Family & Relationships

Winner of the 2024 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology

How embryo adoption advances the Christian Right’s political goals for creating a Christian nation

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.

Conceiving Christian America is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.

A compelling examination of the social and legal experiences of lesbian, bisexual, and queer stepparent families

Lesbian, bisexual, and queer families formed after the dissolution of a marriage face a range of obstacles. In Queer Stepfamilies, Katie L. Acosta offers a wealth of insight into their complex experiences as they negotiate parenting among multiple parents and family-building in a world not designed to meet their needs. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Acosta follows the journeys of more than forty families as they navigate a legal and social landscape that fails to recognize their existence.

Acosta contextualizes the legal realities of LGBTQ stepparent families and considers the actions these parents take to protect their families in the absence of comprehensive policies or laws geared to meet their needs. Queer Stepfamilies reveals the obstacles these families face in family courts during divorce proceedings and custody cases, and highlights their distrust of courts when it comes to acting in their children’s best interests, especially in the event of an origin parent’s death.

As LGBTQ families continue to make social and legal strides in acceptance and recognition, this important book shows how queer stepparents find ways to make their unconventional families work, despite the many social and legal obstacles they encounter. Acosta provides a fresh perspective, broadening our understanding about families in the twenty-first century.

Honorable Mention, 2020 Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology, given by the Society for Psychological Anthropology

Honorable Mention, New Millennium Book Award, given by the Society for Medical Anthropology

How youth on the autism spectrum negotiate the contested meanings of neurodiversity

Autism is a deeply contested condition. To some, it is a devastating invader, harming children and isolating them. To others, it is an asset and a distinctive aspect of an individual’s identity. How do young people on the spectrum make sense of this conflict, in the context of their own developing identity?

While most of the research on Asperger’s and related autism conditions has been conducted with individuals or in settings in which people on the spectrum are in the minority, this book draws on two years of ethnographic work in communities that bring people with Asperger’s and related conditions together. It can thus begin to explore a form of autistic culture, through attending to how those on the spectrum make sense of their conditions through shared social practices.

Elizabeth Fein brings her many years of experience in both clinical psychology and psychological anthropology to analyze the connection between neuropsychological difference and culture. She argues that current medical models, which espouse a limited definition, are ill equipped to deal with the challenges of discussing autism-related conditions. Consequently, youths on the autism spectrum reach beyond medicine for their stories of difference and disorder, drawing instead on shared mythologies from popular culture and speculative fiction to conceptualize their experience of changing personhood.

In moving and persuasive prose, Living on the Spectrum illustrates that young people use these stories to pioneer more inclusive understandings of what makes us who we are.

A personal, intimate account of the extraordinary ways that today’s families are being created.

From adoption and assisted reproduction, to gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families, the stories in Modern Families explain how individuals make unconventional families by accessing a broad range of technological, medical and legal choices that expand our definitions of parenting and kinship. Joshua Gamson introduces us to a child with two mothers, made with one mother’s egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met; another born in Ethiopia, delivered by his natural grandmother to an orphanage after both his parents died in close succession, and then to the arms of his mother, who is raising him solo.

These tales are deeply personal and political. The process of forming these families involved jumping tremendous hurdles—social conventions, legal and medical institutions—with heightened intention and inventiveness, within and across multiple inequities and privileges. Yet each of these families, however they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share.

A companion for all those who choose to navigate the world of modern kinship, Modern Families provides a “fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family” (Booklist).

Transgender survivors of violence tell their stories

Transgender people face some of the highest rates of violence in the US and around the world, particularly within romantic relationships. In Transgressed, Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz offers a ground-breaking examination of intimate partner violence in the lives of transgender people.

Drawing on interviews and written accounts from transgender survivors of intimate partner violence, he sheds much-needed light on the dynamics of abuse that entrap trans partners in violent relationships. Transgressed shows how rigidly gendered discussions of violence have served to marginalize and silence stories of abuse. Ultimately, these stories of survival follow their unique journeys as they navigate—and break free—from the cycle of abuse, providing us with a better understanding of their experiences.

An emotionally compelling read, Transgressed offers new ways of understanding the complexities of intimate partner violence through the eyes of transgender survivors.

Answers the question: Why are women freezing their eggs?

Why are women freezing their eggs in record numbers? Motherhood on Ice explores this question by drawing on the stories of more than 150 women who pursued fertility preservation technology. Moving between narratives of pain and empowerment, these nuanced personal stories reveal the complexity of women’s lives as they struggle to preserve and extend their fertility.

Contrary to popular belief, egg freezing is rarely about women postponing fertility for the sake of their careers. Rather, the most-educated women are increasingly forced to delay childbearing because they face a mating gap—a lack of eligible, educated, equal partners ready for marriage and parenthood. For these women, egg freezing is a reproductive backstop, a technological attempt to bridge the gap while waiting for the right partner. But it is not an easy choice for most. Their stories reveal the extent to which it is logistically complicated, physically taxing, financially demanding, emotionally draining, and uncertain in its effects.

In this powerful book, women share their reflections on their clinical encounters, as well as the immense hopes and investments they place in this high-tech fertility preservation strategy. Race, religion, and the role of men in the lives of single women pursuing this technology are also explored. A distinctly human portrait of an understudied and rapidly growing population, Motherhood on Ice examines what is at stake for women who take comfort in their frozen eggs while embarking on their quests for partnership, pregnancy, and parenting.

