Keywords

Children growing up with same-sex parents will be all right; their lives will be as healthy and happy as those of the other children. This has proved, apparently, the most powerful and successful legitimizing tool for same-sex families to achieve social and legal recognition. Our work as critical scholars, however, is to keep questioning what this tool is doing to people’s experiences and to social power relations. In Virginia Woolf’s (1938) words, let us never cease from thinking: what is this happy and healthy future that is proposed to us, and why should parents and children take part in it?

As a contribution to this thinking, the present chapter questions the healthy future envisaged for the children of same-sex parents and relates it to the individualized, classless future envisaged by neoliberalism. This exploration stems from observing how public debate and research on same-sex families, as well as their collective self-representation and claims-making activities, have developed in Italy in the last decades. It takes the form of a quest for tracing the link between two dots.

On the one hand, there is the importance of children’s health as a battleground for the legitimation of same-sex parents and their ability to take care of their children: public debates on their social and legal recognition have been largely framed as a struggle over expert knowledge, a competition on scientific assessments about the outcomes of same-sex parenting upon children’s psychological adjustment and well-being.

On the other hand, there is the virtual invisibility of class in representations of same-sex families: despite the fact that economic inequalities in Italy are particularly dramatic for families with children, with a huge and growing problem of child poverty, class differences in same-sex parenting experiences rarely emerge in public representations, nor are class relations widely explored in the flourishing research on them.

Tracing that link while avoiding easy shortcuts, I believe, requires different strands of literature to be put into greater dialogue, as I attempt to do in this chapter.

Exploring how the growing prominence of health in framing social struggles has deeply changed public discourse and claims-making around sexual issues, Epstein and Mamo (2017) have taken up the concept of “sexual healthism”, allowing exploration of its possible individualizing, de-politicizing, essentializing and victimizing, but also legitimizing and empowering implications.

Focusing on same-sex families allows us to explore the connections between these reframing tendencies in sexual politics and those regarding the therapeutic surveillance of parents’ caring skills, addressing the familization of social regulation in neoliberal politics, which is often overshadowed by a focus on individual responsibility in critical literature on sexual health.

The result of this work of drawing connections is a call for keep interrogating how healthist framings of same-sex parenting can work at concealing class relations while reproducing them (Aamann, 2017) and which other, more emancipatory directions discourses on health and care may take.

The Advent of Sexual Healthism

Epstein and Mamo (2017) propose using the expression “sexual healthism” to read a process of growing prominence of health in the framing of sexuality issues that has intensified since the 1980s.

In times of declining public responsibility for social reproduction and privatization of healthcare systems (Leys, 2010), this process is part of a more general tendency to reframe social issues in terms of health promotion and risk prevention, declined in individualized terms as a moral imperative to pursue one’s own well-being, which had been interpreted with the term “healthicization” (Conrad, 1992) or “healthism” (Crawford, 1980; Zola, 1977; for an overview, see Turrini, 2015). Detecting the sparking of “healthism ideology”, Crawford (1980) points to its reductionist, individualizing and de-politicizing implications. Becoming a pan-value, health comes to epitomize ideals of good living, and its pursuit gets established as a moral obligation for individuals who are held responsible for leading a healthy lifestyle while managing risks.

Relating the rise of this ideology to the experience of the middle class in the dawn of the neoliberal era, characterized by growing uncertainties haunting the promises of individual competition, Crawford detects the de-politicizing tendencies of turning to holistic medicine and self-care practices in the 1980s. In later years, the healthist ideology would be identified, by Crawford (2006) and others, as a key contribution to the production of a neoliberal “common sense” of individualization of social conflict and privatization of care responsibilities. In fact, while the notion of “healthism” has been first conceived as a form of medicalization, thereby building on its interactionist conceptualizations (Conrad & Schneider, 2010), its uses cross paths with Foucauldian analyses of the health imperative (Lupton, 1995; Rose, 1996) exploring the related tendencies of increased individualization and surveillance in the construction of subjectivities under neoliberalism:

Health has become a vector for the production of the self and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities that introduces the faculty of choice and free will into the everyday management of our body through risk assessment. Though based on individual independence, the health awareness discourse conveys a strong normativity. (Turrini, 2015, p. 22)

