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Book Review: Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family. By Valerie Lehr. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2000, 212 pp., $19.95 (paperback), $59.50 (hardback) Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family. By Valerie Lehr. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2000, 212 pp., $19.95 (paperback), $59.50 (hardback).
Lehr offers a double critique. This study is both critical to the main social family values as to the mainstream gay movement. She challenges the heterosexual, White, and middle class power that is exercised in our society and injures gays and lesbians in a lot ofways. It is not by opening the institute of marriage for gays and lesbians that their oppression is finished. Marriage as such is, as Lehr argues, an oppressive institution concerning gender, race, and economy. She offers alternatives, guidelines for activists, and a political strategy enhancing freedom, democracy, and equality in private life. The book is an eye-opener in the way that it questions themes and views that are usually taken for granted.
This volume refers to a lot of sources and actual experiences of the author both in more personal as in public life at the university and in the society in general. The author refers to a variety of authors from different disciplines. Next to lesbian and gay authors, she mentions also authoritative authors as Lash, Gilligan, Nussbaum, and Foucault. Lehr shows...