Exploring Kinship

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Land of Gazillion Adoptees

This web site and online community is a great place for learning about adoptee culture and the intersections of adoption. This website is a place of providing news about adoption around the world as well as in the United States. While the community is heavily Asian American, it is a space for Queer and other people of color.

Gazillion Voices

This is the online magazine associated with Land of Gazillion Adoptees. This is different because this focuses on the stories and narratives of adoptees around the United States, some of whom are LGBTQ.

What Kinship is-and is Not by Marshall Sahlins

This book provides a short and digestible introduction to notions of what kinship is and is not. This was not included in my articles but is a great read.

Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. Kath Weston

This book, while lengthy, really delves into the hardships of family in the LGBTQ community. It tackles notions of losing family, and then choosing one’s own and then the sometimes return to the ‘blood’ family. I wish I analyzed this book instead.

"Building kinship and community: Relational processes of bicultural identity among adult multiracial adoptees.“ by Gina Miranda Samuels

This article is interesting in that it explores the racialization of kinship in the Black community as well as the duality of a biracial culture of being adopted.

”Contemporary adoptive kinship: a contribution to new kinship studies.“ by Janette Logan

This piece takes a look at the changing definitions of family with adoption and technology and LGBTQ couples now having children. Kinship and how they are being formed in contemporary culture is important to understanding how kinship networks are created.

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Post 11: Reflection

This research project has heightened my perspective on how important the bonds we create are, romantic or otherwise. I have realized just how significant it is now to say that the family I have is one I have chosen. It also challenged my views on adoption. I have always been supportive of adoption, however, I advocate on the side that let’s create societies where children can remain with their families. I have realized now how that rhetoric continues to put the idea of biological families on a pedestal, being the more perfect, pure form of family.  How can I call for the destruction of the family while at the same time advocate to keep them together? This project really challenged my stance on adoption and I am not sure where I stand, but I recognize that maybe from this discomfort I will move forward to a new way of thinking about adoption.

In addition this project has helped me understand more what kinship is. I had always considered it to be a close friendship, but kinship doesn’t have to happen with someone who is close to you. Kinship can take in the form of two strangers who have something in common with each other such as ability/disability, racial background, or similar gender expressions and so on and then two of them noticing and acknowledging each other in their own way. That recognition of someone else who shares some form of existence, who may understand or experience the same emotions is a kind of kinship. Even though that interaction may happen in only a few seconds, it is still meaningful and important. How one finds and expresses kinship is determined by the individual and that is beautiful. Kinship is not determined by length of time knowing someone, or how much a person knows one another; it is the simple reality of mutual existence.

Understanding kinship differently can help society build stronger communities. In realizing that family is not just a white heterosexual offspring producing unit, people can start to recognize the important of kinship that shared among friends, colleagues, peers, and even strangers. A broader understanding of kinship humanizes communities and helps create a sense of belonging and togetherness in a society that so heavily values individualism and independence. Having kinship is not about losing independence, but recognizing that one is not alone and accepting the fact and human connection is often as rewarding as it is exhausting.  Kinship is building a community with each other in a culture that desperately wants to separate us because we are strong as a collective, and from kinship maybe we can achieve a solidarity where change can be created.

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Post 9: Recomendations

To resolve the issue of different kinship structures being recognized we need to dismantle the notion of a white, heterosexual, offspring producing family. We can do that by the following:

1.       Don’t have children. This may sound terrible but this is one way to resist the system. This includes not adopting as well. While this is radical in some sense, not having children is a direct resistance to a system that demands that people reproduce offspring in order to be valuable citizens. In addition, having children I costly and not having a child also opposes capitalism which also benefits from people having children.

2.       Abolish legal definitions of family, marriage, and parental guardianship. The law determines what relationships are valuable in the eyes of the government and society. Abolishing those laws will destroy the idea and family and allow people to define their family as they choose.

3.       Get rid of the notion that family is a biological determinacy. Families and kinship is formed from person to person relationships. Not being blood related does not devalue the relationship just as being blood related does not mean that that relationship is going to be safe or caring.

