QUEERING KINSHIP
Being a queer and non-monogamous woman now facing the joy/crushing reality of my late 20s, I’ve been increasingly questioning and reformulating what family looks like for me and the people I care about in the future. We live in a country where diversity in kinship is legally a difficult area, and in some circumstances, socially still quite taboo. Although monumental change has occurred for queer folk in Ireland over the past 30 years, there is still considerable difficulty in family building, especially concerning children and offspring. In Dr. Lydia Bracken’s 2021 research ‘LGBTI+ Parent Families in Ireland: Legal Recognition of Parent Child Relationships’, she found that in 53% of the families captured by the survey, all children do not have a legal relationship with both of their parents. This indicates that a significant proportion of LGBTI+ parent families are not fully recognised under Irish law. Legal difficulties are further exacerbated in terms of non-monogamy- although there is extremely limited research available on polyamorous and non-monogamous families, issues such as increased social stigma and the legal limitation of only two parents per child make family building extremely complex in these situations. Of course, when considering queer non-monogamous kinship, expanding our conceptions past partnership and parenthood is crucial- how do we incorporate additional friends, siblings, lovers, and other community members? How do we interact with the process of eldering within our kinship structures, and how do we care for those who need it the most? Engaging in this very conscious effort of kinship-making tends to raise more questions than answers, and this is something that we will collectively be more forced to consider- in our current socio-economic climate, where 7.1 % of Gen Z identity as queer, and there is a considerable growing interest in non-monogamy, these factors will force us to recalibrate laws, policy, and ideology to make love a and care easier to engender. In our current social context that focuses so heavily on fear, isolation and sensationalism, the fall of the nuclear family can seem like another devastating blow, but the creativity and love that queer and non-monogamous kinship produces gives undeniable hope for the diverse and ‘forged’ families of the future.
The traditional nuclear family, a steadfast unit of Western industrialized society for the past century, is apparently coming to a gradual and decisive end. It’s almost inevitable, really – in his 2020 article ‘The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake’ for The Atlantic, David Brooks calls this familial structure ‘brittle’, and elaborates that this fundamental fragility has lead to its shattering. The socio-economic and cultural implications of such a failing are catastrophic and far reaching. The nuclear family’s structural reliance on monogamous heterosexuality is implied in this downfall, and inevitably, conservative politics worries not only about the traditional family structure coming to an end, but also about the re-ordering of ties of kinship and care. This fear has centred particularly on the roles that queer kinship and non monogamous connections play, and their
and conservative fears about this perceived ‘attack’ on the ‘natural’ order of the familial hierarchy mirrors the broad intolerance for queer (and especially trans) existence in general. Alternative and diverse familial and kinship systems have always been an integral part of queer culture- drag houses, lesbian separatism, the rhetoric of ‘chosen family’ are but a few examples. This is kinship that extends beyond blood and the biological, and transgresses the normative and often restrictive boundaries of care and support. It allows for the flourishing of love and foundational care in the context of non-traditional modes of intimacy, crucial for navigating a world that makes little space for such care. Although there has certainly been an uptick in mainstream attention given to queer kinship recently (in books like The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and Torey Peters’ Detransition, Baby ), there is still a considerable dearth of representation of queered kinship, especially when those systems incorporate ethical non-monogamy at their core. This lack of representation means that there’s no roadmap, no real cultural ‘guide’ to queer non monogamous life, which can make it an intimidating and awkward path. ...a significant proportion of LGBTI+ parent families are not fully recognised under Irish law.
By Ellen O’Sullivan
increasing visibility in contemporary society. Ethical non-monogamy has long been more evident and accepted in queer communities than in their heterosexual counterparts, and this radical re-evaluation and reimagining
of kinship is now becoming a more prominent aspect of contemporary, mainstream life. That’s not to say that engaging in queer non-monogamy is a clear and easy path- critics and detractors abound,
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