Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice

By Damien Riggs

Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice is a timely contribution to the study of reproduction and parenthood. Drawing on a wide breadth of projects, this book covers topics such as first time parents, donor conception, pregnancy loss, surrogacy, lesbian, gay and/or transgender parenting, fostering and adoption, grandparenting, and human/animal kinship. By presenting individual narratives focused on reproduction and parenthood, this book successfully translates empirical research into practical, applied outcomes that will be of use for all those working in the fields of reproduction and parenthood. Including recommendations for fertility specialists, educators, child protection agencies, reproductive counselors, and policy makers, Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice is a vital new resource that will help guide practice into the future. As a contribution to the field of critical kinship studies, this book heralds new directions for the study of kinship, by revisiting as well as reimagining how we think about, research, and respond to a diversity of kinship forms.

• Includes over 70 narratives representative of hundreds of interviews collected as a part of 15 research projects undertaken over the past decade
• Supported by a companion website that provides further materials and information: www.diversepathways.com
• Translates critical kinship studies theory into applied tools for practice in the fields of reproduction and parenthood

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780128162903

Damien Riggs

Damien W. Riggs is a professor in psychology at Flinders University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He is the author of over 200 publications in the areas of gender, family, and mental health, including Working with transgender young people and their families: A critical developmental approach (Palgrave, 2019). He is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a psychotherapist who specialises in working with transgender and non-binary young people.

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Reproducing ourselves through stories

Abstract

This introductory chapter outlines the focus of the book, namely stories, and more specifically the narratives that people tell about their pathways to parenthood and reproduction. Specifically, this chapter explores how the stories that we tell about ourselves are formative of how we engage with and situate ourselves in the world. With regard to pathways to reproduction and parenthood, then, the stories that we tell play a key role in how we experience such pathways. Drawing from the field of critical kinship studies and research on life narratives, this chapter provides an overarching framework for the book, emphasizing nonnormative accounts of both reproduction and kinship, and how these are situated within broader cultural injunctions to invest in reproductive citizenship.

Keywords

Stories; narratives; reproduction; parenthood; pathways; critical kinship studies; reproductive citizenship

Introduction

This is a book of stories. As McAdams (2001) has argued, stories offer us opportunities and indeed a framework through which to narrate our lives. Further, and as McAdams outlines in his account of stories as a way to understand identity, individual stories are narrated in the context of broader social contexts that shape what types of stories might be intelligible, and what types of stories might be deemed unintelligible. Key to intelligibility, McAdams suggests, are stories that are capable of bringing together multiple, often contradictory, elements of our lives into a coherent narrative. Elements may be contradictory because they differ across time. For example, a life story might involve speaking about being a parent to two children at one point early in life, and being a parent to one child later in life, perhaps because one child has died. Of course the elements in this example are not inherently contradictory, but they may be positioned as contradictory within the context of broader cultural narratives in which we are expected to have singular and consistent experiences of our lives, especially with regard to parenthood. An intelligible narrative of having two children but only one of who is now alive, for example, requires constant negotiation with normative assumptions about parenthood trajectories.

Stories might also be contradictory due to the differing relationships in which we live. For example, a life story might involve a narrative whereby a person describes themselves as fun-loving and outgoing with their peers, but reserved and introspective with their children. These differences in self-presentation are immanently intelligible given the different relationships involved, as cultural narratives about peer as opposed to parent–child relationships render the differences intelligible, as opposed to inherently contradictory. At the same time however what this second example demonstrates is that any story is inherently selective (McAdams, 2001). The stories we tell about our lives are not simply the combination of every single moment we have ever lived. Rather, they are carefully compiled accounts of our lives that bring to the fore certain aspects of ourselves that we wish to treat as salient, or which we think will be culturally intelligible. As such, it is not contradictory to appear one way around children, and another way around peers. Rather, each form of presentation is part of a broader narrative of self that is differentially activated according to the context we are in.

The challenges to reconciling aspects of our life that might seem contradictory across time or relationships became evident to me when I was teaching an undergraduate topic on families in 2010. I had recently been overseas and seen a poster on a train that highlighted the many different people we can all be at the one time. The poster included a list of attributes about a person all derived from their relationships with others and concluded with a final statement that celebrated how all of the statements cohered into one person formed through their relationships with others. I decided to use this as a teaching tool, to encourage students to think about themselves as complex people made up of many different life experiences. For a group of potential future social workers, it seemed a productive way to encourage them to recognize the many different experiences that any one person brings with them.

To provide a launching pad, I presented the class with an example of the narrative structure provided by the poster, based on my own life:

I am my Nana affectionately calling me a ‘dirty devil’ and the three children I now lovingly call the same.

I am my Mum following me in the car to make sure I am safe as I ride home from school.

I am sugarless chocolate pancakes made with my BFF Louise in her Mum’s kitchen.