In Crawford’s (2006) words, the increasingly pervasive health consciousness entails a “pedagogy of danger” focused on the imperative of correcting unhealthy behaviour and preventing risks, requiring persistent self-surveillance and resulting in continuous blaming for the failures to reach unattainable normative standards. This blaming has a class dimension, being a form of “elitist moralizing about what are believed to be unhealthy coping behaviours” (Crawford, 1980, p. 385). At the same time, healthism can be read as a form of class aspiration, as a way to implicitly articulate a project of social mobility in terms of personal development and achievement of moral worth (Aamann, 2017).

Claiming that the relations between the will to health as a moral imperative and sexuality have been underexplored, Epstein and Mamo (2017) give an account of how the notion of sexual health has gained prominence in recent decades in the framing of LGBT issues in the US context. They argue that, by now, it has largely come to epitomize good sexuality and happy sexual subjects, deeply changing public discourse and becoming a key legitimizing tool in claims-making strategies around sexual issues.

Their analysis shows how the success of “sexual health” is accompanied by its semantic instability, produced by its multiple uses by different subjects/publics. The proliferation of its meanings and uses and the alliances that are forged around it, between activism and expert knowledge, can hardly be reduced to consistent tendencies. Included in these tendencies are, for instance, the mobilization of discourses on sexual health in support of struggles for sexual rights and social recognition.

At the same time, Epstein and Mamo (2017) recognize some general implications of healthist framings of sexual issues, in terms of individualization, with a focus on individual solutions to social problems, and the establishment of compelling normative standards of “healthist respectability”, an expression that clearly evokes the class dimension of these standards. Social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have once more exposed, in macroscopic terms, the workings of these two implications of healthism.

Securing the Health of Children: Familization Under Neoliberalism

In issues related to same-sex parenting, the subjects whose health is under surveillance—namely, children—are not the same as those who are held responsible for securing it, namely, parents. In discussing how claims for rights are legitimized by assuring that the outcome of same-sex parental care would be healthy children, we need therefore to question the focus on individualization characterizing discussions on healthism and explore the familization of care responsibilities under neoliberalism. The fortune of theories of individualization, in fact, bears both the risk of marginalizing the individual decentring implied by notions of family as belonging, connectedness, care interdependence and obligations and the risk of underplaying the persisting power of family discourse to legitimize social inequalities (Edwards et al., 2012).

In exploring what the familization of responsibilities means, we can draw on literature that has been arguing for the limits of interpretations of neoliberalism that see the dissolution of relations of care and family ties as part of its constitutive elements. Cooper’s (2017) work is an important contribution in this respect, convincingly retracing a foundational convergence between neoliberals and neoconservatives in promoting family values, though without redistribution. Looking at the fate of policies for families with dependent children as a key case, Cooper shows that the neoliberal transformations of US social policies, far from aiming at freeing individuals from family ties, actually assume and reinforce individuals’ familial responsibilities and hierarchical relations within the family, as the basic way to secure free reproductive labour and social stability:

The imperative of personal responsibility slides ineluctably into that of family responsibility when it comes to managing the inevitable problems of economic dependence (the care of children, the disabled, the elderly, or the unwaged). (Cooper, 2017, p. 71)

Family obligations, and the gender hierarchies upon which they are grounded, are at the same time naturalized and actively enforced, a combination that is constitutive of liberalism (Brown, 1995), taking specific forms in the neoliberal transformation of capitalism:

Neoliberals (…) envisage the private paternalism of the family as a spontaneous source of welfare in the free-market order; a state of equilibrium that may be disturbed by the perverse incentives of redistributive welfare but also restored through the diminution of state paternalism (….) In the medium term, however, they readily acknowledge the reality of family failure (homologous to market failure) and the necessity of some kind of restorative intervention on the part of the state to correct such disorders. (Cooper, 2017, p. 62)

If incentives don’t work, such intervention can ultimately take the form of “the much more overt forms of behavioral correction favored by social conservatives” (Cooper, 2017, p. 63). The result is a fundamental change of the US welfare state, “from a redistributive program into an immense federal apparatus for policing the private family responsibilities of the poor” (Cooper, 2017, p. 21).

