Changing childhoods: Using queer theory and intersectional methods to reconsider the epistemic resources of children with gay and lesbian parents

Abstract

This article explores contemporary childhoods through a lens of epistemic privileges and injustices in order to consider the experiences of children whose family models may not reflect the heterosexual norm. More than 14 million children in the United States have one or more gay parents. As the legal definition of marriage in the United States now recognizes same-sex partnerships, it is likely that this official number will increase. The experiences of children with gay and lesbian parents are often overlooked due to public sentiment toward gay partnerships and parenting, but the changing legal status of gay marriage around the world may indicate a shift in sentiment toward these family structures. For childhood studies researchers, this shift will provide opportunities to conduct studies with children whose voices largely were silenced or omitted from past and current scholarship. Particularly, young children with gay parents are in a unique position to describe the world since they must navigate between their homonormative private worlds and the heteronormative world of public institutions. Drawing on queer theory and incorporating the concept of intersectionality, I posit that applying Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to studies of childhood may reveal new ways to identify systemic and cultural biases including heteronormativity and adult–child power asymmetries. Examining issues of epistemic injustice through a queer lens and using intersectional methods may elucidate aspects of childhood culture that are misunderstood or absent from the scholarship.

Keywords

childhood studies epistemic injustices family models gay families heteronormativity intersectionality queer theory

Introduction

In this article, I suggest that researchers’ critical positionality in research projects affects how children are positioned and represented in research studies. Applying the concept of epistemic injustice to study conceptualizations of childhood may reveal new ways to identify systemic and cultural inequities. I propose that by exploring contemporary childhoods through the lenses of epistemic justice and injustice, it becomes possible to identify and study the experiences of children whose family models may not reflect heterosexual norm (Skrlac Lo, 2016). Fricker (2007) frames epistemic injustices as ethical and moral wrongs that deny or hinder “two of our most basic epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our social experiences” (p. 1). Frank (2013) suggests that considering epistemic injustices can “allow us to do the work of creating more inclusive epistemic practices that lead to more accurate descriptions of the world” (p. 363). I argue that researchers silence young children in research on childhood and that we need to employ methods that hear and recognize contributions children can make to our understanding of childhood in the 21st century. Finding ways to listen to their voices may overcome current epistemic injustices as well as make our collective epistemic resources more robust.

I use queer theory and scholarship to identify epistemic injustices so as to move toward epistemic justice that resists “essentialising and normalising discourses” (Murris, 2013: 257). Queer scholarship offers insight into ways that heterosexuality is normalized within depictions of family models, and I draw on the work of several contemporary scholars (Crisp and Hiller, 2011; Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013) to demonstrate how queer theory can be used to create inclusive and expansive frameworks when considering the experiences of children from diverse families.

Finally, I suggest that intersectional methods may be an effective way to elucidate epistemic injustices that are currently underreported or absent from the scholarship. An application of intersectional methods shifts analysis of diverse populations from categories of difference to process-centered approaches that expand our understanding of variation (Blackburn and Smith, 2010; Few-Demo, 2014). Process-centered approaches refocus notions of identity from category markers (e.g. race, gender) toward the interactions of these categories across spatial-temporal contexts. The shift to the term “variation” helps to disrupt the binary implied with “deviance” (Sedgwick, 2004) or a “difference hierarchy” (dePalma and Atkinson, 2010). Focusing on processes rather than categorical variables acknowledges the dynamism and shifting subjectivity of individuals (Few-Demo, 2014).

Through this work, I offer new ways to conceptualize contemporary childhoods including the value of reconsidering how young children are positioned in research studies. By focusing on a particular population, my goals are to raise awareness of the silenced experiences of a growing population as well as to demonstrate how positioning children as subjects—or experts of their own lives—can expand scholarly understanding of childhood. As Frank (2013) notes, “If the perspectives of those positioned without power in our social world go unheard, then our collective epistemic resources are less robust than they otherwise should be” (p. 365). This article is my effort to add some girth to the scholarship.

Whose childhood?

