Emm's Digital Library

I was drawn to the zine, What Makes a ‘Good’ Lesbian Adoptive Couple, because of the title at first. I’m not really familiar with any adoption regulations, whether heteronormative or not, so I wanted to learn more about it. By asking the question, what makes a ‘good’ lesbian adoptive couple, the author flips this into a matter of resistance when it would usually be used by agencies in a way to measure queer families against heteronormative standards; think standards surrounding whiteness, middle-class status, and heterosexual families and parenting. This resistance shows how zines can be ‘radical third spaces’ in the words of Adela Licona.

Thinking about Licona’s discussion on ‘the function of normative and normativizing discourses,’ this particular zine pushed back against ideas of lesbian couples who are wanting to adopt constantly having to prove themselves as ‘good’ parents, while straight couples rarely face the same amount of push back. By putting this question as the title, they’re not really asking what makes a ‘good’ lesbian adoptive couple, they’re pointing out why that question even exists in the first place.

The first thing that I noticed when reading the zine, is the raw, disorganized aesthetic to it. It features handwritten text, cute stickers all over, and the layout resembles a collage. In my opinion, that layout isn’t just to achieve a cute look, it’s entirely rhetorical and resists the orderly status of adoption court documents, leaning in to the opposite ideals. The messy handwriting kind of embodies the idea that queer parents don’t need external validation to define their families. I like how the zine plays with the absolute absurdity of the question itself, like how suddenly a ‘white-picket fence’ will transform anyone into an ‘good’ adoptive parent. It shows how the adoption system as a whole ends up putting parents into narrow boxes, when there’s more important things that matter more, like love, community, and care.