Another way to understand the familization of care responsibilities can be traced back to a Foucauldian theoretical perspective. Exploring the role of psychology and therapeutic culture in the formation of modern subjectivity, Nikolas Rose (1989, 1996) detects the forms which liberalism’s concurrent tendencies of privatization and responsibilization of the family take in times of neoliberal change. The critique and dismantling of public childcare services and other forms of support to family life, which get redefined as intrusive and oppressive, should not be interpreted as a drawback from responsibilization and surveillance. Rather, they mark a success in making the autonomous, private family take upon itself the desire and responsibility to maximize its members’—and most notably children’s—capacities for self-realization. The family is in fact not only expected to avoid maladjustment but to reproduce, through active engagement and constant self-surveillance, this new normality of a life organized “within a project of self-betterment” (Rose, 1999). The forms under which this normality can be recognized, measured and assessed are those of psychological knowledge: an optimized, and self-optimizing, child is a healthy child.

Furedi (2004, 2008) proposes another influential analysis of the redefinition of parenting and childhood in terms of the contemporary hegemony of therapeutic culture, grounded upon emotional determinism in the understanding of well-being. Under this lens, parenting is considered in terms of its potential emotional damages upon children, with the development of a “code of mistrust” involving a growing surveillance on parents’ behaviour and emotional deficits, both under the forms of an imperative of constant self-surveillance and the need for experts’ advice and support (Hoffman, 2010; for a review and discussion of these perspectives, see Brownlie, 2014).

The shift from public to family responsibility in assuring children’s educational outcomes has corresponded to an increasing focus on early intervention. Framed in terms of social investment, conceiving children as human capital to be appropriately developed to contribute to the nation’s economy, this focus is crucially reinforced by the influence of neuroscience and the notion of the plastic brain.

The perspective of social investment entails an orientation towards the child’s future (as a productive worker) rather than towards her well-being and possibility of agency in the present. This requires a standardization of educational and evaluation models, a disqualification of informal learning in the local community and, finally, an intensification of expert surveillance on parenting, which gets redefined in terms of managing social risks, thereby preventing possible negative effects on future outcomes (Casalini, 2014).

In the last decades in Europe, with an acceleration corresponding to the welfare cuts of post-2008 austerity politics, this surveillance has taken the form of a renewed state interventionism. In the rationale grasped by Cooper (2017), state intervention is informed by class assumptions, taking the form of a concern for policing poor families: a moral agenda of intensive family intervention has been developing around the idea that bad parenting is the most significant cause not only of children’s present problems but also of their future life chances and thereby, ultimately, of future social problems. The corresponding idea is that “good parenting offers a panacea for all social ills” (Dermott, 2012, p. 1). But the model of good parenting which is enforced and legitimized by expert knowledge, namely, “intensive parenting”, requires forms of emotional and caring labour and consumption practices (Hays, 1998) which are hardly affordable by working-class and poor families (Dermott & Pomati, 2016).

Parenting works therefore as “a proxy for social class”, with a regulatory focus on disadvantaged parents (in particular, mothers) as the way to prevent the intergenerational reproduction of personal and social ills (Gillies et al., 2016), and a strong policy investment in educating parents to good parenting practices rather than in redistribution: “The solution to economic stagnation, entrenched inequality and stalled social mobility therefore becomes a matter of training parents to take responsibility for these huge structural problems by changing the way they intimately interact with their infants” (Macvarish, 2016, p. 31).

This class dimension in the attribution of value to parenting practices, however, does not have apparent legitimacy in societies that support the idea of equal worth (Skeggs, 2011). These class assumptions, in fact, are effectively concealed through the scientific, objectifying language of measures of brain development, cognitive performance, psychological adjustment and well-being:

The time- and resource-intensive practices of a section of the middle class are naturalized as “stimulating” brain growth rather than understood as being the particular lifestyle made possible by being better-paid, better-educated parents with a particular anxiety to fend off downward mobility in their offspring. (Macvarish, 2016, p. 31)

Material conditions tend to fall out of this picture. In the face of growing health inequalities related to increasingly unequal life conditions and the re-commodification of healthcare systems (Leys, 2010), the issue of children’s psychological health, defined in terms of adjustment to a heteronormative, respectable lifestyle, gets detached from concerns about their more general health conditions and about the material conditions shaping family lives and parents’ caring practices, as well as parents’ own health. By making social inequalities invisible, however, these ways of framing care responsibilities lay down the very conditions for reproducing them.