More than 14 million children in the United States have one or more gay parents (Ryan, 2010), and the official number is likely to increase as gay¹ relationships are afforded legal status in the United States. Yet, little is known about what these children experience and how they see the world (cf. Epstein, 2009; Evans, 2009; Gustavson and Schmitt, 2011; Ryan, 2010, for notable exceptions). The experiences of these young children may often be overlooked due to public sentiment toward gay partnerships and parenting (Kosciw and Diaz, 2008), which permeates through legal and official systems in various ways: schools may not acknowledge same-sex couples as parents; birth registrars may not allow same-sex couples to both be named as parents; same-sex relationships are underreported on census data because, until recently, there was no option for same-sex couples to self-identify; and those in same-sex relationships may underreport their relationship status due to concerns over personal safety (Herrold et al., 2008; Kosciw and Diaz, 2008; MAP et al., 2011; Smith and Gates, 2001). The rapidly changing legal status of gay marriage in the United States indicates shifting public sentiment toward gay families as well as legal measures to acknowledge and identify these relationships. Given this increased legal protection as well as a trend toward broader social acceptance of same-sex relationships, it is reasonable to expect an increase in the official number of people who identify as being in same-sex partnerships, including those who have children.

This legal recognition of same-sex marriages and a growing inclusion for others who identify as part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, queer, intersex, asexual, ally, and pansexual (LGBTQQIAAP) community cautiously spreads optimism that any stigma associated with discussing the subject of non-heterosexual relationships with young children (dePalma and Atkinson, 2010; Donelson and Rogers, 2004; Robinson, 2005; Thein, 2013) may soon lessen. One benefit to childhood studies researchers will be increased opportunities to conduct studies with children whose voices and experiences were largely silenced or omitted from past and current scholarship, which I discuss in more detail below. Finding ways to identify and analyze these experiences may expand our understanding of the experiences of a greater variety of children and may push against conventional linear trajectories of human development.

The benefits of child-centered studies, when children are situated as sources of expertise (cf. Campano, 2007; Davies, 2003 [1989]; Dyson, 1997, among others), extend beyond this particular demographic and can increase recognition of the tremendous resources that can be learned from those experiencing childhood: children themselves. Children are silenced in much research on childhood since the paradigm, theories, and methods are biased against recognizing the uniqueness of childhood from children’s perspectives. An examination of these perspective—and a consideration of ways to identify these biases—helps to make clear implicit bias that adult researchers (and society more broadly) may have toward the oft-romanticized but always distanced experiences of early childhood and young children. When reflecting on her work with young children, Davies (2003 [1989]) noted how adult researchers often presume that their adult status provides an objective gaze that allows them to “colour in” the children (p. 150). This “colouring in,” the presumption of the right to make meaning of children’s experiences on behalf of the children, demonstrates the adult–child power asymmetry that simultaneously positions adults as experts of childhood and children as incomplete or partial knowers. Children of gay parents are doubly silenced due to this ageism and the socio-cultural bias toward the nature of their parents’ relationship.

If we are to include children’s voices and perspectives on their lives in research, then we must examine the current nature of childhood research and our stance as researchers of childhood and children.² Recognizing children as agentive, dynamic, and fully formed actively resists developmental (i.e. biological and psychological) paradigms, which “frame young people as not-yet-finished human beings” (Bucholtz, 2002: 529). When reviewing the experiences of children with gay parents, I consider two primary sources for scholarship: (1) testimonies of parents, teachers, and other experts who “translate” the experiences for researchers, and (2) retrospective narrative analysis by now older or adult children of gay parents. In the following sections, I will take a closer look at these sources to explore potential social and research biases that may distort how we understand the experiences of children in contemporary society.

Testimonial evidence

Testimonial evidence, or testimony, is using a person’s recounting of an event as evidence or as data. When people are denied the right to give testimony—or are seen by others to lack credibility—they are silenced. This silencing experience is a form of identity prejudice that has implications at the individual and the societal level. Individuals who routinely experience testimonial injustice may eventually internalize this externally imposed lack of credibility and cease to see themselves as knowers (Fricker, 2007). At a societal level, testimonial injustice perpetuates prejudice in the collective social imagination in the form of stereotypical images (Fricker, 2007: 39–40). We refuse to accept a person’s testimony due to subconscious bias.

