Lesbian mothering and the family in France

Family demographics in France are currently undergoing a process of change, as they are in other Western cultures. The conventional nuclear family is in decline, and different arrangements are taking its place: single-parent families, post-divorce blended families, homosexual family groupings. Élisabeth Roudinesco (2002) suggests that same-sex parenting – or homoparentalité to use the term increasingly in use in France – may be the source of new models of the family of the future. Yet Roudinesco, among others, also points to the dynamics between sameness and difference, normality and transgression, operating on same-sex parenting. In wanting to have children, to what extent do gay men and lesbians (wish to) integrate themselves into society as ‘normal’, or how far do they desire to assert their difference? Are same-sex families simply part of a general evolution in the family or are they forging new social formations? Questions such as these take on particular resonance in the French context, given the eschewal of identity politics and the hetero-normative family laws of the French Republic. This paper engages with these debates, drawing on a group of narratives of lesbian mothering, both autobiographical témoignages and novels, which, between them, cover a variety of family arrangements and projets d’enfants: Claire Altman’s 'Deux femmes et un couffin' (2005), Myriam Blanc’s 'et elles eurent beaucoup d’enfants…' (2005), Laurence Cinq-Fraix’s 'Family Pride' (2006) and Éliane Girard’s 'Mais qui va garder le chat?' (2005). The discussion interrogates key issues – the question of the father, reproductive technologies, the role of the ‘second’ mother – and evaluates to what extent these narratives of lesbian mothering uphold new paradigms of parenthood.