14|10 pages
Polygamy in the United States
part Section IV|31 pages
Separation and Divorce
part Section V|42 pages
Reproducing Families
chapter 26|8 pages
Moral Women, Immoral Technologies
chapter 27|8 pages
Race Matters in Lesbian Donor Insemination
chapter 29|3 pages
Born in the USA
part Section VI|38 pages
Building Families through Adoption
chapter 32|10 pages
Letting Her Go
chapter 33|9 pages
“It Was the Cadillac of Adoption Agencies”
part Section VII|25 pages
Families without Children
part Section VIII|40 pages
Children and Teens in Families
chapter 40|11 pages
White Families and Race
part Section IX|40 pages
Experiences and Expectations of Motherhood
chapter 49|9 pages
The Deadly Challenges of Raising African American Boys
chapter 51|8 pages
“Not My Way, Sesha. Your Way. Slowly”
part Section X|37 pages
Defining Fatherhood
chapter 55|10 pages
Biology and Conformity
chapter 57|4 pages
I Am Who I Need to Be
part Section XI|34 pages
Poverty and Family Policy
part Section XII|38 pages
Aging