These suggestions are radical but they are necessary in reshaping how we as a society understand and frame kinship. Human bonds in all the ways they are formed are beautiful, wonderful things. Just because they do not fall under the traditional sense of ‘family’ does not mean they are not important.

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Post 8: Summary

This research revealed how queer kinship structures and adoptee kinship structures are similar. For instance, both communities experience some form of displacement whether that be physically or psychologically and that displacement serves as a catalyst for finding, creating spaces where they don’t feel so displaced. The David Eng piece while not directly discussing how kinship structures were formed, it did present some nuanced ideas of how adoptees and LGBTQ people have common experiences. The psychic diaspora along with notions of how both adoptees and the LGBTQ community benefit from each other, work to convey how both communities share experiences of displacement. This notion is important to understanding then how kinship is formed in the respective communities.

From the real life examples it is shown how when it came to forming kinship bonds, both the adoptee, J, and the LGBTQ person, S, shared the desire of finding people, spaces where they felt safe. While their experience is not meant to generalize entire populations of LGBTQ and adoptee folk, both communities experience the pain and hardships of being marginalized groups. In addition the idea of ‘chosen families’ is widely known in the LGBTQ community as a result of youth homelessness and homophobia, this idea of choosing one’s family is also heavily used in the adoptee community.

The significance of this research is to highlight and being to the forefront the importance of all kinds of kinship. The ideal ‘family’ must be dismantled if our society, our culture is going to move forward and progress towards one that is inclusive of all communities. As we have discussed in class, inclusivity into the system is not always the best way to create change. That is why destroying the family is important, or rather the idea that family consists purely of heterosexual couples that produce offspring. Kinship is a bond that transcends sexuality or biology. It is the connection, the bond people share whether that be romantic or not, produce children or none. The community each person creates and the family they create is valuable and important. Let’s celebrate that.

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Post 7: Intersectionality 

This is intersectional because the LGBTQ and adoptee community are people who experience different lives, different identities and different backgrounds. Their very existence is intersectional by not being the ‘norm.’ Both share a story of being marginalized people and there are people who are both adopted and queer and that’s an intersection of identities. Both of these identities also encompass communities of color, able different communities, and different class.

Furthermore, both of these identities challenge the norm, they both defy and resist notions of normalcy. The notion that heterosexuality is the only way to form romantic relationships is limiting and same goes to the notion that only children created biologically are valuable. These notions do not encompass the vast diversity of different sexualities and kinship structures that exist.

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Post 6: Power Structures

There are several factors that affect the perception of kinship structures. One of them is the state. How the government grants privileges and inheritance rights to people they deem a family. This structure devalues the very real relationships that people form. Why cannot a best friend have parental rights? Or rather another relative that is not in the immediate family? These processes can be done but it has to meet certain expectations in instances such as parental death. People form bonds in many different ways and the state not recognizing the validity of them further displays how the system only values one type of family and marginalizes all other forms of kinship.

Another power structure is the medical establishment. Much like the government, the medical establishment only recognizes certain forms of familial relationships, much like the ones recognized by the state. This is troubling because medical issues deal with a person’s wellbeing and safety. People such as close friends, roommates, and mentors are not allowed to go and support someone they love and care about just because the medical establishment does not place value or worth in that relationship. Yet those forms of kinship are important and valuable as others.

Lastly, another power structure that affects kinship structures is religious institution. This institution works to reinforce the nuclear family ideal by one only sanctioning certain forms of marriage (i.e. same sex marriage). Religion plays a huge role in demonizing and devaluing certain forms of kinship especially queer kinships. At the same time, religion promotes a kinship between its practitioners and with their religious leader. It is ironic that an institution would work so hard to demonize one form of kinship while simultaneously promoting a kinship community within its congregation.

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Post 5: Real Life Example

I have interviewed two people for this project. J is an adoptee from China and S is genderqueer and living in a queer apartment. Both of their stories paint a picture of kinship and work to reimagine family as something a person determines for their selves.

