Yesterday, I tweeted:
“Queer kinship is more important now than ever! Care networks across bio, chosen, and interconnected families!”
And today, even amidst many obligations of caring for my child and prepping my first online classes for next week, it feels urgent to spend a little more time reflecting and sharing.
Recently, I wrote a piece, still under review, in which queer kinship provided the “aha” moment that I was seeking.
Queer kinship is truly powerful, particularly during our current moment. We are a global family and we can feel this now more than ever. Our strength to survive rests in our ability to understand and practice queer kinship.
Smietana, Thompson and Twine (2018: 114) define ‘queer’ as “a critical perspective toward normative reproductive arrangements and institutions made visible by LBGTQ+ family making.” I use queer as both a way of seeing beyond the normative and I use queer family expansively to include diverse forms of family making. For instance, the non-normative or queer family could be considered the single-parent-headed household, families created through assisted reproductive technology, non-bio chosen families, or families created through various forms of adoption, among others. An expansive definition of family allows us to recognize queer kinship beyond biological and nuclear-family attachments (Moore 2011; Dyer 2016; Weiss 2016; Acosta 2018; Compton, Meadow, and Schilt 2018).
I’ve been thinking a lot about queer family during these times of social isolation and COVID-19. As we’ve been asked to “shelter in place,” I think about the meaning of home and how we make family and home. I think about the queer young people who are being forced to leave college dormitories and who may not have a safe bio family to return home to. I think about the young people in foster care; I think about the children who are “unseen” and abused in their “homes” who can no longer take refuge within their created families at school.
Can we pay attention to these harms in the midst of the virus? Can we embrace queer kinship in new ways that enable safety and well-being for the family whose mother has migrated across national borders to provide for the well-being of other more class-privileged families?
As we shelter in place, can we think anew about queer family? Can we put together and build families and home by choice? Let’s physically isolate in units that are safe, sustaining, and supportive of each member’s well-being. I fully recognize how this sort of choice is also shaped by privilege and privileges that many do not have access to. For instance, the child who is being abused at home likely cannot choose to move households.
If we move our attention to queer family, we can find new ways of sustaining one another and build toward new forms of more equitably connectivity.
I also think about networked families during this time. Until very recently, the well-being of my relatively privileged family has been dependent upon the carework provided by our daughter’s daycare teachers. Last week was the first, probably among many, in which my wife and I juggled full time childcare with our full-time employment. And, we recognize our privileges here in that we have careers that allow us to work from home. U.S. childcare workers (who are predominantly female and women of color) tend to earn poverty wages and generally receive few or no benefits for themselves and their families. They care for children, like my own, from more economically privileged families, while their own families struggle.
And, I’ve been thinking a lot about my daughter’s teachers. How will they sustain their families during this crisis? We will continue to pay tuition but we have the means to be able to do this, and this still is not enough. What about the families who have lost their employment because of the virus? How will these families and the daycare workers be sustained through this crisis? And this is why our response can only be found in a substantial public—the public good must expand. We must demand that our governments take care of those who are most vulnerable. These are the same fault-lines that have been here long before the virus. We can no longer ignore the vulnerabilities created through the intersectional harms of capitalism, settler colonialism, racism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny.
Through a lens of queer kinship, we must consider the daycare worker’s family in relation to my family. Coalition through queer kinship is a way forward and a way to organize our energies and resources collectively.
In peace and solidarity.