In academic scholarship with children, the testimony of the child is frequently overlooked in favor of the testimony of a parent or another “expert” adult, who is chosen to report the child’s experiences and beliefs (cf. Herrold et al., 2008; Kosciw and Diaz, 2008; Wilson, 2007). This may happen for practical reasons: attaining permission to work with young children can be arduous and so it is easier to seek out adult testimonies. Bypassing children may be easier when working with ethical review panels. In the United States, for example, research studies must be approved by Institutional Review Boards, and these Boards grant children protected status as a vulnerable population. This status, which reasonably protects children from exploitation or harm, can add significant work to researchers who must provide a burden of proof that child participants will not be harmed in studies.

A second reason for preferring adult testimony in the place of child testimony is the perception that young children are less likely to have the literacy or cognitive skills to meet the demands of a research study. Children are not perceived as credible participants because they lack both cognitive and experiential knowledge to understand their experiences and to be able to communicate them to others (n.b., see Kosciw and Diaz (2008) for their discussion on why they chose to survey parents instead of younger children). Testimonies gathered directly from children, therefore, are difficult to gather and may be perceived as unreliable due to communication and cognitive barriers between the child and the researcher. Of course, this perspective places the child—rather than the researchers—as having the deficit.

A growing number of scholars have become interested in developing research methods that acknowledge child agency and which “situate children center stage in the world as they see it” (Dyson, 1997: 9). These researchers are sharing their research findings, including methods proven effective when working with younger children (n.b., Blaise, 2005; Campano, 2007; Davies, 2003 [1989]; Dyson, 1997; Griffin et al., 2016; Lit, 2003; Murris, 2013). Situating the child at the center of the study requires researchers to recognize that children have the right to “testimonial sensibility” by the hearer, who acknowledges and correctly perceives the child speaker (Fricker, 2007: 71).

It is crucial to consider where and how children’s voices are integrated into research on childhood if we wish to identify systemic and cultural biases that shape and modulate childhood experiences. Finding ways to understand the world through the eyes of the child and to share this world with the research community moves the child from researched object to a subject position (Davies, 2000; Dyson, 1997; Murris, 2013) and may illuminate hidden biases that are unnamed, silenced, or considered taboo, such as non-heteronormative sexuality (Epstein, 2009; Evans, 2009; Gustavson and Schmitt, 2011; Ryan, 2010). Making space for the child to be active in the meaning-making process is essential to conceptualizing contemporary childhood, and this shift of the child’s location during the research process and reliance on a non-research expert (i.e. the child) may allow these “outsiders” to have “better purchase on expert performance than experts themselves and can improve it through their insights” (Robertson, 2009: 23, quoting Selinger and Crease, 2006a). Robertson, in her discussion on the epistemic aims of education, stresses the value of acknowledging and expanding collective knowledge. Frank (2013) also identifies epistemic robustness as the idealized (but unrealized) goal of post-secondary institutions. Fricker (2007) suggests that epistemic virtues are a means to neutralize prejudice. People must be willing to recognize and consider that any dissonance experienced may be the result of a personal failure of their own credibility as a listener rather than a failure by the speaker to effectively communicate. This includes interactions with children, whose voices are often subordinated to adults’. According to Murris (2013), adults—and teachers in particular—often experience dissonance when listening to children. This dissonance is visible in social responses such as laughter, classroom practices and norms, and widely held beliefs in support of developmental theories. This dissonance prevents collaborative talk between adults and children, which can be a rich source of knowledge (Murris, 2013). As researchers, we must consider how our preexisting beliefs about children and childhood impact how we talk with and learn from children who are research participants.

Who are better experts of their day-to-day lived experiences than children themselves? While they may lack “cognitive abilities” and “literacy skills” to complete the task of sharing their ideas and experiences with researchers, surely it is not the children’s responsibility to be heard, but the researchers’ job to understand why they cannot hear what is being shared. Hiding behind terms like “cognitive abilities” enables power asymmetries between children and adults and situates the child as a “becoming”—or less than whole—rather than a “being” (Murris, 2013: 254). When considering epistemic issues, and particularly “good epistemic conduct” (Fricker, 2007: 176), in the context of conducting research with children, we need to consider how we listen to children and what barriers exist to obfuscate their words and actions since “being a particular age has significant impact on how much credibility a hearer affords a speaker, and when and how s/he is silenced systematically” (Murris, 2013: 248). Expanding or reconceptualizing childhood in this active way will enable us, the adults who study children, to add to the current body of childhood research, including developmental studies, and enhance the robustness of the field.

