Synopses & Reviews
The kinds of families we see today are different
than they were even a decade ago, some fantastically so, as paths to
parenthood have been rejiggered by technology, activism, and law. In Modern Families,
Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales — his own
included — that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. We
meet a child with two mothers, made with one mother’s egg and the sperm
of a man none of them has ever met and carried by the other mother;
another born to a man and a woman 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.
We hear the story of a girl with two dads, conceived with one father's
sperm and eggs donated by a friend and carried to term in the womb of
another close friend who becomes their surrogate; and of two girls, one
born in Nepal and the other in India, legally adopted by a woman who is
co-parenting them with her girlfriend and a gay male couple. These are
not your grandparents’ creation stories.
These tales are deeply personal but also unavoidably political. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families
tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales—adoption and
assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and
multi-parent families — set against the social, legal, and economic
contexts in which they were made. In these stories, family creation was
painstaking and sometimes difficult. Often, parts of biological
reproduction took place in a different body than that of the parents
raising the child; sometimes, the model of kinship was made up virtually
from scratch, often in tension with legally and socially sanctioned
versions of family. Becoming parents involved jumping tremendous
hurdles — social conventions, legal and medical institutions — with
heightened intention and inventiveness, within and across multiple
inequities and privileges. It’s a bumpy and potholed landscape, as
institutional change lags behind the creativity of everyday living, as
breaches of family norms remain controversial, and as inequalities haunt
the most intensely loving acts. Yet each of these families, however
they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share.
Mapping the large, complex terrain of the modern kinship, Modern Families presents a personal, intimate account of social change from the inside out.
Review
“In this book, both carefully observed and deeply felt, Joshua Gamson gives voice to the changing nature of family in modern America. The new relationships he describes are complicated and sometimes difficult, but also suffused with love. This beautifully constructed and often hilarious manifesto rings with hope for a society in which everyone is free not only to marry but also to designate as family whomever he or she chooses.”
Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Review
"What is so deft about Modern Families is the ease with which Gamson weaves together individual stories about creating families with academic research about the process, from single parenthood to gay parenting to reproductive technologies…he describes the often heart-wrenching emotional and technological lengths they had to go to. There are moments in all these accounts that will bring you to tears."
In These Times
Review
"[A] fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family."
Booklist
About the Author
Joshua Gamson is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, and The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco.
Melissa Harris-Perry is Presidential Chair and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University and the host of MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry. She is the author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.