Queer Nuclear Families? Reproducing and Transgressing Heteronormativity

During the past decade the public debate on gay and lesbian adoptive rights has been extensive in the Norwegian media. The debate illustrates how women and men planning to raise children in homosexual family constellations challenge prevailing cultural norms and existing concepts of kinship and family. The article discusses how lesbian mothers and gay fathers understand and redefine their own family practices. An essential point in this article is the fundamental ambiguity in these families' accounts of themselves-how they simultaneously transgress and reproduce heteronormative assumptions about childhood, fatherhood, motherhood, family and kinship.