Reflective narrative analysis

Reflective narrative analyses are another prominent research approach for understanding the experiences of children with gay parents. These analyses are typically performed on artifacts in the form of memoirs and personal essays (e.g. Howey and Samuels, 2000; Keller, 2013), advocacy groups and activist literature (e.g. Kosciw and Diaz, 2008; MAP et al., 2011; Smith and Gates, 2001; Wilson, 2007), or academic scholarship (e.g. Donelson and Rogers, 2004; Evans, 2009; Gartrell et al., 2012; Goldberg, 2007; Kuvalanka and Goldberg, 2009), or some combination of these. In this literature, adults (or young adults) are working to make sense of childhood memories. Like testimonial evidence, this research privileges the adult as knower and synthesizer. Our experiences are both hindered and enhanced by the passage of time, which proffers at least two limitations when used to research contemporary children’s experiences: (1) the historical context may not be relevant to present day, and this assumed universality or ahistoricity may not hold across time and for all children; and (2) the passage of time acts as filter to both recollections of and interpretations of memories. This temporal mediation distorts the in situ experience that may be better recorded through collaborative work with young children. While the experiences of now-grown children (i.e. adults) without a doubt influence our contemporary society, contemporary children’s experiences should not be understood through these reflective narrative analyses. To presume otherwise would accept an adult–child binary and power asymmetry, thus reinforcing the privileged position of adults as authorities of knowledge and imposing a top-down understanding of what it means to be a child. I turn to Davies’ (2000) reflective work on her early childhood scholarship as a means to discuss this power asymmetry.

When discussing the challenges of confronting this ageism in her own work with preschool-aged children, Davies (2000) notes “how extraordinarily difficult it is for teachers to break old patterns of adult-child interaction” (p. 13). The notion of “category maintenance work,” a term she uses to discuss how children come to see themselves as gendered, extends to the relationship between adults and children. She writes,

… it is thus predictable enough that our powerful adult/researcher gaze will totalize children as a powerless group because this is such a well-practiced and usually taken-for-granted discursive strategy for establishing power. In doing so, we will also presume the right to “colour in” the children while remaining the uncoloured, objective researcher. (Davies, 2003 [1989]: 150)

Later, she notes that “letting go of adult power can be an emotional and threatening experience, not just in the doing of it, but even in reading about it” (p. 152). Davies recounts one experience of sharing research findings with participants many years after the data collection phase. One participant claimed her memory aligned perfectly with Davies’ own account. Davies, though, chooses not to accept this account as the pure or objective record of these events. When she reinterprets the same incident through a different lens, explaining that her understanding of the event had changed due to new knowledge and ideas, she illustrates the subjective nature of interpretation. For Davies, this reinterpretation demonstrated that she might have influenced the participant’s memories because the participant’s memories mirrored Davies’ first account of the events. Her research is an illustration of the contextual and partial quality of memory, always available for reinterpretation depending on the discursive and epistemic resources on hand (cf. Sipe and Ghiso, 2004, for another example). And these resources remain constrained by the residual prejudice of the collective social imagination (Fricker, 2007) that continues to influence the relationship between adults and children.

Returning to the idea of epistemic injustices, the adult–child binary represents a double injustice to the child, first between adults and children, where adult power is enacted through self-identification “as epistemic authorities constitutes a serious barrier to hearing child’s voice even when room is deliberately made” (Murris, 2013: 249). Like Davies, Murris recognizes the limitations of relying on adults-as-experts. When this identity bias “occurs in the discursive environment, there is a risk of testimonial injustice of our central sort (identity-prejudice credibility deficit)” (Fricker, 2007: 86). If we constantly experience moments when our testimony is wrongly ignored or silenced, then we come to see ourselves as having a credibility deficit. We, as speakers, are silenced either because the listener does not receive us as credible sources of knowledge or because the listener simply cannot understand what we are saying. While Fricker identifies particular groups—such as women, people of color—as likely to suffer effects of this credibility deficit, Murris (2013) adds “credibility deficit is related to age” (p. 248). When we examine how children are silenced—“to be seen and not heard”—it is clear that they are positioned as having a credibility deficit.