I am Princess Grace movies, a pot of Earl Grey tea and a Haigh’s violet cream shared with my two sisters, only one of whom is still here to do this with.

I am the woman I was married to and the man I parent three beautiful children with.

I am all of these things and all of these people.

I am who I am because of everyone.

As the writer of this example, to me, it was self-evident how all of the statements cohered into one story about my life. To my students, however, the assumptions of intelligibility that I made in presenting my life differed from their own. For example, my students were unable to see being heterosexually married and parenting three children with a man as part of a coherent life narrative. Some suggested that I had the children with my then wife, and since separating she had repartnered and then passed away, so I was parenting the children with the children’s supposed stepfather. Others accounted for me being married to a woman and parenting children with a man by suggesting that I was bisexual. Looking at other lines of the text, some students also puzzled over where one of my sisters was. Was she no longer alive? Was she living overseas? Were we estranged? Ultimately, in producing their own narratives, my students were able to see that each of us is made up of many stories, and that the sense of coherency we experience with regard to our own life is very much fictional, premised as it is on our own internal understanding of ourselves, an understanding that may have very little to do with how others see us.

When it comes to journeys to reproduction, stories also play a significant role. In this book, and as I will elaborate later in this chapter, I understand the term reproduction broadly, not limited to genetic reproduction. Specifically in regards to becoming parents, humans do not simply reproduce themselves. At a genetic level, those who conceive a child are producing a human life, and in a sense are reproducing the pattern of life and death that shapes the human world, but they are not reproducing themselves. Children conceived in this way are not genetic clones of their parents. Rather, what all parents reproduce are ways of being, patterns of relating, ways of orienting oneself to the world, and belief systems. Thus, for example, in my brief life story above, although I suggest that I am my Nana who called me a dirty devil, a term I use with my own children now, I am not a simple reproduction of my Nana at the genetic level, but I do reproduce some of her patterns of relating.

Journeys to reproduction, or diverse pathways to parenthood as this book is titled, encompass all of the multiple pathways through which many humans come to reproduce something about ourselves through our relationships with children, or animals who we see as our children. More specifically, this book is about the stories through which many humans narrate their journeys to parenthood: those stories that are deemed intelligible and those that are located at the margins of intelligibility. As such, this book encompasses the conception narratives of foster and adoptive parents (Riggs, Delfabbro, & Augoustinos, 2008), the loving relationships that many humans claim with domesticated animals who live in the home (Power, 2008; Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, 2015), the complex ways that people account for genetics in the context of donor conception and surrogacy (Riggs & Due, 2018a; Riggs & Scholz, 2011), and many other examples where reproduction in the service of family making is not limited to reproductive heterosex. Importantly, however, the book does not solely focus on families that might otherwise be labeled as diverse or at the margins of intelligibility. In order to cover many facets of diversity, it also looks at the stories narrated by parents who have children through reproductive heterosex, firmly locating such parents within a framework of diversity (Riggs & Due, 2018b).

Stories of reproduction or pathways to parenthood, then, are stories that account for how people come to negotiate a parenting role. Even in cases where a pregnancy was unplanned, research suggests, people often come to develop a story about why the pregnancy was ultimately a fated part of their life journey (Jones, Frohwirth, & Blades, 2016). Similarly, for people who experience a pregnancy loss, research suggests that this becomes part of their broader life story relating to reproduction (Collins, Riggs, & Due, 2014). In other words, and to reiterate, reproduction is not simply the process of getting pregnant, staying pregnant, and birthing a child who lives into adulthood. It is also a process of narrating a version of oneself that involves parenting as a desired future, of incorporating parenthood as part of one’s life story even if it was not intended, and honoring one’s reproductive journey even if one does not ultimately become a parent to a living child (though where one may consider oneself a parent to a child who is no longer living).

In the sections that follow in this chapter, I first introduce the field of critical kinship studies. Critical kinship studies, as Elizabeth Peel and I have argued elsewhere (Riggs & Peel, 2016), offers a lens through which to think about kinship in ways that are non-normative. Critical kinship studies as a framework is non-normative in the sense that it focuses on more-than-human families (Power, 2008), and it is also non-normative in the sense that it juxtaposes differing kinship narratives so as to highlight how frames of intelligibility serve to both marginalize and privilege. In the book Critical Kinship Studies: An introduction to the field Elizabeth Peel and I used stories derived from movies, books, and television shows to demonstrate how narratives of kinship located at the margins of intelligibility may in fact by highly normative, and alternatively, to highlight how narratives of kinship located at the center are often unmarked by explicit claims to intelligibility, so normative are their central logics.

