Queer Family Feuds: How Gay Parenting Creates Gendered Tensions in France and the United States

Drawing on archival data of social movements and interviews with activists, this paper examines how parenting issues create tensions along gender lines between and within feminist and LGBT movements in the United States and France. These tensions, related to disagreements about tactical issues, such as movement priorities, and fundamental philosophies, such as autonomy, have played out differently in each country. For example, in the 1970s and 80s, many lesbian activists on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to get their gay peers to mobilize around custody battles they were facing after divorces from heterosexual marriages. This issue was especially important in the US, where the high volume of court battles drove lesbians to seek a collective response. More recently, the issues of artificial insemination and surrogacy have renewed gendered tensions. In France, while LGBT and feminist groups have come together to demand that artificial insemination be legalized for women, disagreements over surrogacy have sparked major divisions within both movements. These divides run along the classic ideological fault line pitting the autonomy and exploitation of women’s reproductive labor against one another. In contrast, in the United States, surrogacy and artificial insemination have not led to such tensions. While certain American activists, particularly some lesbian feminists, disagree with surrogacy in private, they do not actively mobilize against it, as do their French peers. These national differences, I argue, are the result of legal and structural circumstances in each country. France’s conservative legal stance on queer reproduction exacerbates these tensions because it raises the stakes for movement organizers while the US’s relatively liberal legal climate suppresses them by taking these queer reproductive issues off the movement agenda. This analysis provides insight into the ways laws and institutions help explain different patterns in social movements across countries more broadly.