ABSTRACT
This chapter, "Queer(ing) Parenthood", presents diverse configurations of families with children. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic observations, and focus groups with lesbian mothers and gay fathers, this chapter aims to present what it means to queer parenthood in Poland, where there is no recognition of social/co-parents, and second-parent adoption is not available. Among the issues explored in this chapter, more closely are tactics undertaken by queer parents to deal with homophobia and lack of legal recognition of their families and family/parental passing. Drawing on parents’ narratives, a social/co-parent’s unstable, precarious, and fragile position is given particular attention. The chapter reveals various attempts to legitimate a social/co-parent in the Polish context with its particular traditional vision of a family based on nuclear, heteronormative, bionormative, and monomaternal/monopaternal characteristics. They range from strategies already described in the Western literature to those very particular and tied to the Polish cultural context like queering baptism. This chapter critically joins the Anglo-American debate on queering parenthood mostly conducted in the context of assimilation/conformity vs. transgression/subversion paradigm (Bell and Binnie 2000; Duggan 2002; Warner 1993). Instead of seeing queer parenthood through these binary and more or less normative discussions, it proposes concentrating on actual daily practices of sustaining and legitimising parenthood. It reveals that those practices are deeply rooted in social and cultural contexts that shape queer experiences of doing families.
