Judicial narratives in custody cases involving gay and lesbian parents, 1952--1999: A study of indeterminacy and meaning making in legal rationales and outcomes

In this dissertation, I investigate the language of judicial decisions as a mechanism for interpreting, "cementing", and even defining legal and social concepts and identities. To understand these processes, I examine the new social realities of the "gayby boom" (the proliferation of gay and lesbian-headed families) and its interface with the law by analyzing judicial narratives in custody and adoption cases involving gay and lesbian parents and drawing on the socio-legal literature on law's indeterminacy and the "settling" of meaning; the social scientific and feminist literatures on sexuality, law and power; and the constitutive analysis of legal language. This research is based on an archival analysis of all such appellate cases over the last fifty years, briefs from the cases, as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, and litigants. In revealing the range of rationales and discourses in judicial narratives over time, I illustrate how meaning and identity is constituted in law, and how legal and social meanings are reciprocally related.