Wholesome homosexuality: Normative childhoods in same-sex family advertisements

In: Global studies of childhood: GSC, Band 6, Heft 3, S. 324-335

Abstract

Conducting a multimodal discourse analysis of 40 television advertisements featuring same-sex families across 10 countries between 2005 and 2015, this article examines the discourses of childhood that emerge within the advertisements. It argues that same-sex parented children are dominantly framed within mainstream advertising in ways that are normative in terms of gender and social class. The study shows how same-sex families, while increasingly visible in mainstream advertising, are often discursively constructed by television advertisements in ways that limit subject positions that family members can occupy if they are to be seen as an ideal family unit. The article discusses how exclusionary discourses of same-sex families have implications for social inclusion of such families into social ideals of familyhood, as well as for how children of same-sex parents can be anticipated through discourse prior to being materially encountered.