               J was adopted when she was 9 months old to a middle class white family from a Chicago suburb. Growing up J dealt with racism within her adoptive family as well as in her predominately white community. In addition, J’s adoptive family was a toxic environment due to multiple reasons. When was 18, she left for college and never looked back. In college J met floor mates, class mates, and professors who she considers her family. J mentions that one factor in her kinship structure is that she was drawn to people who were the same ethnicity as her. J feels more comfortable with Asians, other adoptees and people who share parts of her identity. College was the first time she also met other adoptees. One thing J said that stood out was her commenting on how lonely it was living with her adoptive family. Even though she was surrounded by people and her family, she was lonely. J elaborates to how she felt isolated and alone because she was adopted. In addition, she mentions feeling disposable like her worth was nonexistent because she was adopted. She names her roommate from sophomore year as someone she really cherishes, calling her roommate a sister. J states that even she doesn’t have a family in sense of ‘two-parents,’ but she has never once felt lonely with her chosen family. J’s chosen family includes her sister she met sophomore year and her mentor who is also an adoptee. J also includes her adoptee activist peers who are located all over the nation. She says that even they are far away and some of them she’s never met, they are still a part of her family because they understand what it is like to grow adopted. That shared experience was important to J when it came to her creating her chosen family.

               S was kicked out of their house when they came out as LGBTQ when they were 17. S is now going to school part time and working full time. They live in what they call a Queer apartment. S describes how they cohabitate with 4 other people, who are also a part of the LGBTQ community and how the 5 of them are kindred. S is poly with D and V while V and D are ‘married.’ S says they are not really married but that’s just what they call it since they’ve been together for over a decade now. S discusses their time being homeless and how that was really debilitating. They felt as though their worth as a person was stripped from them. That affected the kind of people S kept in their life. S says that her coworker at her job at a store was the first to make them feel as if they were worthy of care, love, and safety. S says that their chosen family of misfits is everything they could want. They feel loved and worthy of that love and they are happy.

               Both interviews pointed out similarities in being in familial situations of feeling uncared for and unloved. That caused them to reevaluate their perceptions of ‘family’ and what that meant to them. To them family meant being safe, being surrounded by people who made them feel valuable and worthy of love and care. Their sense of family originated from a place that lacked those qualities. Therefore, family is not about meeting the ‘nuclear’ standard, but rather meeting the emotional needs of the people they care about.

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Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?  by Judith Butler

Post 4

Judith Butler presents notions and ideas of kinship that dissect present notions of family. Butler begins by positioning the idea of family as a westernized, white, heterosexual, biologically reproducing unit that is upheld as the pinnacle of familial success. From there, Butler challenges that idea with the examples of LGBTQ relationships and how they exist.

Much of Butler’s analysis is the politics of reproduction and what that means in the spectrum of producing a family. She challenges the notion that if a family with a child that is conceived through technology or through adoptions is just as important and valuable. Butler points out that biological connection is something that is held at highly important (15).  This Butler proposes may be due to the economic privileges assigned to inheritance developed in western nations (17). Capitalism as proved here is tied to our understanding of family and how society values specific forms of kinship. Butler rejects the idea of biology being the only form of family and proposes that technology doesn’t devalue family but rather transforms traditional understandings of family (16).

One thing that Butler does really well is question and complicate the LGBTQ movement of trying to have same sex marriage legalized. She recognizes the benefits of legal recognition but questions whether recognition by the state is true progress (21). This debate that she presents really asks the reader to rethink what progress and change really is. Butler is essentially echoing Lorde’s sentiment of the ‘master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.’ Gaining legal recognition is important but that is also privilege (Butler 22). When so many are fighting for survival, for housing, for a society that does not demoniz an entire population of people due to sexuality, marriage becomes a topic only a few really have access to. Butler doesn’t present an answer but presents this view to prompt the reader to rethink the movement.

