[T]he United States is currently experiencing the proliferation of families indifferent to traditional concepts of blood, nuclear structures, and lineage. These include communal households; blended families formed through divorce; and families created by means of adoption, artificial insemination, or surrogate mothering for heterosexual or gay couples and single parents. To social conservatives, such families signal the breakdown of traditional norms and underscore their failure to exclude deviants from the national family. They have protested in various ways, encouraging school boards to pull books like Heather Has Two Mommies from libraries and family courts to favor adoptive parents over single surrogate mothers, as in the case of “Baby M.” To sociologists like Judith Stacey (1990), however, these “brave new families” are the result of resourceful and creative action. In fact, these postmodern families hark back to Williams’s premodern familia. We are progressing, it seems, back to the future in a movement that demands analysis by American cultural theorists and public policymakers alike.

This is an excerpt from Carla L. Peterson’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 116).