Building on more than two decades offeminist analysis of the family, this article takes a neoinstitutionalist approach to examine some of the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation intersect in lesbianheaded two-parent families, affecting how they construct their roles as mothers. Institutionalist theory tends to de-emphasize how actors deliberately construct social arrangements such as parenting roles within the family. The authors' analysis of interviews from 14 lesbian mothers remedies this deficiency by focusing both on how they draw upon and transform institutionalized scripts, practices, and understandings of family roles and relations. Their findings reveal how these mothers reinscribed gendered understandings while simultaneously challenging heteronormative ones in their efforts to construct and maintain socially viable two-parent families.
One of the most famous Venetian women of her time, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–1836) was known not only for her salon, but also for her published works. One of these pieces, Teotochi Albrizzi's Ritratti (1807), a series of literary portraits, reveals Europe's concern over the simulation of virtue in a society beginning to judge merit by behavior and self-presentation rather than birth. Teotochi Albrizzi's portraits demonstrate the strategies used to discern character and how the author drew on ideas concerning sexual difference in the realm of aesthetics to address concerns raised by shifting practices of sociability.
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