Overall this article does really well to challenge current constructions of kinship and family. Pointing out how family is not just biological is crucial because so many relationships are not. This statement is important to validating other forms of kinship. In addition the questioning of the gay marriage movement really challenges the reader to consider who would benefit from legalizing same sex marriage and what kind of progress that really is. Butler does a nice job of presenting this ideas however, she still subscribes to the notion of family that produces a child. Never once in this article does Butler mentions friendships, or the possibility of not having children. This is a morphed regurgitation of conforming to the ideal that family means being in a romantic partnership and having children. Kinship is more than that. Kinship is the possibility of raising a child with a best friend, creating meaningful bonds with mentor and mentees. This frame of romantic relationships and having children still limits the fantastic possibilities that kinship can be.

Butler, Judith. "Is kinship always already heterosexual?." Differences: A Journal            of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14-44.

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Post 2: Scholarly Analysis

Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas

David Eng positions adoption and queer diaspora within the realm of queer liberalism and global economics. With this lens, Eng complicates transnational adoption and family structures. Eng positions adoption within economic terms like mail order brides and overseas nannies. The children, Eng describes, are subjects of exploitation in the sense that they are commodities used by their adoptive families to gain global and social capital (11). Eng continues to discuss queer diasporas with the notion of ‘two mothers’ and how adoptees have in a sense two mothers, their adoptive mother and biological mother. This queering of adoption may be seen as bit of a stretch, but it does help in creating a background to how adoption is queer beyond a child being adopted by a gay, lesbian, or queer couple. In addition, the notion of adoption as being inherently queer puts into perspective of how migration and immigration and families are queer. Eng continues to present the notion of how adoption and transnational adoption is a tool used by people to fit into traditional, heterosexual framework of family (9). Having a child, producing offspring is a social marker of success. Therefore, adoption is in essence a mechanism for people who cannot produce biological offspring to obtain social and cultural acceptance and success (12). This Eng mentions is why adoption needs to be complicated within the lens of queer theory.

               One thing that Eng mentions that is interesting is the notion of psychic diasporas. This is the sense of how the mind embodies the physical displacement and sometimes this can happen through children (Eng 16) . Eng uses an example of a mother and daughter. The mother was interned during World War II yet reports having no memory of that experience while the daughter is plagued by nightmares (30).  This, Eng supposes, is the psychic effects of trauma creating a diaspora of memory, of experiences (29). In addition, Eng proposes this notion to the psyche of an LGBTQ person who has to remain closeted, their queer identity must be placed somewhere else in their mind, a diaspora of a sort (31). This notion is revealing in the ways of how the mind not only embodies physical diaspora but a mental one as well to survive.

               David Eng’s piece does a lot to inform and present new ways of examining queer diaspora and adoption. However, Eng proposes many ideals that are only half way explored. With the notion of ‘two mothers’ Eng does not present the idea of ‘two fathers’ or even the idea that a child could have three or more parental figures. The absence of mentioning fatherhood reinforces the idea that children are intrinsically connected to mothers and that fatherhood is less valuable. I mention this only to showcase how fatherhood is often left out of parental conversations as well as to state that parenting should also be de-gendered. Parenting is restricted to this sense of ‘motherhood’ and ‘fatherhood’ and that is just not applicable to the dynamic kinship structures that exist. Parenting takes all different types of forms, in a professor checking in with a student, in a friend making sure their friend eats enough, even in a classmate checking in on a peer. Parenting is not just producing and raising a child, is the mentoring, the caring of a person.

               While reinforcing notions of gendered parenting, Eng does introduce an interesting notion in psychic diasporas. This notion of how the mind responds and embodies certain forms of displacement highlights the impact of diaspora and mental health. The extension of a mental diaspora to queer identity of being closeted really hones in one the notion that diaspora is a much more nuanced concept than just physical displacement. This idea I felt could have been extended to adoptees as well. There are psychological effects of being adopted and that could also be classified under psychic diaspora. Why Eng didn’t bring adoptees into this notion, I am not sure but it is one that is definitely worth exploring.

Eng, David L. "Transnational adoption and queer diasporas." Social Text 21.3                   (2003): 1-37.5

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Post 2.  Queer Time and Space: Family Structures and Kinship by Julie Fogarty

web source analysis by Lux

Fogarty discusses the idea of a nuclear family and then complicates those notions through an analysis of queer families and the different ways that family form and exist. Fogarty explicitly presents the notion of how the current ideals of a ‘nuclear family’ need to be complicated within queer theory.

