Critical Kinship Studies

Charlotte Kroløkke, Lene Myong, Stine Willum Adrian, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783484188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent decades the concept of kinship has been challenged and reinvigorated by the so-called “repatriation of anthropology” and by the influence of feminist studies, queer studies, adoption studies, and science and technology studies. These interdisciplinary approaches have been further developed by increases in infertility, reproductive travel, and the emergence of critical movements among transnational adoptees, all of which have served to question how kinship is now practiced. Critical Kinship Studies brings together theoretical and disciplinary perspectives and analytically sensitive perspectives aiming to explore the manifold versions of kinship and the ways in which kinship norms are enforced or challenged. The Rowman and Littlefield International – Intersections series presents an overview of the latest research and emerging trends in some of the most dynamic areas of research in the Humanities and Social Sciences today. Critical Kinship Studies should be of particular interest to students and scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Medical Humanities, Politics, Gender and Queer Studies and Globalization.

Chapter One Critical Kinship Studies Kinship (Trans)Formed

Charlotte Kroløkke, Lene Myong, Stine Willum Adrian and Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen

The making of kinship today involves border crossing and mobility. For example infertile couples from Western countries travel to India for surrogacy; Denmark has become a known fertility destination providing Danish sperm to women with or without partners; and couples in need of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in Mozambique travel to neighbouring South Africa. For decades, children have been transnationally migrated through the adoption system, but a growing number of adult adoptees are deciding to relocate to their birth countries permanently or for longer periods. The Internet and social media have made it difficult to enforce ideals of anonymity between family members separated by adoption or created through ART. As a result, opportunities for adoptees to search for and reunite with their first families have increased. ART communities witness the same developments when parents of donor-conceived offspring use the web to search for the donor or for their children’s half-siblings. Meanwhile, infertile couples negotiate and display their involvement with reproductive technologies, such as transnational surrogacy, in weblogs and televised documentaries. This book investigates how kinship today is desired, pursued, produced, consumed, regulated and transformed in a world characterized by accelerated mobility and migration of people, bodies, (reproductive) substances, technologies, knowledge and expertise.

This anthology builds on and contributes to an emergent field of critical kinship studies. Importantly, ‘critical’ does not refer to a singular normative, theoretical position. In our understanding, critical kinship studies designates the contours of methodological and theoretical approaches that (a) conceptualize how kinship is both transformed and preserved through the accelerated mobility of some (but not all) bodies and human substances and (b) engage with the complex ethical consequences arising from kinship formation produced through political, discursive or economic inequalities.

New methodologies and critical analytical perspectives are needed to grasp and analyse how kinship and relatedness are assembled and (trans)formed. This anthology features different methodological frameworks and empirical data, ranging from new media and social networking sites to multisite ethnography and oral histories. We view the use of different methodologies, the diversity of empirical material and the inclusion of different national contexts as central to critical kinship scholarship. For example although the clinic is a crucial site for exploring how kinship is (trans)formed and a site where different cultural and moral values, professional expertise, notions of kinship and commercial interests intersect, new media and social networking sites are also vital in the staging of various actors, such as the reproductive consumer, the reproductive assistant, the sperm donor, the intended parent, the care worker, the first mother and the adoptee. Similarly, the inclusion of different national contexts illustrates how divergent political and legal frameworks contribute to unequal distributions of mobility and kinship rights. In this volume, we include the kinship geographies of Australia, Barbados, Denmark, Estonia, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Mozambique, South Korea, Spain and Sweden to illustrate the transnational scope to kinship formation, as well as the importance of contextualizing kinship scholarship within local practices and contexts.

This anthology’s broad inquiry into how kinship is practised through new technologies, legislative policies, ethical guidelines, bodily substances and new media environments is situated within theoretical perspectives that critically engage with stratifications along the lines of gender, class, sexuality and race. Thus, while some clinics and gamete donors are more readily understood as having ‘desirable’ genes or nurturing capacities, transnational adoption is promoted through discourses of how (adoptable) children are always and already destined for death and/or institutionalization if they remain in their birth countries. Meanwhile, some bodies are framed as ‘natural’ gifting bodies, donating (not selling) their reproductive matter and ability to give birth, while other bodies become framed as ‘rightful’ recipients. In this manner, first mothers, egg donors and surrogates are framed as gift givers, while recipients, most often from the global North, are positioned as natural parents. The chapters included in Critical Kinship Studies complicate this picture from different perspectives by analysing the ways in which these stratifications are made and unmade, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

(RE)SITUATING CRITICAL KINSHIP STUDIES

Our naming of this work ‘critical kinship studies’ does not imply a generalized critique of previous scholarship within the field, nor do we claim that earlier scholarship was not critical. Kinship studies have been closely associated with the discipline of anthropology (which, at one point in time, was termed kinshipology) and its theoretical developments (Eriksen 2004). The existing body of research on kinship, reproduction and adoption is vast and impressive. The ambition of this book, however, is not to provide an exhaustive overview of this research. Instead, we build on and seek to expand existing scholarship on kinship studies by recognising its vigorous debates and productive criticisms (Schneider 1984; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Weston 1991; Strathern 1992; Modell 1994; Yanagisako and Delayney 1995; Franklin and McKinnon 2001).

