Heteronormativities and Queer Kinship

• In Event: Poster Session: Current Studies of LGBT Politics & Normative Political Theory
  In Poster Session: 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference Poster Session: Current Studies of LGBT Politics

Abstract

This proposed paper is the second portion of a three-part project on heteronormativity as a concept for political theory and practice (and potentially public policies). The first part, given as a paper for the 2023 APSA Annual Meeting, analyzed heteronormativity genealogically in sexuality and gender studies in connection with its use among advocates promoting sexual rights and justice in several regions of the world. The paper concluded with the hypothesis that heteronormativity is a discursive and practical regime of sexuality that, while not universal, is prevalent enough with penumbral power to be studied comparatively through analysis of the different forms it has taken both historically and in different political contexts in the world today. In order to clarify how it works and evaluate it for political theory, the paper suggested taking an approach of “comparative heteronormativities.” Accordingly, this proposal for a second stage of the project is to study how heteronormativity works in relation to queer kinship, specifically how studies and advocacy around the latter subvert or transform what’s claimed as a heteronormative regime. It is expected that the third stage of analysis, already somewhat embedded in queer kinship critique and practices, is a call for sexual and reproductive justice; so, it is this call for justice that will be foreshadowed herein as a working framework for future research.

For the purpose of this study, queer kinship has developed expansively from an earlier and narrower scholarly and public policy focus on the historical effects of trauma and exclusion from birth families to movements toward “families we choose.” Arising out of a broader critique of heteronormativity and its imbrication with patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism, queer kinship encompasses bodily practices and social relationships of belonging, intimacy, friendship, care, eroticism, dependency, and reproduction as chronicled by LGBTIQ- as it intersects with BIPOC- inflected historical scholarship and contemporary social research and theory. As such, the proposed paper will work beyond the already well-discussed topic of gender-neutral marriage rights and imagined experimentation with alternative structures of affective relations to focus on three examples of queer kinship in transforming heteronormativity: “transrelationality” as knowledge- and affect-sharing to resist medical stigmatization, police violence and incarceration, and colonialism; surrogacy and IVF in relation to heteronormativity and reproductive justice; and how queer kinship exemplifies a shift in the way in which the social life of sexuality is reshaped and sustained.

Author

• Mark Blasius, The City University of New York Graduate Center