Class and the Politics of LGBTQ Parenting

After a period of relative marginalization, a general recognition of the need to reclaim class perspectives in LGBT and queer studies has been gradually gaining ground (Hennessy, 2000).

Class differences are discussed in terms of whose experiences are known and recognized in LGBT and queer research, as part of a more general attention to intersectionality. Research based on prevailingly middle- and upper-class experiences is questioned not only for making others invisible but also for setting the universal standard against which other lives are measured. Echoing critiques on the problematic empirical foundations of theories of the democratization of intimate relations failing to take account of—and thereby obscuring—the persistence of material inequalities (Jamieson, 1999), the scrutiny extends therefore to the interpretative frameworks used in research, as long as they do not question these implicit standards. The individualized, self-reflexive subject freely choosing who to be, which has informed accounts of LGBT relationships and narratives on sexual citizenship, is in fact ascribable to a middle-class subjectivity, abstracted from the life conditions that make different choices possible. Indeed, class positioning can influence the extent to which choice itself can be a relevant element in the construction of the self.

Together with a call for greater visibility of working-class experiences, then, comes a call for problematizing privileged lives (Taylor, 2011): a call which sounds all the more urgent in times in which life conditions are becoming increasingly unequal. When empirical works meet this call, they clearly show the actual relevance of class differences, shaping gay and lesbian parenting experiences (Taylor, 2009), the relations between coming out and the self-perception of well-being and how shame is managed (McDermott, 2011; McDermott & Roen, 2016). Research on media representations of same-sex families also shows the pervasiveness of a middle-class trope, centred on classed norms about what it means to be a family, and reassuring the spectator that same-sex families do not disrupt but instead “seamlessly” fit into the middle-class ideal of the suburban home (Drew, 2016).

A further step in this critical assessment of the invisibilization of class in LGBTQ studies calls for a stronger integration of materialist and critical political economy perspectives in the understanding of sexual politics (Hennessy, 2000). Questioning the separation of sexual identity politics from a critique of capitalism that has characterized mainstream tendencies in times of neoliberal hegemony, critical analyses of neoliberal tendencies in sexual politics have since developed, with the key contribution of feminist materialism. The concept of homonormativity, deriving from this kind of analysis, has been taken up as a fruitful tool to understand the pitfalls of strategies pursuing a reductionist version of equality goals “paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (Duggan, 2003). Duggan identifies contemporary homonormativity as an expression of neoliberalism’s sexual politics, working at de-politicizing sexual dissidence through consumerism and domestication into a middle-class, respectable family life.

Cooper (2017) adds interesting elements to this reading of sexual politics, connecting the increasing relevance of parenting in LGBTQ lives to the growing relevance of private wealth transmission. In the neoliberal era of US capitalism, the family gains renewed centrality not only as the key supplier of welfare but also as an economic actor, as a result of the changing relative weight of declining salaries and private wealth. Family wealth transmission, according to Cooper, also has important implications for sexual politics, providing “a powerful stimulus to discipline oneself within the legal framework of inheritance” (Cooper, 2017, p. 161). A key aspect of demands for recognition of same-sex marriage was, in fact, access to legitimate property transmission, at a time when LGBTQ subjects appeared as a promising new niche for a strongly expanding consumer credit sector, including house mortgages. As a result, “the curious temporal logic of credit—its ability to materialize the future in the present—was here harnessed as a means of recapturing non-normative desire in the inherently regressive form of private familial debt” (Cooper, 2017, p. 315). Legitimation of parentage becomes then a central issue in sexual politics. However, wealth transmission has different relevance depending on whether one has any wealth to transmit—which is not a universal condition. Moreover, a two-parent family with its children presents a simpler situation in terms of inheritance, compared to the complexities of blended families, but the importance of this difference also depends on what is to be inherited. These considerations can help to understand the class dynamics underlying which priorities are established in the sexual politics agenda.