As a concept, kinship in scholarly discourses has been both challenged and reinvigorated by the so-called repatriation of anthropology and by the influence of feminist studies, queer studies, critical adoption studies and science and technology studies. Since the 1990s, critical adoption studies have gained ground by emphasizing the need to theorize transnational adoption as a result of militarism, poverty, racism and, importantly, a Western desire to adopt children—either for altruistic and religious purposes and/or as an answer to infertility problems. Although the historical trajectory of ART studies follows a different path, core similarities exist as well. For one, contemporary scholarship on transnational surrogacy also stress the need to understand the mobility of infertile couples in light of economic, racial and gendered stratifications (Vora 2009; Pande 2010). These new and interdisciplinary approaches to kinship have been motivated and pushed forward by the ways in which an increase in infertility, ART, reproductive travel and tourism, commercialization and transnational adoption have both challenged and reinforced hegemonic Western notions and practices of kinship. These notions and practices have given symbolic priority to the biological connections and genetic relatedness created through heterosexual sex (between the parents to be), parturition and birth (Parkin and Stone 2004). As Franklin and McKinnon argue, kinship studies has not suffered from the previously mentioned ‘critical interventions’; on the contrary, kinship studies have ‘productively reconfigured and indeed been revitalised by the many critical interventions through which they have been transformed’ (2001, 6).

In Critical Kinship Studies, we see close alliances to the work of feminist anthropologists who, inspired by the advent of new reproductive technologies and transnational adoption, raised questions about the presumed natural basis of kinship relations and the idea of biology as fixed, stable and deterministic (Franklin 1997; Carsten 2000, 2004; Franklin and McKinnon 2001). The majority of this feminist scholarship was inspired and provoked by the American anthropologist David M. Schneider’s account of kinship in American society (1968) and critique of anthropological kinship studies (1984). One important implication of this current was that critical analyses were forced to move beyond dichotomies of biology and sociality and of nature and nurture, which for so long had dominated research on kinship formation, reproduction and adoption.

CRITICAL KINSHIP STUDIES: A CALL FOR INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Critical Kinship Studies brings together different strands of interdisciplinary scholarship that aim to explore the manifold versions of kinship and the ways in which normativity is naturalized and/or challenged and resisted in different kinship formations. It includes, among others, anthropological, sociological, queer and cultural studies perspectives on how kinship is not only made but also performatively constituted in different contexts (e.g., Thompson 2005; Mamo 2007; Shome 2011).

Throughout the book, we identify the potential of creating dialogue between the overlapping yet occasionally disjointed academic traditions of studies on assisted reproductive technologies (ART; e.g., Strathern 1992; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Inhorn 2003; Thompson 2005; Melhuus and Howell 2009; Inhorn et al. 2009) and critical transnational adoption studies (e.g., Anagnost 2000; Hübinette 2005; Smolin 2005; Volkman 2005; Dorow 2006; Marre and Briggs 2009; Eng 2010; Kim 2010; Yngvesson 2010; Brian 2012; Briggs 2012; Leinaweaver 2013; de Graeve 2014; Leinaweaver and van Wichelen 2015; Park Nelson, forthcoming). In so doing, we aim to contribute to the development of critical kinship studies while simultaneously paying attention to the specifics of historical context. For example the sixty-year-plus time frame of transnational adoption has not only enabled new perspectives on kinship to grow and solidify; adoptee scholars are also now forming an integral part of critical adoption studies as researchers and producers of knowledge in their own right.

The bringing together of ART and critical adoption studies encourages us to inquire into the dynamics of globalized reproduction and transnational adoption and ask questions such as ‘How does the making and unmaking of kinship operate to enhance the options of financially and racially privileged subjects?’ and ‘How does the value of biogenetic substances, affective and reproductive work, and children themselves shift according to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion and nationality?’ The contributions in this volume span the humanities and the social sciences, but despite being embedded within different academic histories and theoretical trajectories, their interdisciplinary scope provides fertile ground on which to analyse questions related to the structural inequalities and consumptive patterns that serve as the context for kinship formation. These perspectives are sensitive to the dangers involved when analytical focus is placed either on the subjects seeking to form kinship or on the child as a desired and prized commodity, frequently portrayed as devoid of agency. Similarly, in this book, we seek to highlight narratives that go beyond the figure of the child, instead emphasizing other types of kinning, such as the kinship work undertaken in care relationships, in clinical settings and in the ways in which care is exhibited in televised documentaries or understood in cases of donor breast milk.

