Objective
To investigate stratification within gay fatherhood communities.
Background
As laws and attitudes have become friendlier to queer families in recent decades, gay fathers have experienced increased visibility in and through both media and scholarship. However, this visibility has been distributed unevenly along normative patterns of marital status, race, class, and kinship.
Method
Participant observation of gay fathers groups was conducted in California, Texas, and Utah over a period of 61 months. Using theoretical sampling of group members, 56 gay fathers also participated in semistructured interviews. Themes were identified and refined through a 3‐stage iterative coding process, consistent with a grounded theory approach.
Results
Findings suggest that single gay fathers, gay fathers of color, and gay fathers who had children in heterosexual contexts occupy marginalized statuses within the gay fatherhood community. Gay fathers develop distinct mechanisms of resilience to respond to the challenges associated with their marginalization.
Conclusion
The experiences of gay fathers on the margins highlight the negative consequences of gay fatherhood discourses that reproduce family normativity. The resources available through gay parenting groups simultaneously played a role in gay fathers' well‐being, resilience, and marginalization.
Implications
Efforts to expand opportunities for gay families should consider coalitions with other marginalized family forms. Gay parents who had children in heterosexual unions should be specifically targeted through gay parenting outreach.
The history of research on interventions for struggling readers in Grades 4 through 12 dates back to 19th-century case studies of seemingly intelligent children who were unable to learn to read. Physicians, psychologists, educators, and others were determined to help them. In the process, they launched a century of research on a wide variety of approaches to reading intervention. As shown in this systematic narrative review, much has changed over time in the conceptualization of reading interventions and the methods used to determine their efficacy in improving outcomes for struggling readers. Building on the knowledge gathered over the past 100 years, researchers and practitioners are well-poised to continue to make progress in developing and testing reading interventions over the next 100 years.
Cultural norms surrounding gender and family have failed to keep pace with demographic trends of family change, resulting in a wide range of family forms that are excluded from family normativity. Yet the contexts in which diverse families confront normative expectations, and the strategies they use to navigate such situations, have received limited attention. Using participant observation with gay father groups and interviews with 41 gay fathers in California and Texas, this study examines how structures of gender and family affect gay fathers’ everyday lives, as well as the management strategies that contribute to gay fathers’ resilience within exclusively paternal families. Results show that community support and norms of outness and visibility among gay fathers aid in their ability to navigate heteronormative ideologies. The concept of incidental activism is introduced to theorize the relationship between gay fathers’ resistance strategies and discourses of respectability within LGBTQ collective action.
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