Critical perspectives, while revealing these dynamics, also address their concealment, analysing how certain ways of framing sexual issues make the structures of capitalism invisible and discussing how this can be undone. Researching working-class women’s construction of sexual subjectivity, Skeggs (1997) shows how the moral category of respectability mediates the definition of heterosexual subjectivity, which becomes differently accessible along lines of class and race. Heterosexuality and respectability are therefore mechanisms reproducing class as well as race inequalities, but at the same time, their classed dimension is made invisible: class is a “structuring absence” for working-class women in Skeggs’ research, who dis-identify from a working-class positioning which is de-valued and sexualized and measure themselves against the standard of respectability.

The ways in which identity politics has entailed a class positioning while concealing it are the object of Hennessy’s critique. She argues that identity politics has been striving for a middle-class model which, recalling Wendy Brown (1995, p. 60), she defines as “phantasmatic” rather than real, “a bourgeois norm of class acceptance, legal protection, and relative material comfort”. Identity politics as a class ideology, however, actively conceals class differences, undermining the possibility of recognizing capitalism’s deprivations and the needs it outlaws and leaves unmet. What needs to be done then, she argues, is a critical work of historicizing identities, in order to “make visible their historical and social conditions of possibility” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 230).

These reflections prompt us to consider the invisibilization of class relations as a constitutive element of how LGBTQ issues, including same-sex parenthood, are constructed and experienced. We can detect this concealing at work in public discourse as well as in academic research, when class differences are reduced to lifestyles, or in uses of concepts like homonormativity detaching the normative dimension from class relations and the critique of neoliberal capitalism. We can also detect this concealing at work when healthist frames are used, as we will explore below by looking at the Italian context.

Sexual Politics, Parenthood and Class Relations in Italy

Starting in the 1990s and escalating in the last decade as a response to the 2008 crisis, a hard wave of austerity politics cutting social expenditure has resulted in a privatization of social, educational and health services in Italy that has effectively redistributed childcare responsibilities from the public to family networks. Together with labour market policies centred on reducing the cost of labour and workers’ rights, these politics of welfare retrenchment have increased social inequality among parents and further hampered already limited social mobility (Perocco, 2018). They have also increased poverty, which in Italy is especially high among families with minors: 6.5% of families with one minor and 20% of families with three or more minors—a total amount of 1.2 million minors—live in absolute poverty, while 34% of couples with three or more minors and 14% of one-parent households live under the relative poverty line.Footnote 1 Research on health conditions has pointed to a growing disadvantage of the population with lower education (Istat, 2015, p. 64) and to higher infant mortality among lower-income populations (those living in the South and non-Italian citizens).Footnote 2 A study on health inequalities among children in Campania confirms that poverty is the main determinant of health (Cirillo et al., 2007), which means that, given the distribution of poverty in Italy, children are particularly disadvantaged in their health prospects. With exposure risk and economic consequences in the COVID-19 pandemic weighing especially on poor families, these prospects are bound to get even more dire.

This dramatic picture of social inequality does not seem to affect research on non-heterosexual parenting (for a review, see Trappolin, 2017), as is indeed the case for much of the research on heterosexual parenting as well. Overall, issues of class are rarely addressed, with the exception of debates on surrogacy. In the debate on the 2016 civil unions act and in the following year, surrogacy has become the key issue of attacks to social and legal recognition of same-sex parenting and a strongly divisive one in Italian feminist and lesbian politics. Issues of class in discussions on surrogacy emerge in particular about two-father families, and critiques of the commodification of reproduction are mingled with victimizing representations of the exploited woman and essentializing views of motherhood (Gusmano & Motterle, 2019).

In research on LGBTQ parenting, class as a sociodemographic variable is actually discussed, mainly by acknowledging the overrepresentation of middle and upper classes in the samples. This is specifically linked to economic reasons for research on couples conceiving children through assisted reproductive technologies (ART), a very expensive path for people living in Italy due to legal regulations (Gusmano, 2018). Issues of class are also sometimes mentioned in research on same-sex parents’ experiences, pointing to the middle-class roots of the model of intensive parenting that same-sex parents feel particularly compelled to live up to (Everri, 2016).

