The faculty book I chose to read was Joshua Gamson’s Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship. Joshua Gamson’s Modern Families tells a variety of stories about unconventional family creation. These stories highlight how many of today’s families do not fit the traditional family mold that many of us have grown up with, but makes them no lesser a family and enlightens readers on the changing nature of family structure in our modern society. Professor Gamson received his BA from Swarthmore College, his MA and PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and previously taught at Yale University for nearly a decade. Professor Gamson has previously authored three other books in addition to Modern Families, some of which have …show more content…
Modern Families is not as concerned with answering a research question as it is confronting, and seeking, to dispel a powerful ideology Gamson refers to as “One True Family”— that heterosexual coupling is the sole correct way to establish a family and anything else is illegitimate or unnatural. This book serves as the voice of couples that have endlessly fought for the same respect, support, rights, and resources that are available to traditional couples. Gamson utilizes interviews and ethnographic storytelling to relay their often-difficult paths to …show more content…
The first chapter begins with a personal retelling of Joshua and his husband’s, Richard, efforts to build their family through egg donation, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. He details the complex path they took to conceive their first child, Reba, using egg donation from one friend, sperm from himself, and the womb of Joshua’s ex-girlfriend, who remains a very close friend.
Next we meet a single mother, Rachel, who never successfully found “the one” to begin a family with, and instead, ventured into single motherhood enlisting the help of an adoption agency who found her son halfway around the world in Ethiopia— a boy whose biological parents died months apart, left in the care of his maternal grandmother who did not have the means to care for him, and consequently turned him over to a local orphanage. Then there is Maureen and Julia, a married couple, who conceived their son in a similar manner as Joshua and Richard, using Julia’s egg, an unknown sperm donor, and Maureen’s