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The URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded | H2R has the pleasure of inviting you to the brown bag lunch talk “Queerying Doing Family? Gay and Trans Parents in Switzerland” by Dr. Carole Ammann, University of Lucerne.
Thursday, 20. March 2025, 12.15 to 1.45 pm, University of Zurich (room tba).
Carole Ammann joined the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lucerne as part of an Ambizione project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to research rainbow families. The aim of this project is to find out how GBTIQ+ parents experience parenthood within structures that are geared towards heterosexual, cisgender two-parent families.
After studying history, political science, and African Studies, she completed her PhD at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Carole Ammann’s doctoral research focused on women’s everyday political articulations in Guinea, where she conducted fieldwork between 2011 and 2013. She published her findings in the book ‘Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea. Silent Politics’ (Routledge).
Carole Ammann was a junior fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Berne. From 2020 to 2021, she was an SNSF postdoctoral mobility fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam, where she researched fathering. After a one-year stay at the University of Lucerne with an SNSF return grant, she was a senior researcher in the Spatial Development and Urban Policy (SPUR) research group at the ETH Zurich.
In Switzerland, a country that is known for its conservatism on family issues, ideas about what constitutes a family are highly normative. The dominant image depicts families as consisting of two white, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, able-bodied, neurotypical, married, presumably monogamous, and co-habiting parents with genetic ties to their children. This norm persists despite the fact that children are growing up in a variety of family configurations, not least because the divorce rate was at 40% in 2022.
In this presentation based on anthropological research, I explore what it means for gay and trans (I hereby focus on parents who do not identify as women) parents living in Switzerland to not fit into this dominant image because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Using the examples of four parents living in different family constellations, with whom I conducted in-depth biographical interviews, I address the following questions: How do gay and trans parents understand, experience, negotiate, and enact ‘doing family’ (Jurczyk 2014, Morgan 2011) within social, legal, political, and economic structures geared towards cis-heterosexual, two-parent families? In what ways do they challenge, (de)stabilise, and reinforce hegemonic family norms and what kind of (emotional) everyday labour does this require? In short, to what extent do they queery ‘doing family’?