Poorer parents are altogether absent in terms of their actual experiences, but appear sometimes as phantasmatic presences, countertypes, in different ways. They can represent the implicit “backwards other”, represented by lesbians and gays giving up the parenting project or having children from heterosexual relationships, against which same-sex couples having children through ART are defined as an avant-garde (Baiocco et al., 2015). They can also be evoked to represent the “homophobe other”. Trappolin and Gusmeroli (2019, p. 98) detect a “partial overturning” in the focus on the agents of homophobia in public representations, when homophobia itself gets reframed in terms of urban security (for these tendencies in LGBT local policies, see Bertone & Gusmano, 2013). While in the 1990s “those who were accused were prevailingly those representing the social and symbolic order, often prominent people, and (…) homophobia was discussed mainly as a symbolic and cultural problem of the ‘majority’”, media outlets in later years identify perpetrators of violent attacks as “‘violent youth’, ‘drifters’, ‘Romanian clochard’, ‘minors’, ‘a gang from the suburbs’, ‘a group of thugs’, ‘misfits’” (Trappolin & Gusmeroli, 2019, p. 98).

The class dimension of the urban security frame, with its imagery of respectability (“decoro” is an Italian corresponding word) and its relations with gentrification, the intensification of valorization of urban life and the surveillance of the dangerous classes, has been amply studied in Italy (Pitch, 2013). However, improper appropriations of such a framing of homophobia are discussed in Italian LGBTQ studies in terms of constructions of ethnic differences and homonationalism (Di Feliciantonio, 2015), more than in terms of class relations.

If urban security is a frame allowing same-sex parents to position themselves on the respectable side while concealing the classed implications of this positioning, healthist frames can work in a similar way.

Peregrín et al. (2014) discuss strategies of legitimation of same-sex parenting in Spain, detecting the crucial role played by experts and scientific studies that are mobilized to prove the healthy development of children. They describe this as a defensive strategy of normalization, reacting to the agenda of the opponents that is based on the defence of the natural order of sexuality and the family. But such a strategy, they argue, bears the risk of reproducing a moral tale of good parenting with “naturalistic nuances” (p. 22).

In Italy, the body of international psychological research on the lack of negative effects of sexual orientation on parenting and the related statements of professional organizations of psychiatrists and psychologists acknowledging its results are fundamental resources upon which Italian LGB families’ organizations draw for the construction of their social legitimacy and the articulation of their claims for legal recognition.Footnote 3 They are used in a struggle over scientific authority on a battlefield that also sees the bulky presence of anti-gender opposers, engaging as well in the terrain of science as a strategy of legitimation of their political agenda (Franchi & Selmi, 2018). Actually, competing frames (Brownlie, 2014) are also mobilized, with the self-representation of the main LGBTQI parents’ organizations (Famiglie Arcobaleno and Genitori Rainbow) revolving around visibility and the displaying of the families’ everyday practices and their claims-making being also framed in terms of fighting discrimination (Everri, 2016). However, psychological research on the health of children remains a key tool for the litigation strategies that have been deployed to obtain a recognition of parenting rights that law still fails to provide, including stepchild adoption (Bosisio & Long, 2020).

As already mentioned, sociological critiques argue that the current prevailing expert knowledge on child development entails a naturalization of middle-class practices as the moral standard of good parenting: indicators of parental attachment and involvement and scales of children’s psychological adjustment and well-being reify and naturalize these standards, erasing a history of conflicts over definitions and over the value of different ways of caring for children.

Clarke (2008) and others (Hicks, 2005) have argued that the process of social and legal recognition of same-sex parenting should not be read in terms of objective scientific progress, the gathering of more accurate data, but as a social, collective process of depathologization led by alliances between activism and research. Clarke (2008, p. 123) also points to “the regulatory power of psychology” in supporting constructions of the dichotomy between the good lesbian mothers, those hiding their sexuality and subordinating it to their mothering role, and the bad ones, the militant, visible dykes (and, we can add, working-class, “unrespectable” mothers), openly challenging heterosexuality, a distinction upon which the judges drew in custody cases in the 1980s and 1990s. The critical argument made by Clarke is that, in the USA, the process of construction of the fit lesbian and gay parent has not involved a challenge to the definitional power of clinical knowledge.