When considering reflective narrative analyses, which position adults’ or young adults’ interpretations of the past as the only credible sources of knowledge, children again are denied authority to speak or have their speech recognized without the mediation of an adult speaker. In this case, the passage of time prevents researchers from talking directly to children, silencing them much like when children’s voices are replaced by adult testimony. What does this adult mediation mean in the context of academic research? Since children are not the presumed audience for academic research, why does it matter how children’s experiences are recounted? Is there a harm done when children do not know their voices are not necessarily being heard? Here, I offer two responses: first, the child participants in the study suffer very little or no immediate harm since the context of the research is in the “adult” world, separate from their day-to-day experiences, but, second, society suffers as a collective by the denied dissemination of perspectives or “limited epistemic resources” (Frank, 2013: 266) that could influence the shape of policy and practices. This is where children—as a collective—may endure harm due to misperceptions about childhood that play out in policy and adult behavior. This collective suffering may be difficult to measure, but not knowing whether there is harm in ignoring children’s voices does not mean there is no harm occurring. It simply means we cannot measure it.

Epistemic injustice may also occur within an individual, whose adult-self overpowers the child-self, correcting and reinterpreting childhood experiences. For myself as a reflective researcher, since becoming a parent, my childhood memories of my parents have undergone radical transformations. For example, I no longer see my mother as an enforcer of rules, but as a person who was my protector. Experiencing my own motherhood, I have gained a new perspective on my mother, one that is far more sympathetic. Does this new perspective invalidate my former feelings and memories of her? In one sense, it does since it introduces doubt into my child-self’s veracity, and yet these new conceptions should not necessarily supersede my child-self’s perspectives. When we, as researchers, rely on adult reflective analysis, which may be complicated by layers of understanding and experiences that antecede childhood, we are missing opportunities to gain children’s perspective of childhood.

When reconsidering the role of reflective narrative analyses, it is clear that they offer perspectives to expand understanding of the experiences of children with gay parents. Furthermore, these researchers who have worked to gather this information have navigated a system mired with obstacles so as to gather this information in other ways (cf. Donelson and Rogers, 2004). This research contributes to our epistemic resources since it raises awareness of a population who struggled until adulthood (for many) to find outlets for their child-self experiences, and it has created opportunities for us to hear from children who are otherwise silenced. The next step is to find ways to access contemporary childhoods.

Researching contemporary childhood

As a researcher who works with children, I need to resolve this dual authority (to other children, to my child-self) in order to adopt “epistemic modesty,” which Murris (2013) suggests is to accept that my “(and all) knowledge is limited and that [I] can learn from children” (p. 251). This echoes Davies’ (2000) notion of reflective awareness and Fricker’s (2007) idea of epistemic virtues as a means to neutralize prejudice. Davies, Fricker, and Murris are concerned with the relationships between identity, power, and prejudice, underscoring the politics of power and power asymmetries. While Fricker (2007) never mentions the adult–child binary, she calls on the hearer to be responsible, to “mature and adapt in light of ongoing testimonial experience” (p. 84). Much like I cannot return solely to my childhood memory of my mother, I can neither return to being a scholar who sees children as only objects to be studied. This personal, cross-temporal reconceptualizing of my memory is readily extended to my interactions with others because adopting a reflective stance allows me to expand my knowledge and to envision new ways of hearing others. As scholars, we need to consider how we can expand our ability to hear; our epistemic obligation is to hear fully and to recognize others as having epistemic resources that will add robustness to personal and collective understandings of experiences. For the remainder of this article, I focus on ways to expand our collective knowledge, turning first to queer theory and finally to intersectional methods as two rich intellectual sites of inspiration.

Queer theory as means to robustness

The work of queer critique is often to read outside the official documentation. (Muñoz, 2009: 148)

Queer theorists argue that gender, sex, and sexuality are not bounded together via a biological imperative, rather that bonds of gender/sex/uality—a term “used to indicate the complex and shifting relationships that exist between gender, sex, and sexuality” (Blaise, 2014: 115)—are social constructions privileging certain groups and types of relationships, namely, heterosexual ones (Blaise, 2005; Butler, 2008 [1990]; Muñoz, 2009). This privilege results in non-dominant groups being silenced in public and institutional spaces (Blackburn, 2004; dePalma and Atkinson, 2010; Muñoz, 2009; Robinson, 2005), and this silencing is a form of epistemic injustice. Queer theorists are concerned with the impact of heterosexism and homophobia, which may “police the behaviors of all” (Robinson, 2005: 185). The heterosexual matrix—which situates heterosexuality as “natural” and “compulsory” (Butler, 2008 [1990])—works to codify and construct gendered behaviors and sexual identities of “young children, framed and policed within rigid polarized boundaries of acceptable behavior: the heterosexual us and the homosexual them hierarchy” (Robinson, 2005: 185). Young children with gay parents are in a unique position to describe the world because they must navigate between their homonormative private worlds and the heteronormative world of public institutions.

