Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales (original) (raw)
Related papers
What Makes a Queer Family Queer? A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry H. Robinson
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2014
In this essay I respond to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson's research on queer families by remarking on the distance GLBTQI people have travelled in the last half century. I raise critical questions about the potential gains and possible losses that may result from bringing heretofore subjugated knowledges into the school curriculum. Drawing on my own biography, I also interrogate the radical edge that our outsider status once allowed us, the rapid normalization of gay life, and the foreclosure of options which that normalization has brought. Finally, I pose a distinction between nontraditional and queer families as a prompt to further investigation of how vectors of identity such as class, race, ethnicity, and religion intersect with the choices people make about constructing families and raising children. GLBTQI lives are awash with children, as I was reminded on a recent trip to Provincetown, MA. Unawares, I arrived just as Family Pride Week-nestled in among Mates Leather Weekend, Roundup Recovery, Bear Weekend and the Gay Pilots Association Classic-moved into full swing. Proud parents, young children in tow, walked up and down Commercial Street and parked multiple strollers outside the many small restaurants and cafes that line the main drag. They were welcomed by an array of signs announcing clam bakes, targeted programming for their teens, parenting workshops for themselves, and all manner of affinity group meetings. At poolside early the next morning I was surrounded by attentive moms and dads encouraging their children to join them in the water, admonishing them not to splash others, and applauding their first swimming efforts. I overheard other conscientious parents offering advice about schools and schooling, exchanging compliments on their children's natatory skills, and sharing the kinds of easy confidences about their offspring so often proffered in city playgrounds, on nursery school steps, and in clinic waiting rooms. From outward appearances the adults were working hard and successfully at being engaged, concerned parents. In turn, the children were performing modern childhood to perfection, alternating demands for constant attention and acts of resistance to the close adult surveillance practiced by their caregivers. As I listened and watched that morning I could not help but reflect on what a different world this was from the one in which I had grown up, recognized myself as gay, and constructed a life based on the love of other men. In the decades immediately after World War II, our relationships with children were always suspect (Silin, 1997). Gay men and lesbians were characterized as predatory, seducing other people's children to satisfy their perverted desires and to fill their ranks in the absence of the ability to biologically reproduce with one another. We were feared as experts in recruitment. Today there continues to be confusion between paedophilia and homosexuality and the misreading of abuse as occurring from without rather than from within the family/circle of adults already known to the child. GLBTQI people function as the screen onto which others project their own unacceptable and unimaginable longings.
Queer Kinship on the Edge full
Routledge, 2022
Queer Kinship on the Edge explores ways in which queer families from Central and Easter Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geo-political locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on on rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e. queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings) the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life-course. This study is suitable for those interested in LGBT Studies, Sexuality Studies, Kinship and Eastern European Studies.
Trends in Contemporary Queer Kinship and Family Research
lambda nordica
There have been great advances in socio-legal queer rights in recent years and many of these have clustered around partnership and parenthood. Whilst these rights are seemingly progressive and welcome, they have not come without a cost. Cultural studies and queer theorising have critically engaged with, and effectively critiqued, these advances. However, in many ways empirical research on “same-sex parenthood” has largely glossed over the problematic of contemporary equality rights and focussed instead on the opportunities presented. Research in this vein typically instantiates heteronormative gender and sexuality through insufficient attention to everyday experiences and the ways in which these queer kinship. Geopolitical and socio-cultural contexts are used as scene-setting rather than being operationalised to prise apart the intersections of public/private intimacies. A genealogy imperative is defining families, with queer practices of conception invoked to separate one family fr...
Editorial introduction to Special Issue: Queer Kinship and Relationships
Sexualities, 2017
Studies of non-heterosexual kinship in modern societies are well established in the Anglophone countries, dating back to such 'classical' texts as Esther Newton's Mother Camp (Newton, 1972) and especially Kath Weston's Families We Choose (Weston, 1997[1991]). This original body of work has now become 'canonical' and a mandatory point of reference for subsequent researchers-and deservedly so. Canonization, however, does present the inevitable perils of hegemonization and dominant theories can sit somewhat uncomfortably amidst diverse (i.e. non-Western) socio-cultural and historical contexts. Scholars from geographically diverse localities typically invoke 'the canon' as pre-existing points of reference and inspiration for their investigations and analysis. Consequently, whilst studying diverse localities, we frequently adapt language and concepts that derive from elsewhere. There has never been any attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all frame onto queer lives and lifestyles; such a move would indeed be most ill-fitting. Queer experience remains as dynamic now as it has ever been. At the same time, it is hard to escape the intellectual scaffolding that accompanies prevailing theoretical vocabulary. This thorny issue of cultural hegemony is of course not unique to queer kinship studies. The power and impact of discourse has been a key feature in sexuality research more widely, starting with Michel Foucault (1990[1976]) and extending to recent engagements with homonormativity (Duggan, 2002) and homonationalism (Puar, 2007), to name just two. Anthropological studies have Sexualities 0(0) 1-8 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Gender questions, 2017
Queerying Families of Origin was originally published as a special issue for the Journal of GLBT Family Studies in 2014. The book provides a rich and detailed account of the experiences and perceptions of self-identified heterosexual family members of GLBT individuals-and it succeeds admirably by building on and citing the earlier work of gender, sexuality and family studies by scholars, in order to provide a "thick descriptive" (Geertz, 1973) account of marginalised individuals within a heteronormative context. In order to curtail critique of providing a monolithic account of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) individuals in relation to the social institution of the family, the authors have included contributions from America, Australia, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and the United Kingdom. The first chapter, "The Transparent and Family Closets: Gay Men and Lesbians and Their Families of Origin", written by Alenka Svab and Roman Kuhar, echoes earlier contributions on the dualism of "the closet"-as both liberating and constrictive. Reporting on how the parents of gay and lesbian youth seek to remain silent about their children's sexual orientation after disclosure, the authors' inductive contribution results in the demarcation of a "transparent closet" and "family closet". The article succeeds in underlining a constructivist focus on familial life as a continuous process. Erika L. Grafsky, writing from an American perspective on "Becoming the Parent of a GLB Son or Daughter", bases her work on eight interviews with parents of sexual minorities. She elaborates on the relational aspects associated with the "disclosure-tofamily" process and provides a counterargument on the preceding narrative of silence
Queering kinship, overcoming heteronorms
Human Affairs
Although same-sex couples and their offspring have been legitimised in many European countries, heteronormativity is still embedded in institutions and practices, thereby continuing to affect the daily lives of LGBT individuals. Italy represents a clear example of the hegemonic power of heteronormativity because of the fierce opposition to recognising lesbian and gay parenthood among many parts of society. This paper focuses on the peculiarities of the Italian scenario with the aim of highlighting how heteronormativity works in contemporary neoliberal contexts. By drawing on queer and feminist perspectives, the article also analyses how LGBT equal rights demands can contribute, to some extent, to reinforcing heteronormativity. Implications concerning strategies for challenging the regime of normality and queering kinship are discussed.