The implications of building on such knowledge need to be problematized in Italy as well: all the more so since anti-gender actors are firmly treading on that ground, naturalizing social hierarchies through the mobilization of scientific authority (Garbagnoli & Prearo, 2018).

Moreover, seeking recognition through a healthist frame legitimizes, as we have seen, a familization of responsibilities and reduces the terrain for politicizing the actual conditions shaping parenting experiences. In particular, the pressure for living up to a model of intensive parenting as an outcome of the neoliberal demise of public responsibility accounts for much of the fatigue of LGBTQ parents, who feel that they are held to higher standards because of their uncertain social recognition (De Cordova et al., 2016, 2020; Franchi & Selmi, 2018). However, the critique of this model does not seem to be part of their political claims. The endeavour for measuring parenting performances as part of the social investment ideology goes thereby largely unquestioned. In fact, despite embodying a social risk, privileged parents “are able to display the middle-class risk practices that are considered responsible and respectable” (Aamann & Dybbroe, 2018), but by doing so they risk undermining possibilities of coalition with parents from other stigmatized social groups. In this way, they are just displacing surveillance from themselves to other parents or, better, from a part of their constituency to parents who do not live up to standards of respectability, including other same-sex parents.

Seen from an intersectional perspective, when LGBTQ parents seek recognition through an individualized and depoliticized healthist frame, erasing class and other social inequalities and thereby issues of redistribution from their self-representations, they contribute to undermining the very conditions for emancipation of a great part of the constituency they are speaking on behalf of.

Conclusions

Reflections on intersectionality have taught us that research is never innocent when it leaves fundamental power inequalities unaddressed, since reproducing by concealing is a key working of the construction of knowledge.

By connecting the strategic use of healthist frames and the concealing of class relations in activist discourses and research, this contribution has shown that the processes of recognition of same-sex parenting need to be understood as related to the reproduction of social inequalities: the re-familization of care responsibilities, the implications of austerity politics for parents’ surveillance and the lines of exclusion drawn by models of good parenting. In particular, the current social investment framing of childcare policies in Europe and the forms of knowledge it draws its legitimacy from emerge as key elements to understand the conditions set for the normalization of same-sex parenting, in the case of Italy as well, in terms of being able to secure a healthy future for their children.

On the one hand, tracing these connections requires improving empirical knowledge about the parenting practices among working-class LGBTQ people. Their experiences of being judged—and shamed (McDermott & Roen, 2016)—against standards of respectability not only for their sexual orientation or gender identity but also for their creative ways of dealing with the accumulation of “risk factors” in their everyday struggle to get by (Stacey, 1990) should become more visible.

At the same time, as Klesse (2014), in reflecting on the need for a stronger class perspective on polyamory experiences, has pointed out, we need to sharpen our theoretical perspectives, moving beyond the description of class differences to understanding class relations both in society and in the politics of knowledge. This includes a critical assessment of how we conceptualize health and how we deal with the more or less conscious epistemic compromises entailed by engaging in the rather well-funded interdisciplinary research on sexuality framed as a health issue (Vogler, 2019).

It also requires reflexivity about our positioning in looking at class issues. In Italy some of the most advanced studies questioning normative models of care have been carried out by researchers under precarious working conditions. Setting precarity as an interpretative perspective to read the redefinition of intimate and kinship relations (Gusmano & Motterle, 2019) has allowed them to challenge respectability standards in parenting and recognize that creativity and innovation can be linked to necessity rather than choice and can have protagonists other than the middle-upper-class avant-garde. The fact that the connections between changing patterns of care and class relations are explored from precarious positions may, however, explain their limited impact on research agendas: for instance, the programmatically unrespectable (“indecoroso”) urban squat residents in Bologna, called “Atlantide”, from which such perspectives were developed (Acquistapace, 2022), have since been evicted.