Emerging identities: New subjects within gay adoption

This thesis explores the identity construction and subject positions of gay male foster and adoptive parents. Using late twentieth and early twenty-first century cultural texts, I apply a Foucaultian perspective to analyze how controversies over gay adoptions articulate shifts in contemporary American discourses of homosexuality and the family. Identities available to homosexuals have shifted since the nineteenth century; this thesis looks at the emergence of a new contested identity for homosexuals as adoptive parents at the turn of the twenty-first century by employing Foucaultian methodological techniques of archaeology. This work contributes to the sociological literature on gender, law, and the postmodern family, and begins to move theoretical understandings beyond the current state of queer theory and poststructural discourse on identity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Year

2003

Author dc:creator

• Hartzell, Megan O

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kathryn Hausbeck

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/rtds/1550

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:oasis.library.unlv.edu:rtds-2549