Lecture | Is queer kinship always already chosen? LGBTQ+ families and affective politics of race, gender and desire in (homo)nationalist times

By: Ulrika Dahl (Professor of Gender Studies, Uppsala University)

This paper revisits Weston’s (1991) Families we choose and Butler’s (2002) discussion of (heterosexual) kinship to critically reflect on what their widespread arguments mean for queer subjects with and without wombs and rights in an era of neoliberalism and of growing inequalities and austerities.

Drawing on ethnographic research among LGBTQ+ families and engagement in social movements in Sweden, this largely conceptual paper discusses how intersectional forms of privilege and oppression shape contemporary queer understandings of kinship and reproduction, highlighting forms of queer affinities, kin solidarities and family-making among those who are outside of the white middle class norm and/or off the legally recognized and state-sanctioned track. Reflecting on contemporary understandings of sameness and difference, on what it means to ’be long’ together, and on how desire (for futurity, romance, and community/kinship) shapes different kinds of reproductive orientations, it asks: for whom is kinship chosen and what is queer about “same sex families” in (homo)nationalist times?