While these children’s sexual and gendered identities may not be considered fully formed, they are queered due to their family model, which disrupts the heterosexual matrix of compulsory heterosexuality. By queer, I am not referring to the children’s own sexuality but their membership in a queer community. This membership provides them the privilege of perceiving gender/sex/uality from a non-heteronormative perspective (Epstein, 2009; Gustavson and Schmitt, 2011), which may allow them to see the false consciousness of heteronormativity but also isolates them from those who are unconscious of heteronormativity. Their identities as “queerspawn” (Evans, 2009) distinguish them from others, and in this queerness, they may be “lost in space or lost in relation to the space of heteronormativity” (Muñoz, 2009: 72) because their experiences and family identities are largely absent in public institutions, such as schools and media for younger children (cf. Crisp and Hiller, 2011; Naidoo, 2012; Ryan, 2010; Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013; Sedgwick, 2004; Wolf, 1989; among others). For children with gay parents, the heterosexual matrix is easily disrupted. For example, gender roles are more flexible, “their parents can provide the range of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits that they require” (Hosking and Ripper, 2012: 182). These experiences are tremendous resources for unlocking the social constructedness of gender/sex/uality, yet few efforts are made in academic scholarship to identify them. This silence in the research literature may be the result of socio-cultural biases. These biases, including ageism and heterosexism, silence children in scholarly literature and in day-to-day practices that reinforce heteronormativity.

Many education and childhood researchers are working to raise awareness of and measure the effects of heterosexism and homophobia (e.g. Blackburn, 2004; Clark, 2010; Kosciw and Diaz, 2008; Robinson and Espelage, 2011; Thein, 2013). I would like to emphasize the importance of making room to hear children who may have queer identities by proxy and note the work of several scholars who are using children’s literature as a means to access children’s epistemic resources. Their research elucidates how the heterosexual matrix is embedded into institutional spaces and objects. Crisp and Hiller (2011) see the potential of interacting with children and children’s literature to reveal possibilities of diverse ways of being in the world. Like others, they urge us to be reflective, to “continue the difficult work of recognizing our own assumptions … and to recognize individual agency in sense making” (p. 209). As researchers and practitioners listening to and learning from children, we can become aware of “wider representations of diverse gendered identities in all children’s literature” (p. 210), a process that Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth (2013) call “queering texts.”

Queering texts works to make “visible the ways that texts depend on a variety of binary constructions for their composition and intelligibility” (Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013: 148). Sharing queer readings of texts with children provides opportunities for practitioners and researchers to reflect on and discuss issues of identity formation, agency, and the effect of temporal-spatial factors. This reflective practice requires consideration of those beliefs, practices, and objects we take for granted in order to interrogate community norms, particularly around issues of gender, romantic relationships, and family structures. When we start to question these normatives, we reveal an ability to see and hear more diverse experiences, thus recognizing existing epistemic injustices that immediately put at risk particular groups of people and that ultimately harm everyone due to constricted and narrow collective epistemic resources.

Applying queer theory can create space to identify injustices because queerness “should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough” (Muñoz, 2009: 96). This sentiment echoes the importance of being expansive and inclusive when considering what is possible. Like Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and Frank’s desire for epistemic robustness, the purpose of my argument is a desire for another way of being, one that exists but is not widely recognized by the research community. Here is where intersectional methods may create openings to do this. Intersectionality is more than how categorical variables, such as race and sexuality, interact. It acknowledges complex layering in society—creating diverse and dynamic contexts—that requires people to draw on (and perceive) different aspects of selfhood.

