Sapphic Circle December 14th, 2025: Woman-Centered Family

Sapphic Circle takes place most Sundays, 12pm PST/3pm EST/8pm UTC.

Sapphic Circle is a space for lesbians to come together for thoughtful discussions on a variety of topics. We seek to build lesbian community through engaging in lesbian ideas, politics, media, and more!

Nuclear Family

Family, for lesbians, is a complicated topic. Some of us have close bonds with our blood family, while others have a stronger connection to their found family or framily. Regardless of how our families look, our politics and values play a large role in how we build and maintain relationships with the people we lean on.

Often, shared values are the glue that holds families, friends, and community together. Other times, differences in values drive people apart. For many lesbians, their relationship with their blood family is in tension with their values. This often leads us to build very close friendships that take on many of the characteristics usually seen in familial bonds.

If lesbians don’t feel a full sense of belonging, recognition, and respect within our blood families, we may still feel tied to them because of finances or obligation. How many lesbians, without a husband, are seen as the family member with the most time to dedicate to a sick relative? How many lesbians, without children of their own, are expected to do free childcare and childrearing because the alternative is too expensive?

Many lesbians don’t feel comfortable with the prescribed roles within the nuclear family. As feminists know, “The nuclear family, with its prescribed male dominance, has been a primary site of women’s oppression” (Rich, 1980). Whether because of our emotional well-being or our politics, we often find ourselves putting on some kind of act when we’re with our families.

Found Family

When looking for a sense of belonging, many lesbians first turn to our friends and community. We know that these women can be relied upon for emotional and material support, often more than our blood relations. Through experience, lesbians learn that our sisters can connect with us in deeply.

Some subsets of the lesbian community are very aware of the depth and importance of their female friendships and intentionally pour energy into those connections. Then there are other subsets who simply happen into building close bonds with friends and come to expect a lot from those relationships.

In Janice Raymond’s 1986 book A Passion for Friends: Towards a Philosophy of Female Affection, she explores the potential and limitations of women’s connections to one another:

Women have been friends for millennia. Women have been each other’s best friends, relatives, stable companions, emotional and economic supporters, and faithful lovers. But this tradition of female friendship, like much else in women’s lives, has been distorted, dismantled, destroyed—in summary, to use Mary Daly’s term, dismembered. The dismembering of female friendship is initially the dismembering of the woman-identified Self. This lack of Self-love is grafted onto the female self under patriarchy. If the graft takes, women who do not love their Selves cannot love others like their Selves (Raymond, 1986).

She repeatedly notes how female–female bonds are taken for granted and undervalued, despite the fact that we know from our own experiences that they can be the strongest relationships in our lives. She also raises the concepts of self-love and self-actualization, arguing that by nurturing reciprocal, loving relationships with one another, we can learn to love and be ourselves more fully.

Some lesbians have little choice in which relationships they can pursue and nurture, often waiting for a time when their familial connections can be truly mutual. Others, however, have carefully curated their intimate friendships throughout their lifetimes, offering a model for the rest of us. Together, these experiences show that care, intimacy, and belonging are not limited to blood ties; they can be consciously nurtured, shared, and politicized, even in the face of societal expectations.

Questions To Consider

Are you critical of the nuclear family? Why or why not?
What role do you think choice plays in family?
How much does duty and obligation play into the decisions you make about your family?
Do you think lesbians value blood relations vs friendship differently than non-lesbians?
Do you have a found family/framily? Tell us about them.
Describe your ideal family unit.