Their argument is broken down into several parts beginning with, “The Structure of the Family.” Here Fogarty presents what a family is defined as in the United States and how laws and systems uphold that very narrow view of family as a two parents with children household.

The second section, “The Two-Parented, Nuclear Family Ideal” Fogarty goes into briefly discusses of the origins of a nuclear family. The two-parent standard is derived from religious, medical, and economic reasons discusses Fogarty who then references two charts that display how many families in the United states do not adhere to that standard, showing how families are changing.

In ‘Multi-parented Family” Fogarty presents how families in California can put four people on a child’s birth certificate. This is a display of how families are being legally redefined reflecting how the culture is shifting to a broader understanding of familial structures.

Finally in the last section, “Thoughts on Queer Family” Fogarty shows excitement in finding an interview that centers on two queer folk and their relationship. The video shows how people define and create their kinship structures in different way and for one of the people interviewed; it was centered on creating a safe space. Fogarty ends the piece by leaving the reader wondering what family will look like in the future.

This article is a good stepping stone into rethinking family and kinship and how they are valued differently by the government. I liked how the author really broke down the ‘nuclear family ideal’ into different sections to create an easily understandable reading. However, I think that author could have done more to really dismantle the ‘nuclear family.’ Fogarty could have gone more into how the two-parent structure was facilitated by economic means, but again this is an introduction article to the topic. Another point that would have been great to point out is adoption. Nowhere in this piece does Fogarty mention displaced children. This article focused on marriage and parental formations as if that is the only way to change familial formations. The highlight of the article was the video at the end of the article. The interview with Jasmine Cruz and Shawnta Smith was really revealing in how partnerships, relationships, and kinships are formed in complex ways that are just as meaningful, valuable as ‘nuclear families.’ The part where Jasmine Cruz talks about the type of home they wanted to create and how that came from their desire to create a safe place is important. People create kinship structures for many different reasons and for people who are LGBTQ and adopted, finding and creating spaces where they feel safe is important because for the Queer and adoptee community, sometimes the home they are given is not safe so they have to go and find or create that safe space.

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Comparative Analysis of LGBTQ and Adoptee Kinship Structures

by Lux

     It is without a doubt that family is centered as one of the most important things in the United States, one may go as far to say that to have a family, to be a part of a family represents a pinnacle of human success and happiness.

     However, family is a very complicated thing. What makes a family? Who is included in a family? How is family constructed in the United States? These questions show how the ideal of family doesn’t always align with what families look like in America.

     This blog is dedicated to challenging the idea of ‘family’ through a comparative analysis of kinship structures in the LGBTQ community and the adoptee community. Through a comparison of how LGBTQ  and adoptee people find, create ‘chosen families’ and develop kinship structures in their lives, the notion family is redefined, reimagined and decentered from traditional values.

     This comparison is important because the networks people create are crucial to the health and well-being, even survival of people in communities who are continually marginalized and forgotten in a system that pushes for a white, nuclear, middle, and heteronormative normalcy. How kinships structures and networks are created and maintained in LGBTQ and adoptee communities is an example of people creating meaningful, loving relationships that are most certainly families. However, these structures are often ignored and devalued in the eyes of society and even the law. Therefore, a comparative analysis is important to unveil how systems work to perpetuate a narrow definition of family that is used to marginalize certain communities.        

     People often say that ‘blood is thicker than water’ always forgetting that the second part is ‘but the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ The kinship structures and networks adoptees and LGBTQ people create are important. Thus, this blogs seeks to celebrate the support networks created and give a space to honor the families people created.

    This topic is important to me because I am both queer and adopted. It is partly because of these identities that I sought out my own family and created my own kinship structures outside the ‘nuclear’ family. Without my chosen family, I would not be where I am today therefore I want to explore the world of kinship structures and celebrate their importance in the lives of LGBTQ and adoptee people.