Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices

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Feminist parenting creates unique challenges. Mothers may struggle with shifts in their own subjectivity and the peculiar conjoinment of parenthood. As women experience the unique powerlessness of motherhood, they also hold the uncomfortable power of acting as advocates for and as agents of socialization and social control over their children. Fathers may feel the desire for feminist parenting whilst experiencing a backlash and a lack of support, while some parents may attempt to resist the binaries of mothering and fathering in their feminist parenting journey. Feminist parents may attempt to resist gender binaries; they may submit to them while attempting to foster critical dialogue; they may struggle with the display of their own femininity and masculinity or, for some, its perceived lack. For some parents a dialogue about gender normativity may be inspired by gender-diverse behavior on the part of their own children, while others may parent children who happily submit to the mainstream and query the need for gender questioning.

"Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices" attempts to cast a lens on the messy and convoluted ways that feminist parents approach parenting their children in gender aware and gender fluid ways. The collection draws together scholars, activists and community members to open a conversation about the challenges of exploring and maintaining an awareness of gender while parenting in a highly gender normative world.

Chapter One: Dancing in the Eye of the Storm: The Gift of Gender Diversity to Our Family–Kathy Witterick

Chapter Two: Get your Gender Binary Off My Childhood! Towards a Movement for Children’s Self-Determination–Jane Ward

Chapter Three: The Boy in the Red Dress–Susan Goldberg

Chapter Four: Trapped in the Wrong Body and Life Uncharted: Anticipation and Identity within Narratives of Parenting Transgender/Gender Non-conforming Children–Jessica Ann Vooris

Chapter Five: Transgender Men’s Self-Representations of Bearing Children Post-Transition–Damien Riggs

Chapter Six: We’re Having a Stanley–j Wallace

Chapter Seven: Between the Village and The Village People: Negotiating Community, Ethnicity and Safety in Gender Fluid Parenting–May Friedman

Chapter Eight: Feminist Parents’ Strategic use of Liminoid Experiences to Produce Sites of Empowerment for Young, Gender-Diverse Children–Sandra Schneider

Chapter Nine: Complicating the Truth of Gender: Gender Literacy and the Possible Worlds of Trans Parenting–Jake Pyne

Chapter Ten: Pink Butterflies and Blue Caterpillars–Arwen Brenneman

Chapter Eleven: I Wish I Knew How to Make Cabbage Rolls: An explanation of Why the Future of Ethnicity Relies Upon Gender Fluidity–Sarah Sahagian

Chapter Twelve: The Parental Transition: A Study of Parents of Gender Variant Children–Elizabeth Rahilly

Chapter Thirteen: Our Fluid Family: Engagement, Feminism and Expression–Fiona Joy Green, Barry Edginton and Liam Edginton-Green