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16 Chapter 2 Who Counts as Family? W ho doAmericans count as family? Do they see family through the lens of nostalgia or through conventions that favor traditional forms? Alternatively, does public opinion indicate movement toward greater acceptance of various nontraditional living arrangements, most notably same-sex couples? Or do public views appear so jumbled that they lack any consistency? Finding consensus among existing definitions of family is not easy. The disagreement even among academicians is evident from the brief overview presented in chapter 1. It has been common for social scientists to express or reinforce—often inadvertently—a heteronormative orientation in their writings regarding “family” or “the family.” Others, however, have begun to steer away from this circumscribed definition. Instead, they now focus on broader conceptions of cohabitation arrangements that include same-sex living arrangements, among others (Berkowitz 2009; Bernstein and Reimann 2001a; Trost 1988, 1990) and offer constructionist accounts that allow for more fluidity (Holstein and Gubrium 1999); some have given up altogether on a unified concept of “family” or “the family” (Bernardes 1999; Settles 1999). Competing visions of the meaning of family come from other places as well. The American Heritage dictionary, for example, offers two definitions of family that speak to different themes: “A fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children”; and “Two or more people who share goals and values, have long-term commitments to one another and reside usually in the same dwelling place.” Note that the first definition privileges the presence of children (a biological connection), while the latter highlights mutual intimacy between at least two persons (an affective connection).1 The U.S. census definition of family—“a group of two people or more (one of whom is the householder) related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together”—corresponds more closely with the first definition . This definition disqualifies childless same-sex couples from fam- Who Counts as Family?    17 ily status, but places same-sex couples with children in the paradoxical position of being in both the category “family” (one or both adults being legal parents) and the category “nonfamily” (the adults not being related by birth or married), even if they live in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage (such as Massachusetts).2 Media depictions of family waver between unquestioningly celebrating the nuclear heterosexual family and challenging—sometimes forcefully, sometimes equivocally —the traditional forms. Similarly, political parties and self-identified family advocacy organizations advance disparate portrayals of family. The Alliance for Children and Families characterizes family by the “intimacy, intensity, continuity, and commitment among their members,” and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) explicitly “rejects that GLBT persons exist independent of the institution of family.” In contrast, the Alliance Defense Fund sees marriage as a prerequisite to family and contends that “God has defined marriage as one man married to one woman.” The question, then, of who counts as family—and in particular, whether same-sex couples should be seen as family—is at the center of contemporary debate over families and family policy. How families are defined has far-reaching policy implications, including but certainly not restricted to determining who makes decisions about the end of life, who is responsible for caring for others, who has medical proxies, who is eligible for family benefits, who is entitled to alimony and child support, and who is to receive assets upon an individual’s death. Who is counted in the definition of family and who is counted out tell us which personal relationships we value and which ones we do not. Although we can appreciate or debate the merits and influence of the various discussions and definitions of family described here and in chapter 1, most of these descriptions share a common limitation: few of them take into account how the public defines family. To be sure, some studies have considered how certain groups (for example, same-sex couples or African Americans) define their own families (see, for example , Weston 1997). But these analyses cannot tell us about the public at large. Nor can they tell us which living arrangements Americans characterize as family overall, regardless of how they define their own family. Nonetheless, such studies do tell us that to a great extent the meaning of family is normative and is derived from people themselves rather than from directives imposed on them by the government, advocacy groups, the media, or academicians. Considered collectively, prior work highlights the relevance...

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