Having introduced the field of critical kinship studies, I then go on to explore in the next section of this chapter how this book builds upon but also differs from my previous work. Specifically, I suggest that in the present book my focus is on developing ways of translating stories into practice. This is not constituted by a case study approach per se. Certainly, case studies can be useful tools through which to speak to the general from the specific. In this book, however, I use the stories of individual people to highlight how the stories that we tell about reproduction and pathways to parenthood are marked by a range of narrative structures that may at times be competing, contradictory, complementary, and in varying ways intelligible or serve as a challenge to normative accounts of reproduction. To provide a framework for the analytic chapters to come, I thus explore some of the narrative structures that circulate with regard to families, highlighting both those narratives that are considered normative, and those that are nonnormative or indeed are critical of normative narratives. Exploring the structure of the stories I recount in the analytic chapters that follow allows for a consideration of what the structure of different stories means for practice, which includes practice related to family counseling, fertility planning, reproductive counseling, and parenting-related counseling services.

This chapter then concludes with a brief overview of the analytic chapters included in this book, drawing attention to the many different collaborations and research projects that feed into this book. A decade on from the undergraduate topic that I taught in 2010, then, this book constitutes a full circle opportunity to return to a focus on stories, and specifically stories that speak of relationships as constituting one’s sense of self: both relationships with our intimate others, and relationships with broader social norms.

Critical kinship studies

Critical kinship studies, as outlined by both Elizabeth Peel and I (Riggs & Peel, 2016) and in the edited collection Critical Kinship Studies: Kinship (trans) formed (Kroløkke, Adrian, Myong, & Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, 2015), takes up the challenge first laid down by Schneider (1968,1984) to reconceptualize kinship beyond the narrow confines of genetics. Building on the work of Schneider and others since (e.g., Franklin, 1997; Strathern, 1992a,b), critical kinship studies refuses the simplistic assumption that kinship is somehow natural, instead seeking to examine how kinship and specific forms of kinship are naturalized. In other words, it examines how specific kinship forms come to appear as natural. In terms of reproduction and pathways to parenthood, work that falls under the banner of critical kinship studies has examined, for example, the naturalization of assisted reproductive technologies (Franklin, 1997); the normalization of donor conception as a proxy for reproductive heterosex (Nordqvist & Smart, 2014); and the instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the service of surrogacy arrangements, such as when women’s bodies are viewed as natural conduits for reproduction (Deomampo, 2016; Harrison, 2016; Riggs & Due, 2018a). This focus on naturalization as a core aspect of critical kinship studies highlights that the field is centrally focused on a critique of norms related to reproduction.

Beyond a critique of the naturalization of genetic reproduction, critical kinship studies has also sought to map out how modes of reproduction or pathways to parenthood located outside the norm of genetic reproduction are variously incorporated into normative logics of kinship, or else risk remaining relegated to the margins. This focus on reproduction beyond genetics has been important, as it serves to highlight how the norm of reproductive heterosex continues to serve as a benchmark against which all other forms of kinship are compared. Moreover, a focus on a diversity of kinship forms has served to demonstrate how the norm of reproductive heterosex retains a privileged position precisely through its capacity to incorporate other kinship forms into its organizing logic. Turner (2001), for example, has argued that the injunction to reproduce as a hallmark of neoliberal citizenship has necessitated an extension of the boundaries of reproduction to incorporate a diversity of kinship forms and modes of reproduction. In other words, and as Turner suggests, pronatalist neoliberal state agendas are increasingly concerned less with who reproduces, and more that reproduction is promoted as a norm. As I elaborated earlier in this chapter, reproduction here refers not simply to genetic reproduction, but rather to the reproduction of ways of being, patterns of relating, ways of orienting oneself to the world, and belief systems: all of which are formatively shaped by specific neoliberal values about personhood.

Research in the field of critical kinship studies, then, has explored how neoliberal values of personhood traditionally reserved for genetic reproduction have been extended so as to bring into the fold a diversity of kinship forms and modes of reproduction. Importantly, this folding in of diversity, it is often argued through a critical kinship studies lens, has not inherently changed the face of reproduction. Instead, it has simply shifted its boundaries, boundaries that still delimit what is deemed intelligible in terms of kinship. A critical kinship studies lens, for example, allows us to see how adoption has been normalized historically through the erasure of birth families (Sales, 2012), and how lesbian and gay parenthood has been normalized through the injunction to conform to homonormative ideologies (i.e., the expectation that lesbian and gay parents conform to normative ideals associated with parenthood, see Duggan, 2012). On the one hand, then, the diversification of public accounts of kinship may appear to represent a much-needed shift in the landscape of kinship, welcoming and indeed celebrating many forms of kinship beyond that of genetic reproduction. On the other hand, however, and as research in the field of critical kinship studies has so deftly demonstrated, it is important to be cautious in our celebrations. Representation and inclusion can easily become yet more of the same: representations of family diversity can resort to normative imagery, and inclusion can come at the expense of any genuine shift in the status