Modern Families
Dr. Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales—his own included—that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. ... These are not your grandparents’ creation stories. ... Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, 'Modern Families' tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales—adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families—set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made. In these stories, family creation was painstaking and sometimes difficult. ... Becoming parents involved jumping tremendous hurdles—social conventions, legal and medical institutions—with heightened intention and inventiveness, within and across multiple inequities and privileges. ...Yet each of these families, however they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share.