About this item
The kinds of families we see today are different than they were even a decade ago, some fantastically so, as paths to parenthood have been rejiggered by technology, activism, and law. In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. We meet a child with two mothers, made with one mother's egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met and carried by the other mother; another born to a man and a woman in Ethiopia, delivered by his natural grandmother to an orphanage after both his parents died in close succession, and then to the arms of his mother, who is raising him solo. We hear the story of a girl with two dads, conceived with one father's sperm and eggs donated by a friend and carried to term in the womb of another close friend who becomes their surrogate; and of two girls, one born in Nepal and the other in India, legally adopted by a woman who is co-parenting them with her girlfriend and a gay male couple.
About the Author
I was born and raised--a Scorpio, naturally--in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then spent time in Israel, Boston, Berkeley, San Francisco, New Haven, New York City, and eventually landed back in the Bay Area. I went to college at Swarthmore, and got my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley; I taught at Yale University for nine years, and now I teach at University of San Francisco. I married Richard Knight in 2004, and we have two kids, Reba Sadie (b. 2006) and Madeleine Blanche (b. 2009) . www.joshuagamson.com
