“What’s a Real Rainbow Family?”: The Sex Hierarchy and the Construction of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Families in Australia

Drawing on qualitative interviews and mind maps with 34 queer individuals in Australia, this paper analyses how the increasing visibility and inclusion of so-called rainbow families in social and institutional contexts can (re)produce normative hierarchies that maintain a line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ families. Gayle Rubin’s sex hierarchy is used as a framework to examine how queer people draw boundaries around what counts as family, and how power operates to maintain these distinctions. The findings show that the nuclear family remains a key benchmark for a ‘real’ family, often leaving queer people feeling invalidated because they do not align with this social ideal. Simultaneously, participants described feeling insufficiently ‘queer’ or ‘rainbow’, comparing themselves against homonormative expectations of what a queer family should look like. In navigating this space between cisheteronormative and queer worlds, dominant ideas of both the ‘real’ nuclear family and the ‘real’ queer family become reference points through which participants understand, internalize, and reproduce hierarchies that can render their own families as ‘unreal’. Applying Rubin’s sex hierarchy to family formations highlights how, even as some queer families are inching across the border of respectability, normative understandings of family continue to shape which arrangements are socially valued.