Intersectionality and intersectional methods

Intersectionality examines how relationships between race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity are routinely labeled and often marginalized (or over-simplified) in research discourses. Intersectional analysis is perceived as a means to examine the complexity of identity and to mediate “the tension between assertions of multiple identity categories and the ongoing necessity of group politics” (Crenshaw, 1991: 1296). Scholars who favor intersection methods and analysis recognize the constructedness of identity categories and investigate how these categories are valued across societies (Blackburn and Smith, 2010; Crenshaw, 1991; Few-Demo, 2014; Hancock, 2007). Intersectionality pushes against a category of difference approach, which Hancock (2007) refers to as the idea that “one category reigns paramount among others and is therefore justifiably the lens of analysis” (p. 68). It also resists the multiple approach. This approach places categories of difference “parallel to one another,” which acknowledges that these categories are not mutually exclusive but ignores the complexity of these relationships (Blackburn and Smith, 2010: 630). Intersectionality theory can be used to take a political or social justice stance because it is used to identify the experiences of those who fall between the definitive boundaries of these other approaches.

Scholars who use and advocate for the adoption of intersectional methods suggest it is a means to study and attend “to the dialogic relationship between individuals and institutions” (Blackburn and Smith, 2010: 631). Hancock (2007) encourages a research stance that regards the intersection of categories of difference across four “domains of power” (p. 74) or four different types of social spaces: interpersonal, disciplinary, structured, and hegemonic. Moving through these domains in an analytical way may reveal systemic structures that are overlooked when only categorical variables are considered, and this “recognition of intersection in multiple domains may reveal additional options for non-tradition coalition building among groups” (p. 74). This stance offers a method for studying gay families and proffers a response to a frequent critique of queer scholarship: “one might ask whether queer always subverts other identities, or whether it sometimes just hides them” (Hames-García, 2011: 35). Intersectionality may expand the scope of conversations about and the working definitions of diverse families. While intersectionality is frequently used to address the complexity of identity across race and gender, it also can be used to analyze the complexity of age, particularly the power asymmetry between adults and children, as well as complicating the relationship between queer and childhood scholarship.

Intersectional methods are informed by a reflective stance that takes into consideration issues of “sociohistorical context of structural inequality that may not be explicit or directly observable in the data” (Few-Demo, 2014: 175). The researcher must consider how variables are defined and characterized, the relationship between the variables, and the level of analysis to be conducted before determining the best methods to make sense of the data (Few-Demo, 2014). Researchers also must reflect on their own content specialization and accept the notion that they are often unable to see what is outside their area of expertise (Hancock, 2007). This reflective practice must be constant and data analysis should include iterative and inductive coding. This process-centered analysis may provide a more complete understanding of the findings and build a framework for “analyzing behaviors, processes, and relationships” (Few-Demo, 2014: 180), which reveals data that were not previously visible leading to a new understanding of social dynamics or hierarchies. Returning to Fricker’s (2007) idea of the collective social imagination, an intersectional analysis sheds light on ways prejudice may infiltrate our social consciousness. Intersectional methods analyze power relations and include a social justice focus that attends to inequities that often may be excluded from dominant research methods that use identity categories in their analysis. In short, intersectional analysis expands our understanding of social organization and hierarchies of value according to identity categories.

With regards to collective epistemologies, Frank (2013) suggests that one goal of academic research should be to move beyond “the paradigmatic knower” to expand our epistemic resources. This paradigmatic knower is akin to Hancock’s content specialist, and reinforces why researchers must take a reflective stance and reconsider how the subject of their research is being categorically labeled. In the case of working with children, we must reconsider how we see and hear the child and how we conceptualize childhood, particularly with regards to issues of heteronormativity, which “speaks not just to bias related to sexual object choice but to that dominant and overarching temporal and spatial organization of the world that [Muñoz has] been calling straight time” (Muñoz, 2009: 154). When considering research on children from gay families, we also must be reflective of who we see as a family. Whiteness is often the unnamed norm, as Hosking and Ripper (2012) note:

Through the attempt to “queer the family,” white, middle-class homosexual couples were established as the new norm at the expense of single parents, working-class parents and non-white parents, regardless of their sexuality. While whiteness was not mentioned explicitly, it was this absence of race which stood as a marker for whiteness … (p. 180)

This is echoed by Muñoz (2009) and Hames-García (2011), two scholars who identify both as queer and as of color and whose scholarship has worked to expand the boundaries of queer theory and integrate issues surrounding race and class so that queer scholarship reflects the lived experiences of a broader and more representative populations.

