Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship Summary

Reviewed past Hilary Levey Friedman

Where do I come up from? Who am I? These are some of the most central questions humans ask themselves. In many cases, the answers have to practise with family unit. But, what, then exactly is a family?

Joshua Gamson tackles these complicated problems in Modern Families, a book about contemporary tales of family creation including adoption, in vitro , surrogacy, and more. Gamson is a sociologist who has previously written books on fame, tabloid talk shows, and sexuality, but this book is far more personal. This is likewise the story of the creation of his family.

Different Mitchell and Cameron on "Modern Family," the ABC sitcom that inspired the proper name of the book, Gamson and his hubby don't go through international adoption (though other couples in Modern Families use both domestic and international adoption to create their own modern families). His start girl, Reba, was conceived using the egg of a friend and the uterus of another friend, what is known as "collaborative reproduction." His second daughter, Madeleine, was carried by a paid surrogate who liked to refer to herself as a "fetus sitter." Information technology'southward no wonder then that when describing Modern Families Gamson explains, "More than broadly, you might read it every bit an intimate view of the much-remarked-on transformation of family unit structures, every bit seen through the experiences of people who have been, out of necessity every bit much every bit annihilation else, making their families up."

Gamson successfully weaves together the personal and the academic throughout the book. He takes personal stories and situates them in more complicated institutions and social structures. In the Introduction (titled "Impertinent Questions" nigh the probing questions strangers sometimes enquire about how their daughters were "got") he usefully describes the book as the "dear child" of 2 unlike types of writing on reproduction.

The first type of writing is what he calls Repro Lit. These personal stories, usually memoirs, double as how-to books and are ultimately celebratory virtually the process—think Peggy Orenstein's Waiting for Daisy. Repro Crit on the other hand is more of a buzzkill focusing mainly on institutional structures and the circulation of power inside them and how this literally reproduces inequality. Though less well known, a book by the name of Outsourcing the Womb , suggests the tone of this category.

Like Repro Crit Gamson points out forces of inequality throughout (mainly to do with fiscal issues, just also sometimes social form and cultural knowledge that impacts legal processes), but the narratives are often emotional and triumphant, with some how-to advice thrown in. Gamson details the legal workarounds they used with their surrogates in Kentucky and Massachusetts, and one of the all-time lines in the book is when he writes that Kentucky had out-liberaled California (where Gamson and his hubby live) when they listed "parent" and "parent" on their daughter Madeline's nascency certificate, and not "mother" and "begetter" like California.

In the end information technology is the stories we are left with, mainly because there is a lilliputian serious research on families similar Gamson's, partly because they are so new. The various stories of family cosmos told in Modern Families— the struggles and the successes—are quite moving. On multiple occasions while reading I was moved to tears, ordinarily tears of joy. One caution is that while this is a volume you can dip into and out of, it can be hard at times to continue all the families and the people who make them up direct (no pun intended) given the multiple families featured.

A lasting theme of Modern Families is: "How extraordinary y'all are, and still how ordinary." While the families profiled here were brought together thank you to various types of engineering, often in extraordinary ways, in the end the children and their parents are ordinary. Gamson insightfully writes, "It'due south 1 of the things these family origin stories share with more typical ones: every family story has silences and secrets. More than to the signal, the farther away yous get from the conventional, the less you can fit your story into a familiar script of family cosmos and the more you're likely to face disapproval. For those of us who grew upwards in a culture of disclosure—in which, for instance, coming out is an act of empowerment and Facebook is a verb—becoming parents has posed the jarring challenge of figuring out what not to tell."

Every bit the extraordinary, yet ordinary, children whose creation stories are relayed hither age, they will take the lasting evidence of but how much they were wanted, just how much their parents were willing to tell on social media and beyond to create their own modernistic families.

Hilary Levey Friedman is the Book Review Editor at Brain, Kid and the writer of Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Civilization. She loves all modernistic families, including her ain.

A Q & A with Mod Families author Joshua Gamson

Purchase Modern Families: Stories of Boggling Journeys to Kinship

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Source: https://brainchildmag.com/2016/01/modern-families-stories-of-extraordinary-journeys-to-kinship-a-book-review/