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Sandra Patton-Imani, Review of “Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 1, September 2021, Page e5, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab016
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Reviewer: Nancy J. Mezey, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ, USA
Since the early 1990s when the first major works were published on lesbian and gay families in general, and on lesbian motherhood more specifically, the study of lesbian families has burgeoned. The lens of those studies has moved from studying largely white, middle-class lesbians to using a more critical analysis of how structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to produce the landscape in which lesbians create and experience their families.
Sandra Patton-Imani’s book Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood falls within the larger context of those earlier works. Drawing on her own family experiences, as well as stories collected through interviews with a diverse group of lesbians across the United States, Patton-Imani’s book contributes to the growing body of literature on lesbian motherhood in part by providing an overview of that very literature. Her book extends beyond existing research, however, by problematizing the seemingly apolitical task of creating a family tree. By using the family tree as an allegory for how policies and practices have prevented queer families from fitting the dominant cultural model of “The Family,” Patton-Imani shows how family trees can not only make certain family members invisible but also prevent some families from creating a tree that represents their own families at all. Patton-Imani’s purpose is not to ask how queer mothers should fit into a dominant family model but rather to show readers how much larger and complex family trees really are and can be if not constrained by laws and policies meant to keep certain families from existing. As Patton-Imani explains, by using the family tree as allegory and drawing on a diverse group of lesbian mothers, her book contributes to our understandings of how all families are shaped by laws and policies that are shaped by, and maintain those, in power.
