Family is an integral part of the fabric of society with diverse configurations of people living together, related through blood or kinship. Changes to the Canadian political and legal structures granting access to marriage have affirmed the rights of gays and lesbians, yet many remain positioned on the margins of society. This grounded theory study illuminates the experiences of women with children who meet and fall in love with another woman. An intricate series of events is set in motion towards development, and ultimately, affirmation of a new lesbian headed stepfamily that addresses the central problem of family legitimacy. The theory of authenticating family demonstrates how women and their children incorporate another woman into their lives, maintaining and protecting the legitimacy of the new family structure. Transitions from being a heterosexual and/or single parented family to a lesbian headed stepfamily create multiple opportunities for challenges to their sense of legitimacy. The new stepfamily faces marginalization, stigmatization and heteronormative assumptions that contest the sense of legitimacy for all family members. Lesbian headed stepfamilies have few role models to provide guidance for behavioural expectations. These families learn from multiple interactions among themselves and with outsiders about how to negotiate a new understanding of family. They develop the ability to demonstrate pride to a society that has marginalized in the past, even as society is evolving in acceptance of multiple and diverse family configurations. There are three stages in authenticating family: (a) accepting the challenge, a process of realizing an intimate attraction to another woman, coming to terms with the significance of pursuing a relationship, and finding balance between many potential obstacles; (b) building the bonds, takes families through the process of getting to know each other, creating relationships, and understanding how dynamics among the family have shifted. While the process of authenticating family remains primarily within the confines of the family home, members begin to look beyond their family in anticipating interactions with outsiders; and (c) thriving, the final process includes solidifying and reclaiming legitimacy while juggling relationships within the home and countering the impact of continuous interactions with society at large.

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No description available.

The contemporary field �lesbian health� was shaped by a range of social and political changes in the last third of the twentieth century, as well as by discourses originating in the historical regulation of lesbianism. In discourse, lesbians have been produced as invisible, passive victims of heterosexist and potentially homophobic health-care providers. This project sought to understand how lesbians produce and manage their own health, and their interactions with doctors and other health-care providers. The research questions asked how discourses about lesbianism and the construction of the lesbian health field influence the ways in which lesbians construct and manage their own health, and how lesbians position themselves as they negotiate clinical spaces. Using semi-structured interviews, 19 women, aged between 22 and 64 years, who identified as lesbian, gay, same-sex-attracted and queer were interviewed. Interview data were analysed using discourse and content analysis. When they engaged with the health-care system, some participants produced their lesbianism as a social matter of no relevance to health; while for others their lesbianism was central to their health. An analysis of power relations revealed the complexity of ways the participants used agency to speak or remain silent about their sexual orientation. This was motivated by complex embodied understandings about the potential for emotional, physical or ontological harm involved in coming out in clinical spaces. Some chose to remain silent all, or some of the time, others to assertively identify themselves as lesbian. This depended on a range of contemporaneous factors including safety concerns, past experience and personal judgement. Whether to come out or not in the medical encounter was not necessarily a conscious decision, but was shaped by the individual�s embodied �sense for the game�. While the health-care system had frequently provided less than optimum care, these women were not passive, but used agency to decide whether or not their sexual orientation was relevant to the medical encounter.

This thesis examines the day to day practices that constituted Anne Lister’s (1791–1840) sexuality and sociability within the range of her writings, as well as her society. Anne’s writings were a detailed account, spanning her lifetime, of her own love and relationships with the ‘fairer sex’ (Whitbread 1988, 145). Anne’s sociality, seen in her correspondence and plain handwritten journal entries, has been explored by Muriel Green in Miss Lister of Shibden Hall and Jill Liddington in Female Fortune and Nature’s Domain (Green 1992; Liddington 1998; 2003). As a gentlewoman of adequate means, Anne has garnered some attention from women’s historians interested in her agency within an early nineteenth century social and historical context. Anne’s sexual identity has been extensively analysed over the past nearly twenty years by lesbian feminists, queer theorists, women’s historians and historians of sexuality concerned with the history and development of modern Western female homosexuality and gender. The source for theorising Anne’s sexuality has been the edited selections of the crypted journal entries, published by Helena Whitbread in I Know My Own Heart and No Priest but Love (Whitbread 1988; 1992). However, many analyses deal either with the theorisation of Anne’s sexuality or her sociality; the theoretical difficulty with reconciling these categories has troubled the analysis of her complex subjectivity. Drawing upon the archival materials, I have used an interdisciplinary feminist approach to analyse the sexual and social processes of Anne’s everyday interactions in her writings. Taking the seven month period of the sojourn to Paris in 1824–25, I have focused upon Anne’s textual practices within her journal volume and letters during her residence in Paris, her social practices with the other guests at the guesthouse 24 Place Vendôme and her sexual practices with her lover, the widow Mrs. Maria Barlow. The journal volumes and correspondence are a valuable historical record of one gentlewoman’s engagement with early nineteenth century British culture.

Thesis (PhD) -- McMaster University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-264). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1996. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2007 / Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Social Work. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-75).

Thesis (MHSc--Health Science) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2003. / Also held in print (129 leaves, 30 cm.) in Akoranga Theses Collection (T 306.874308664 BRE)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northeastern University, 2008. / Title from title page (viewed March 23, 2008). Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Law, Policy and Society Program. Includes bibliographical references (p. 306-324).