KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
them to call for a return to ‘family values’.
The first manifesto of the Gay Liberation Front was declared in London in 1971, which was followed by the first Gay Pride in 1972. The manifesto details the oppression of homosexual people through ‘physical violence and by ideological and psychological attacks at every level of social interaction’, including in both the public and private domains of family, school, media, employment, community, and the law.80 It offers solutions for gay people to bring revolutionary change to the whole society rather than temporary reforms, and contends that a real change for all lies in subverting the patriarchal family and sexism by allying with the Women’s Liberation Movement: ‘The end of sexist culture and of the family will benefit all women, and gay people’.81 Therefore, the manifesto calls gay people to rise up and step out of imperatives determined by the dominant heteronormative society and family.
Political lesbians and lesbian separatists contributed to the validity of non-normative families in challenging homophobia and backlash against lesbians. During the 1970s many lesbians had their children taken away from them based on the assumption that a lesbian could not be a ‘proper’ mother. During the 1970s and 1980s, a group of radical feminists voiced their support for political lesbianism, which fought against what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality and sexism by advocating lesbianism as a positive solution to women’s oppression.82 The divergence of political lesbianism from mainstream feminism moved the discussions of family into a new phase, in which women were invited to reject heterosexual relations and to embrace liberation in practice. For example, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Alice Echols considered married women to be ‘hostages’ trapped in the ‘anti-feminist’ institution of marriage and heterosexuality.83 Shelia Cronan suggested the abolition of marriage for women’s freedom, ←49 | 50→as it ‘constitutes a slavery for women’.84 Roxanne Dunbar stressed the importance of demanding ‘full-time childcare in public schools’ to free many women and enable them to make decisions, suggesting that the demand ‘alone will throw the whole ideology of family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and [they] can fight collectively’.85 Andrea Dworkin called upon women to renounce ‘all forms of male control and male domination’, and to destroy ‘the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison [women] in invisibility and victimization’.86 For Dworkin, the patriarchal system created a timeless cycle of victimisation for individuals:
Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.87
Marilyn French critiqued the family as promoting female subjection through male control of women’s sexuality. She further added that while women have always been subjects of disempowerment, degradation, and subjugation, men, particularly in the West, have ‘exploded in a frenzy of domination, trying to expand and tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature—people of color and women’.88 Marilyn Frye highlighted the connection between male dominance and naturalisation of female heterosexuality for perpetuating patriarchal systems.89 Shelly Jeffrey co-wrote Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism (1981) with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, arguing that ‘[a];ny woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations ←50 | 51→stronger’.90 Claiming that ‘[f]eminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’, political lesbianism critiqued the idea of reconfiguring familial arrangements as impractical as long as the heterosexual relations continue.91 Their solutions, though radical in tone, challenged the single form and meaning of the family, and celebrated families of choice.
Queer Kinship and Families of Choice
A significant challenge to the traditional family has come from lesbians and gay men, who have destabilised the heteronormative nature of the family by living outside traditional family arrangements. Judith Stacey introduces the concept of the postmodern family condition, in which as she contends, choice determines family composition. She maintains that the postmodern family ‘is not the next stage in an orderly progression of stages of family history; [it] rather […] signals the moment in that history when our belief in a logical progression of stages has broken down’.92 The way in which gay men and lesbians form their families represents the break-down in the history of the heterosexual family. For example, Cheshire Calhoun contends that lesbians are uniquely positioned to violate the conventional gender expectation that they, as women, would be dependent on men in their personal relations, would fulfil the maternal imperative, would service a husband and children, and would accept the confinement to the private sphere of domesticity.93
By avoiding heterosexual and conventional gender relations, gay men and lesbians create ways in which the perpetuation of sexism and the gender role system are avoided, being replaced instead by alternative and liberated lifestyles. Gay men and lesbians have also illustrated that family composition can be determined by choice rather than being imposed by biology or dominant ideology. This has developed the idea that families can exist in a variety of forms and ←51 | 52→purpose, depending on the demands of the individual. The struggles of gay men and lesbians, therefore, represent a transition from the dominant family ideology to a new phase, one characterised by the ‘chosen family’. This concept contrasts with the compulsory heterosexual nature of the family. In a chosen family, human biology does not determine the ordering of parental and sexual relationships. This family promotes the idea that human sexuality ‘is a choice, and [humans] are not destined to a particular fate because of [their] chromosomes’.94 For example, women do not have to be mothers—or primary carers—just because they are born female, and being male does not privilege men to be relatively free from parental responsibilities. Instead, the idea of parenthood is equally shared by both parties in a non-hierarchical manner. This, in return, creates ways in which children are raised free from gender constraints. For Kath Weston, ‘familial ties between the same sexes, [which] are not grounded in biology or procreation, do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage’.95 Therefore, prevailing family ideology and gender roles are not transferred across generations.
The chosen family replaces traditional family arrangements, such as heterosexual marriage, gendered parenthood, and biological kinship, and introduces non-normative arrangements such as same-sex marriage, same-sex parenting, and non-biological kinship. In deciding whether or not to have children, gay men and lesbians have challenged the family ideology that promotes having children and raising them within a heteronormative family, in line with gender roles. These non-normative arrangements initially incurred a backlash, as they were considered to be deviant and a threat to social stability. However, the struggles of gay men and lesbians to receive equal rights in the public domain have paved the way for chosen families to be gradually recognised and legalised.96 Gay men and lesbians have put into practice the long feminist fight against gender oppression by establishing non-normative family arrangements and celebrating sexual diversity.
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The New Right and After: The ‘Pretended’ or Alternative Families
Feminist and gay challenges to the traditional family have not passed without resistance. During the 1980s, stable families were part of the New Right’s policy and its vision of a stable society. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) declared that ‘a nation of free people will only continue to be a great nation if your family life continues and the structure of that nation is a family structure’.97 This conservative notion of the family structure reinforced a sharp distinction between private and public spheres in which women and men were successively situated. This distinction was sustained through ‘stable’ families, which in Diana Gittins’