Same-Sex Parenting in Contemporary Italy: Constructing Parenthood on Insecure Grounds

This chapter explores how parents in same-sex parent families access, construct, and represent parenthood and its challenges in contemporary Italy. Samesex partners having children together face a series of specific hurdles to parenthood and ongoing challenges in their parenting practices. This situation of uncertainty is a consequence of the lack of legal recognition of their reproductive and parental rights as well as to discourses and institutional practices either explicitly reaffirming heterosexuality as the prerequisite to (good) parenthood or neglecting the existence and needs of same-sex parent families. Based on qualitative data of a project exploring constructions of parenthood on insecure grounds, the chapter aims to provide knowledge about same-sex parenting challenges and practices in everyday life and against the background of ambivalent orders of recognition. The chapter contributes to a better understanding of how Italian same-sex parents construct and make sense of their parenthood and how they display family between claims of recognition and feared or experienced practices of exclusion.