The Sexual Politics of Healthy Families and the Making of Class Relations

The chapter explores how healthist framings as strategies of legitimation of same-sex parenting, in which knowledge on children’s health and psychological adjustment has become a key battleground, can work at concealing class relations while reproducing them. The case of Italy, where class inequalities are particularly dramatic for families with children, with widespread and growing child poverty, is particularly telling about the implications of invisibilizing class relations in debates and research on same-sex parenting. Connecting different strands of literature, the chapter argues that the processes of recognition of same-sex parenting needs to be understood as related to how current class dynamics are at play in the re-familization of care responsibilities, the therapeutic surveillance of parents, the lines of exclusion drawn by models of good parenting.