"That's Our Kind of Constellation": Lesbian Mothers Negotiate Institutionalized Understandings of Gender within the Family

Building on more than two decades of feminist analysis of the family, this article takes a neoinstitutionalist approach to examine some of the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation intersect in lesbian-headed two-parent families, affecting how they construct their roles as mothers. Institutionalist theory tends to de-emphasize how actors deliberately construct social arrangements such as parenting roles within the family. The authors' analysis of interviews from 14 lesbian mothers remedies this deficiency by focusing both on how they draw upon and transform institutionalized scripts, practices, and understandings of family roles and relations. Their findings reveal how these mothers reinscribed gendered understandings while simultaneously challenging heteronormative ones in their efforts to construct and maintain socially viable two-parent families.