Family Values: Fatherhood in an American Community

FAIN: FA-50267-04

Ellen Lewin
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

The proposed fellowship will support writing an ethnography that concerns the experience of gay men who are or seek to become fathers, based on field research conducted primarily in the Chicago metropolitan area. The book will investigate the sorts of moral and cultural claims the men's actual or potential parental status allows them to make and will focus closely on the interactions of these men in relation to the people--gay and straight, parents and non-parents--who populate their daily lives, relating their social practices to the articulation of gay, parental, and other identities, as these emerge both in personal narratives and in community formation. It will also examine the racial and class dynamics that shape the forms gay fatherhood take, and raise questions about established understandings of gender through an analysis of "maternal" practices enacted by fathers.

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