Adopting intersectionality as a research paradigm and using intersectional methods provide an opportunity to create a bridge between “reductionist research that seeks only the generalizable and particularized research so specialized that it cannot contribute to theory,” and it emerges from critical theories that “acknowledge and incorporate the historical context in which contemporary power relations operate” (Hancock, 2007: 74). Using intersectional methods when researching childhood may provide a rich set of data since these methods are constructed using a reflective stance and allow the researcher to position herself as a collaborator in knowledge gathering rather than an all-knowing objective expert of childhood. Our goal as researchers of children and childhood is to find ways to learn about the lives of young children and to acknowledge them “as profound sources of knowledge that could help illuminate aspects of our shared world” (Campano, 2007: 16). Intersectionality and intersectional methods may be one way to better identify and share this knowledge.

Conclusion

Why is it important to seek out the opinion of and hear children while they are still children? Addressing this question has been the central task of this article, and in doing so, I turned to the concept of epistemic injustice to demonstrate how current research methods, through their reliance on adult testimony and recollections, ignores and silences the children’s voices, nullifying their agency. Hosking and Ripper (2012) suggest that “to acknowledge children’s agency would be to disrupt the construction of the innocent, abstract child, which sustains the ‘best interest’ rhetoric” (p. 173), and so ignoring it must perpetuate power asymmetry between children and adults.

Adult authority is normalized across most spaces in the United States. In this article, I have considered how research on childhood and on the experience of children with gay parents has suffered due to this power asymmetry. Children are routinely silenced in academic research, their voices mediated either through adult experts, such as parents, or through reflective narrative analyses by adult children of gay parents. Both methods of attempting to understand childhood normalize the power adults have over children, and hence the use of epistemic injustice. As researchers, we have an epistemic obligation to reconsider these normalized discourses and to seek out theories and methods that can expand our knowledge through the inclusion of silenced groups. By focusing on a particular group of children, those whose parents identify as being in a same-sex gender relationship, I hope I have demonstrated how research methods have silenced children through normalized discourses about heterosexual families and their cultural practices, as well as through institutional barriers. Examples of the latter include difficulties in gaining access to younger research participants and troubling patterns in large-scale data collection that ignore the true variety of identities in the United States. Muñoz (2009) suggests that this narrowness is “the way public culture is cut up through the institutions of the majoritarian public sphere” (p. 52). Muñoz’s work, and the work of other queer scholars, offers a lens through which to consider how these silences could be uncovered. Finally, in response to any concerns that queer theory may have tunnel vision for gender/sex/uality issues, I turn to intersectional methods to acknowledge the complexities of our collective identities and associated power relations and recognize the issues at stake for those who are multiply marginalized.

There are three benefits of this reconceptualization of children and childhood studies. First, we may learn more about our communities by acknowledging a population that is keenly active yet under-included as knowledgeable participants. This is especially important in a time when childhood includes standardized tests, centrally created curriculum, and top-down policies and practices that tend to generalize the child as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge (Freire, 2000; Murris, 2013). Second, over the longer term, listening to young people today creates richer understandings of the child-to-adult trajectory. Finally, closely examining and listening to children’s perspectives may reveal moments of “truth making” or “schema building” that may otherwise appear natural to adults.

We, as researchers, must consider how our preexisting beliefs impact how we conduct our research, from theoretical frameworks and designing data collection methods to the analysis and dissemination of findings. For those who study children and childhood studies, we must acknowledge our dual roles as listeners and speakers. Are we credible listeners, willing to push against residual prejudice and hear the child speaker? As adult speakers, do we acknowledge the socially constructed power we exert over children, and do we look for ways to disrupt this asymmetry in order to share the experiences of minoritized groups? By considering how we see ourselves as speakers and listeners, we will take fresh steps to overcome epistemic injustices and to create more robust collective epistemic resources.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Rachel Skrlac Lo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Counseling at Villanova University. Rachel’s teaching and scholarship explore ways to decenter social norms and expand understanding of children’s experiences in contemporary society. Her work has been published in Language Arts and Children’s Literature in Education, and she has presented at International Research Society for Children’s Literature, Literacy Research Association, and American Education Researchers Association.

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