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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses on queer mothers* and fathers* living in shared multi-local parenthoods. Case studies of Switzerland reveal how they negotiate und shape their parental roles beyond heteronormative scripts and how they cope with the lack of legal protection of their family arrangements.

Paper Abstract:

This paper focuses on how queer mothers* and fathers* arrange shared parenthood and pursue their everyday family life across households. In my PhD I study the practices and self-perceptions of parents and children in multilocal contexts. By taking an in-depth look, interviews with children aged 3-12 years and their family members are combined with ethnographic oriented approaches such as go-alongs, photographs and drawings.

Based on the case studies, I delineate two tropes that are crucial to understand "Doing family" in queer settings:

1. Paths to queer parenthood: As parents describe, future family life, home arrangements, parenting ideas, etc. are sometimes negotiated long before the birth of a child and laid down in agreements. Lacking legal protection, multi-parent queer families find themselves in a vulnerable status, which is significant to them and result in corresponding coping strategies.

2. Parental roles in queer multi-parent families: Parenthood with multiple partners requires a negotiation of family roles for which conventional, heternormative notions of motherhood and fatherhood are not per se applicable. Social parents in particular tend to develop new characteristics of care relationships to children for which there is no script so far.

Queer families reveal how family and parenthood can be shaped and done beyond heteronormativity and bisexuality. They open up new possibilities to reflect on care relationships and intimacy and unfold emancipatory potentials to challenge or irritate established family norms.