Uncovers the class and race dimensions of the "cupcake wars"

In the wake of school-lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and concerns over childhood obesity, the diet of American children has become a “crisis” and the cause of much anxiety among parents.

Many food-conscious parents are well educated, progressive and white, and while they may explicitly value race and class diversity, they also worry about less educated or less well-off parents offering their children food that is unhealthy. Jennifer Patico embedded herself in an urban Atlanta charter school community, spending time at school events, after-school meetings, school lunchrooms, and private homes. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation, she details the dilemma for parents stuck between a commitment to social inclusion and a desire for control of their children’s eating. Ultimately, Patico argues that the attitudes of middle-class parents toward food reflect an underlying neoliberal capitalist ethic, in which their need to cultivate proper food consumption for their children can actually work to reinforce class privilege and exclusion.

Listening closely to adults' and children's food concerns, The Trouble with Snack Time explores those unintended effects and suggests how the "crisis" of children’s food might be reimagined toward different ends.

The gay and lesbian community is experiencing a baby boom. Advances in gay rights coupled with increased availability of alternative reproduction techniques have led to an unprecedented number of openly gay and lesbian parents. Estimates are that between 6 and 14 million children in the United States are being raised by at least one parent who is gay. Yet, very little is known about how gay or lesbian headed families function, or whether they differ in any relevant ways from families headed by straight parents.
Written by two developmental psychologists, The Gay Baby Boom reports the findings of The Gay and Lesbian Family Study, the largest national assessment of gay and lesbian headed families. By asking participants detailed questions about the way they parent, the authors are able to describe for the first time exactly what takes place within gay and lesbian headed families across the county. Traditional research has tended to assume that there is something uniquely different and potentially psychologically damaging about children being raised by gays. The authors draw on their data to show these fears unfounded.

They go by many names: helicopter parents, hovercrafts, PFHs (Parents from Hell). The news media is filled with stories of well-intentioned parents going to ridiculous extremes to remove all obstacles from their child’s path to greatness . . . or at least to an ivy league school. From cradle to college, they remain intimately enmeshed in their children’s lives, stifling their development and creating infantilized, spoiled, immature adults unprepared to make the decisions necessary for the real world. Or so the story goes.
Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening interviews with parents across the country, Margaret K. Nelson cuts through the stereotypes and hyperbole to examine the realities of what she terms “parenting out of control.” Situating this phenomenon within a broad sociological context, she finds several striking explanations for why today’s prosperous and well-educated parents are unable to set realistic boundaries when it comes to raising their children. Analyzing the goals and aspirations parents have for their children as well as the strategies they use to reach them, Nelson discovers fundamental differences among American parenting styles that expose class fault lines, both within the elite and between the elite and the middle and working classes.
Nelson goes on to explore the new ways technology shapes modern parenting. From baby monitors to cell phones (often referred to as the world’s longest umbilical cord), to social networking sites, and even GPS devices, parents have more tools at their disposal than ever before to communicate with, supervise, and even spy on their children. These play important and often surprising roles in the phenomenon of parenting out of control. Yet the technologies parents choose, and those they refuse to use, often seem counterintuitive. Nelson shows that these choices make sense when viewed in the light of class expectations.
Today’s parents are faced with unprecedented opportunities and dangers for their children, and are evolving novel strategies to adapt to these changes. Nelson’s lucid and insightful work provides an authoritative examination of what happens when these new strategies go too far.

Explores the experiences of homeschooling mothers

Mothers who homeschool their children constantly face judgmental questions about their choices, and yet the homeschooling movement continues to grow with an estimated 1.5 million American children now schooled at home. These children are largely taught by stay-at-home mothers who find that they must tightly manage their daily schedules to avoid burnout and maximize their relationships with their children, and that they must sustain a desire to sacrifice their independent selves for many years in order to savor the experience of motherhood. Home Is Where the School Is is the first comprehensive look into the lives of homeschooling mothers. Drawing on rich data collected through eight years of fieldwork and dozens of in-depth interviews, Jennifer Lois examines the intense effects of the emotional and temporal demands that homeschooling places on mothers’ lives, raising profound questions about the expectations of modern motherhood and the limits of parenting.

"[An] empathetic study of the meanings of cross-racial adoption to adoptees."—Law and Politics Book Review

Can White parents teach their Black children African American culture and history? Can they impart to them the survival skills necessary to survive in the racially stratified United States? Concerns over racial identity have been at the center of controversies over transracial adoption since the 1970s, as questions continually arise about whether White parents are capable of instilling a positive sense of African American identity in their Black children.

Through in-depth interviews with adult transracial adoptees, as well as with social workers in adoption agencies, Sandra Patton, herself an adoptee, explores the social construction of race, identity, gender, and family and the ways in which these interact with public policy about adoption. Patton offers a compelling overview of the issues at stake in transracial adoption. She discusses recent changes in adoption and social welfare policy which prohibit consideration of race in the placement of children, as well as public policy definitions of "bad mothers" which can foster coerced aspects of adoption, to show how the lives of transracial adoptees have been shaped by the policies of the U.S. child welfare system.

Neither an argument for nor against the practice of transracial adoption, BirthMarks seeks to counter the dominant public view of this practice as a panacea to the so-called "epidemic" of illegitimacy and the misfortune of infertility among the middle class with a more nuanced view that gives voice to those directly involved, shedding light on the ways in which Black and multiracial adoptees articulate their own identity experiences.