ABSTRACT
This chapter examines The L Word (2004-2009) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), two recent American cultural productions depicting lesbian couples who use ARTs to conceive. Produced by the premium cable network Showtime, The L Word is a TV series about affluent and glamorous Los Angeles lesbian lives. While the series is probably best remembered for its explicit lesbian sexuality, this chapter explores a plotline from the first season in which mixed-race couple Bette and Tina seek a suitable sperm donor to conceive a child. Meanwhile, the feature film The Kids Are All Right recounts how two teenage siblings brought up by their lesbian mothers contact the sperm donor (their biological father) with unforeseen consequences. Both productions were spearheaded by established lesbian cultural producers who are also parents: Ilene Chaiken acted as executive producer, creator and writer of The L Word, while Lisa Cholodenko is credited as director and co-writer of The Kids Are All Right. Partly inspired by personal and collective experiences of lesbian parenting, these productions are also carefully crafted narratives that navigate the changing conditions of lesbian representation within American popular culture during the first decade of the 2000s. The L Word and The Kids Are All Right were produced within a sociopolitical context in which the enduring American cultural fantasy of the heteronormative nuclear family coexists uneasily with emergent practices of reproduction and kinship: assisted conception, lesbian and gay “families of choice,” and legal battles over the recognition of same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay parenting rights. I have argued elsewhere that, alongside everyday performative practices of kinship and political and legal struggles, the field of cultural production is pivotal to the reproduction and reimagining of kinship (Pidduck 2009). At once conventional and highly adaptive, the narratives and genres of popular culture stage the symbolic negotiation of core cultural tensions (Altman 1984). In this light, this chapter studies how The L Word and The Kids Are All Right represent lesbian appropriation of ARTs, and queer women’s sexuality and kinship more broadly, in relation to changing norms of kinship, gender, and sexuality in the USA. The L Word and The Kids Are All Right articulate how female same-sex desire connects with reproduction and kinship by dramatizing controversial practices and themes, including lesbian appropriation of ARTs, queer female
sexuality and motherhood. While these themes are novel to the heteronormative domain of American popular culture, the lesbian baby boom is an established sociological phenomenon in the United States and many other affluent countries. Since the late 1970s, queer women have routinely used non-medicalized donor insemination (also known colloquially as the “turkey baster” method), but from the mid-1980s they have increasingly turned to ARTs for the management of information and medical risks associated with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (Sullivan 2004, 32-34). The infertility clinics referenced in these productions are typical of a privatized American health-service sector operating without any regulation of cost, access, scope or quality of treatment (Asch and Marmor 2008). Ethical, economic and political problems of access to ARTs are not broached directly, as both works take for granted the access of their well-off lesbian protagonists to a private ART industry operating on a user-pay basis that is indifferent to sexual orientation. The low-key but pivotal role of ARTs in these productions enables fictional explorations of changing practices of biological and other forms of relatedness. These mainstream representations of lesbian procreation and kinship were released in a context where LGBTQ individuals and communities are profoundly ambivalent toward norms of heteronormative and biological kinship (Pidduck 2009). Kath Weston (1991) argues that the discourse of “families of choice” involves a deliberate refusal or decentering of biological relatedness in a context where lesbian, gay and queer subjects are frequently rejected by their blood families, and have been figured individually and collectively as “exiles from kinship.” The refusal of mainstream society to recognize LGBTQ kinship has proven devastating for the legal recognition of queer parents, and for LGBTQ access to health-care benefits (notably during the AIDS pandemic). Both productions are situated in early 2000s California, a context marked by high-profile political and legal battles over the legal recognition of same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay parenting: Same-sex marriage was briefly legalized in 2008 in California, only to be banned by Proposition 8, a State constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriages. As popular culture productions, The L Word and The Kids Are All Right resolutely avoid explicit political references. Even so, their novel and self-conscious treatment of contested themes of lesbian sexuality and kinship need to be framed in an ideological context in which the State and the Christian Right have aggressively shored up heteronormative political, legal and sociocultural definitions of family. These forces have systematically vilified same-sex marriage and parenting, drawing on “a persistent cultural narrative denying the naturalness of lesbian and gay sexuality . . . because it is perceived to be inherently nonprocreative” (Hayden 1995, 56). In this context, the juxtaposition of a seemingly “perverse” and nonprocreative lesbian sexuality with assisted reproductive technologies presents a particularly potent cocktail. Queer women’s appropriation of assisted conception, represented for the first time in these works, challenges and rearticulates cultural norms of gender, sexuality and motherhood.
