As Erin Gallagher-Cohoon was researching the history of queer families in Canada for her PhD dissertation, it struck her that one voice was consistently absent in the archives.
"Based on the records, I ended up writing a history that was more centred on the parents than on children's experiences or perspectives," she says. "To me, this was a really unfortunate gap in the story."
Now that Gallagher-Cohoon is a postdoctoral researcher at Brock University, she is aiming to find the voices of "queerspawn" children raised by queer parents both in historical records and in interviews with those children who are now adults.
Postdoctoral researcher Erin Gallagher-Cohoon, who is researching the history of children raised by queer parents, looks at a monitor displaying figures in a children's drawing of a court case involving a lesbian mother. The illustration comes from Tree Noiseux-MacKay in Children and Feminism by the Lesbian and Feminist Mothers Political Action Group.
She is seeking to understand queerspawn experiences from the 1970s to the early 2000s as they went to school, accessed health care, watched TV, listened to radio and had other encounters with the world around them.
"How did they navigate a sociopolitical environment that was hostile to queer families?" Gallagher-Cohoon says. "How involved were they in queer activist circles? How did they make sense of their own lives within the historical context in which they were living?"
Based in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Gallagher-Cohoon is beginning her research where her dissertation left off: the thoughts and words of queerspawn children caught up in family law cases.
She is, for example, scouring archival sources to find children's thoughts and words in cases where queer parents, primarily lesbian mothers, sought sole or joint custody after the break-up of their heterosexual marriages or partnerships.
"Often it was their ex-partner taking them to court for custody rights, claiming that the queer parent was unfit because of their sexuality," she says.
Gallagher-Cohoon is also looking at cases involving gay and lesbian couples who were wishing to foster or adopt children.
Although it's early days in her work, she's noticing some trends.
"Autobiographies of people who grew up in in queer families and are now adults reflecting on their childhood talk about pressures to present their families as being normal, to hide any part of their family experience that was more complex," says Gallagher-Cohoon. "The fear was, and is, that any negative experience would be used not only against their parents but also against other queer families."
To find original materials that reflect children's voices, Gallagher-Cohoon is searching court documents, academic literature, files in activist organizations and other sources.
These materials include paintings, poetry and transcripts of interviews with children, among other artifacts.
Gallagher-Cohoon refers to a drawing she found from a child reflecting the court process.
"It depicts an oversized mother in this protective pose kind-of battling it out with the judge," she says. "It shows the kind of stresses that kids were feeling in the court as they feared that they were going to be taken away from their parents."
Gallagher-Cohoon says a view of the past puts the present into perspective.
"It's really important, especially as we're seeing renewed attacks on queer and trans youth, that we take a perspective that really honours the uniqueness of age in this story," she says.
Gallagher-Cohoon plans to also research children's engagement with queer activism.
"Initially children were part of broader movements, including queer parenting groups like the Lesbian Mothers' Defence Fund," she says. "By 1990, though, some queerspawn were beginning to organize amongst themselves in their own interests. This story of youth-led activism can tell us much about children's political agency."
Gallagher-Cohoon, who joined Brock earlier this year, is researching under the direction of Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies Hannah Dyer.
Funding her research is the Government of Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship.
