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Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition

Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition

Author: Marie-Amélie George
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009284400
Published In: August 2024
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

List Price: HKD 390.00

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Description
Contents

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In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change.

Introduction

Part I. Queer Partners and Parents:

1. Legalizing queer life: Alfred Kinsey and criminal law reform

2. Contesting custody: social science and queer parental rights

3. Recognizing relationships: corporate and municipal domestic partnership programs during the AIDS crisis

4. Adopting change: social workers, foster care, and the expansion of the queer family

Part II. Straight Parents, Queer Children:

5. Combatting violence: protecting the queer community on the streets and in the schools

6. Teaching tolerance: the queer family comes out against hate

Part III. Queer Families:

7. More perfect unions: marriage equality, public opinion, and the queer family

Epilogue