Experiences of Family Belonging among Two Generations of Sexually Diverse Australians

• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Christy E. Newman,Asha Persson,Sujith Prankumar,Toby Lea,Peter Aggleton
• Date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12411

C E. N, A P, S P, T L,  P A

UNSW Sydney

Experiences of Family Belonging among Two

Generations of Sexually Diverse Australians

Objective: To extend knowledge about how

lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans+, and queer

(LGBTQ+) people relate to their families of

origin by paying particular attention to their

experiences of belonging within this context.

Background: Although the impact of family

rejection on young LGBTQ+people is well

established, circumstances and expressions of

family belonging are less well understood.

Method: Taking a qualitative, social genera-

tional approach, we asked two groups of Aus-

tralians, born in the 1970s (n=14) and 1990s

(n=18), about their experiences of family rela-

tionships when they were growing up sexually

and/or gender diverse.

Results: A subset of participants described feel-

ing accepted by families of origin, although

very few were gender diverse. The 1970s cohort

described these experiences as culturally excep-

tional, and the 1990s cohort as a birthright.

Examples from both demonstrate how family

belonging can remain conditional.

Conclusion: Experiences of family belonging

reveal both the importance of family to the

well-being and ourishing of LGBTQ+people,

and the entanglement between individual and

social understandings of what family acceptance

comprises.

Centre for Social Research in Health, Level 2, John Goodsell

Building, UNSW Sydney,New South Wales,Australia 2052

(c.newman@unsw.edu.au).

Key Words: LGBT issues & relationships, family strengths,

family narratives.

Implications: Scholars and support service

providers may benet from recognizing that

some sexual minorities experience belonging

in their families of origin, but work remains in

understanding and challenging the conditions

that some families continue to impose.

The image of queer young people being rejected

by their family of origin is familiar in both

popular media representations (e.g., Grzanka &

Mann, 2014) and the research literature (e.g.,

Carastathis, Cohen, Kaczmarek, & Chang,

2017). There is clear evidence that young

people who disclose a nonconforming gender

identity or sexual orientation are more likely

to experiencing mental health or substance use

problems, housing and food insecurity, and

long-term socioeconomic disadvantage if their

family is unsupportive than supportive of that

identity (Cray, Miller, & Durso, 2013; Hillier

etal., 2010; K. H. Robinson, Bansel, Denson,

Ovenden, & Davies, 2014). Although there are

indications from population surveys that homo-

phobic and transphobic social attitudes may be

changing in some settings (Pew Research Cen-

ter, 2014), family households and relationships

largely remain sites of threat and hostility for

many young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans+, and

queer (LGBTQ+1) people.

1In addition to the deliberately broad term LGBTQ+,we

sometimes use the term queer, in recognition of the fact that

this term has been deliberately reclaimed by many within

the LGBTQ+communities as a way of communicating both

292Family Relations 69 (April 2020): 292–307

DOI:10.1111/fare.12411

Experiences of Family Belonging293

There are many reasons for research to con-

tinue to examine experiences of family rejection

in depth, and across different settings, including

to inform investment in services and programs

that seek to empower and support queer youth

and their families. Nevertheless, there can also

be unintended consequences of perpetuating a

dominant representation of queer young peo-

ple as inevitably vulnerable to (Cover, 2013;

Rasmussen, 2006) or traumatized by (Martinez

& McDonald, 2016; Ryan, Huebner, Diaz, &

Sanchez, 2009) their experiences of family

life. Among these consequences is the missed

opportunity to deepen understanding of the

circumstances and expressions that character-

ize experiences of family support. This is not

unique to the study of families of LGBTQ+

people; indeed, Bennett observed (2014b) that

“there is more academic literature relating to not

belonging than to belonging” (p. 1). However,

given broad recognition of the importance of

family acceptance and support for queer youth

(Shilo & Savaya, 2011), there is a particular

urgency to understanding the conditions that

both facilitate and complicate belonging in this

context. And yet there are still only minimal

examples in the literature of more positive or

nuanced accounts of LGBTQ+experiences of

family life. More recently, some research has

been published that hasaimed to document

the positive aspects of parenting an LGBTQ+

child (Gonzalez, Rostosky, Odom, & Riggle,

2013), and that has been designed to expand

understanding of the factors that support family

acceptance of sexual and gender minorities

(Mehus, Watson, Eisenberg, Corliss, & Porta,

2017; Ryan, Russell, Huebner, Diaz, & Sanchez,

2010; Watson, Barnett, & Russell, 2016).

With this article, we aim to contribute to

these efforts, drawing on qualitative data col-

lected from a study of two cohorts of sexu-

ally and gender-diverse Australians, whom we

describe as distinctive social generations on

the basis of their experience of a number of

shared experiences and conditions in the era in

which they grew up, to consider what can be

learned about how family belonging is expe-

rienced and expressed and the circumstances

that support it.

a nonnormative gender identity or sexual orientation and

a political position that seeks to question and destabilize

heteronormativity (Davies & Robinson, 2013, p. 40).

L R

Until the past few years, there was lim-

ited recognition of the experiences of

LGBTQ+people in the eld of family sci-

ence (Moore & Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, 2013;

van Eeden-Mooreeld, Few-Demo, Benson,

Bible, & Lummer, 2018; Zrenchik & Craft,

2016). We are therefore keen to add our voice

to those calling for a more deliberate attempt to

queer established denitions and methodologies

for researching families (Fish & Russell, 2018)

and to “destabilise [the dominant] categories

of gender, sexuality and identity” (Davies &

Robinson, 2013, p. 40), which have too often

been presumed to underpin experiences of fam-

ily life. Indeed, a substantial range of research

studies is now being published that aim to

document a much broader range of family

experiences than those of gender-normative

and heterosexual-parented families, includ-

ing same-sex parented families (Gahan, 2018;

Oswald, 2016; Power etal., 2010), families

shaped by gender transitions in parents or chil-

dren (Kuvalanka, Allen, Munroe, Goldberg, &

Weiner, 2018; von Doussa, Power, & Riggs,

2015), and the families of origin of queer

youth and adults (Bertone & Pallotta-Chiarolli,

2014; Rothblum, 2014). We align our approach

with this relatively new subeld of family

science and aim to extend what is known

about how LGBTQ+people relate to their

families of origin by paying particular atten-

tion to their sense of belonging within this

context.

We begin with the assumption that the family

remains an important source of support for many

queer people, despite considerable change in the

way in which sexual and gender minorities are

viewed and supported socially. Sociologists of

youth have made similar observations in work

with other groups of young people, arguing

that “Family is an important resource for young

people, yet its importance to them has tended

to be overlooked, with a focus on the move

away from the family home” (White, Wyn, &

Robards, 2017, pp. 26–27). It is because family

continues to matter that we can also assume that

a sense of belonging can be characterized by the

relative absence of family rejection experiences.

In a recent study of Australian gay men and

lesbians, Carastathis etal. (2017) offered an

overview of experiences of family rejection,

including blatant forms such as