The Neutered Parent

Abstract

Despite family law's broader recognition of nonmarital sexualities and nonmarital parental status in the past forty years, marriage has continued to shape the legal and social experiences of parents in a critical aspect of their lives-sexuality. Whether expressed in terms of sexual behavior or sexual orientation, the sexuality of parents has curiously drawn little attention in legal scholarship, except in contexts the law has deemed aberrant. This Article breaks ground by widening the lens on parental sexuality to examine how the law's conventional framing of evaluations of parental sexuality obscures the marriage-based structure of these appraisals.