KINSHIP (IM)MOBILITIES

In this volume, the making and unmaking of kinship are viewed as effects of an unequal distribution of mobility. In our approach, mobility refers to (a) the transfer and exchange of reproductive substances between differently situated bodies; (b) the (trans)national travel or migration of people for adoption, surrogacy, eggs, sperm, care, community and medical knowledge; (c) the ways in which laws and ethical guidelines either become fluid or crystalize to form particular understandings of kinship; and (d) the ways in which new media communication environments facilitate a form of virtual travel and that downplay relational geographies and emphasize wholeness and comfort. Emphasizing the concept of kinship mobility involves examining both the motivations and the rationales for different forms of mobilities while simultaneously analysing both local and global contexts to recognize how places themselves are relational and thus somewhat mobile. Consequently, the authors included in this anthology critically question mobility as a resource, one that is not necessarily shared equally by everyone (Skeggs 2004). We agree with Sheller and Urry when they note that emphasizing mobility involves ‘tracking the power of discourses and practices of mobility in creating both movement and stasis. A new mobilities paradigm delineates the context in which both sedentary and nomadic accounts of the social world operate, and it questions how that context is itself mobilised, or performed, through ongoing sociotechnical practices, of intermittently mobile material worlds’ (2006, 211). Thus, to explore mobility requires analyses of how and to what effect desires and longings for kinship become mobile. For this reason, we do not intend to imply that mobility is desirable or subversive per se. Rather, we argue that mobility must be understood as a resource frequently predicated upon neocolonial structures in which the burden of reproductive labour and the privilege of kinship rights are negotiated and assembled through intersections of bio-economies, as well as nationalized, racialized, sexualized and gendered norms.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS ANTHOLOGY

In Critical Kinship Studies, we suggest four analytical frameworks that pinpoint what we see as the main themes of kinship formation, where desires for different forms of kinship continue to fuel academic discussions over which reproductive services, body parts, substances, geopolitical destinations and human beings are exchanged and transferred, bought and sold, and desired and circulated. The four analytic frameworks shaping the book are kinship as substance, kinship as consumption, kinship as a political economy and kinship (re)imagined.

Kinship as Substance

How is substance given meaning and value through discourses, policies, affects and visual representations? In this section, the chapters address the substance perspective of critical kinship studies. Clearly, scholars working in anthropology have already illustrated how biogenetic substances flow or move between biology, machine, commercial, ethical, moral and, in the case of fertility travel, national borders (Carsten 2011; Inhorn 2011; Lorraine et al. 2013). They note that biogenetic substances cannot be understood as stable entities but rather must be understood as dynamic cells that change meaning as they cross not only time and space but also cultural terrain (Bharadwaj 2008). In fact, Aditya Bharadwaj (2008) suggests the concept of “biocrossings” to explicate how biological matter engages in its own crossings (extractions and insertions of tissue) within the (trans)national fertility industry. For example oocytes move from having little value (rhetorically framed as ‘excess’ or ‘waste’ material) to having immense value (‘intelligent’ eggs) or potential (a future baby).

While the two first contributions in this section discuss how oocytes and breast milk become negotiated as vital kinship substances, the remaining chapters extend a substance perspective to, amongst other things, ideas of sameness. Illustrating how donor breast milk functions as a kinship substance, Katherine Carroll, in her chapter ‘The Milk of Human Kinship: Donated Breast Milk in Neonatal Intensive Care’, builds her analysis upon fieldwork carried out in neonatal intensive care units in the United States. She argues that donor breast milk challenges the understanding of motherhood as an interpersonal, intimate affair established through breastfeeding. The transnational mobility of Swedish women travelling to Latvia and Estonia for egg donation is the focus of Jenny Gunnarsson Payne’s chapter, ‘Mattering Kinship: Inheritance, Biology and Egg Donation, between Genetics and Epigenetics’. Gunnarsson Payne demonstrates how Swedish women, in travelling to receive eggs, draw on the rhetorical strategy of ‘epigenetics’. Taking the notion of substances to other arenas, Damien W. Riggs, in his chapter ‘Keeping Up Appearances: Resemblance Talk among Permanent and Foster Carers in Australia’, discusses how ideas concerning racial sameness work in the placement of children in foster care arrangements. The notion of substance is also at the heart of Trudie Gerrits’s fieldwork and chapter, ‘“It’s Not My Eggs, It Is Not My Husband’s Sperm, It Is Not My Child”: Surrogacy and “Not Doing Kinship” in Ghana’. In this chapter, Gerrits shows how surrogates in Ghana de-emphasize carrying and giving birth and, instead, position surrogate children as not their own kin. Taken together, the authors illustrate how substance or the imagination associated with substance has a (trans)formative effect in different cultural contexts and different kinship formations.

Kinship as Consumption

Feminist scholars have already problematized kinship formations in a globalized world as a type of consumption. Individuals, frequently from the West, take up a flexible consumer position and imitate the traditional nuclear family while also ‘enterprising up’ (for better and younger reproductive cells) and going global to fulfil their dreams of parenthood (Kroløkke 2009; Eng 2010; Nebeling Petersen and Myong 2015). Reproductive consumption is throughout this analytical framework interrogated in light of concepts such as global assemblages (Ong and Collier 2005) and the politics of neoliberalism (Rose 2007) in which reproductive mobilities are seen as stratified (Colen 1995). Problematizing the political economy of reproduction, Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper (2008) outline the global bio-economy in which the u...