Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland

Joanna Mizielińska

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000607185
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: LGBT Studies

Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts.

The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing ona rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of 'families of choice' improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life course.

This study is suitable for those interested in LGBT studies, sexuality studies, kinship and Eastern European studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016571-1

When I titled my project Families of Choice in Poland, I did not foresee the difficulties and confusion the simple name might evoke both in Poland and abroad, mainly in the Anglo-American academic environment.¹ In both contexts, the whole term “families of choice” was perceived as controversial, although for different reasons. On the one hand, during presentations at international conferences, I was repeatedly asked why I did not use other terminology. Kinship? Intimacy? Personal life? Why did I decide to keep alive such a heteronormative and useless concept? Consequently, I had to explain over and over again why despite doubts concerning the usefulness of the term “family” within the Anglo-American queer theory (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004; Warner 2000; May 2011; Wilkinson and Bell 2012),² in my project, I decided to use such a passé term and more importantly, I claimed its political importance in given (Polish) context. I argued that different ideas worked differently in other circumstances and pointed out that precisely because the term “family” was so mythologised and overloaded with heteronormative assumptions in Poland, using it becomes an act of resistance.

On the other hand, in Poland, the term was perceived as provocative: “aren’t all families created by choice?”, I was asked several times during interviews, after conference presentations and academic lectures. Critics suggested using other names such as relationships, intimacies, and couples as more suitable – for a different reason than in the West, however. In the Polish mainstream discourse, LGBTIQ+ persons are perceived as family outlaws, and their relationships are not called families, even if they raise children. Once, at a Polish conference, when I talked about “families of choice”, I was asked: “How many of THESE have we got in Poland?” It was as if the person who asked this question could not even utter the word “family” in the context of non-heterosexual relationships (and he was/is not the only one). Precisely because of this, I undertook this project believing in the politics of naming and aiming to show diverse familial experiences hidden behind numbers. I have believed that it is essential to retain the term, stick with/to it even. In a country where “family” is reserved exclusively for the nuclear model, and other configurations are refused the name of families, daring to reach for such a sacred word, using it in the context of same-sex relational life was a conscious political (and queer?) act with a clear objective to change the mainstream discourse as well as the self-perception of LGBTIQ communities.

The above controversy over the simple naming reflects some of the key arguments of this book, namely the need to go beyond Anglo-American hegemony in queer kinship (with its taken-for-granted conceptual framework) to fully understand the diversity of queer kinning elsewhere and create a new conceptual framework capacious enough to grasp them. In this book, I show that the suggestion that we should abandon the term family as fundamentally heteronormative (and not queer) is inadequate in the Polish context. The meaning of kinship/family is firmly linked with the geo-temporal specificity of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region (Kulpa and Mizielińska 2011). Consequently, instead of thinking about family and queerness in opposition (which is the dominant paradigm in conservative media in Poland curiously resembling the arguments of some queer critics; see Mizielińska and Stasińska 2017), I want to ask what could there be queer about family/kinship in the post-communist locality? Is it possible to think of queerness and family, not in opposition but in conjunction? What lesson could Anglo-American/Western queer scholars draw by recognising non-Western geo-temporal differences in this subject? My empirical findings reflect the above-described tussles and illuminate the in-betweenness of West/non-West or, better on the West’s ground, between “West” and CEE. Therefore, any resemblance or consistency with Western findings might be justified and simultaneously delusive, as I explain later, complicating the West/East divide and strict boundaries between the core and the periphery.

Nowadays, global academic knowledge production on (queer) kinship and families is mostly based on Anglo-American/Western ways of experiencing sexuality, kinship/families strengthening the “Western perspective” as the normative “zero-point”,³ placed at the very centre of all narratives, and used as an obligatory reference for all comparisons, leaving other geopolitical locations under-researched. Many feminist and queer scholars from around the world have already criticised Anglo-American hegemonies demonstrating how scholars from the peripheries are never considered providers of theoretical frameworks and a part of the canon but rather informants, data miners, and/or “poor relatives” whose role is to reproduce the knowledge produced by their more advanced Western colleagues (Silva, Ornat, and Mason-Deese 2020; Kulpa and Silva 2016; Ramon, Simonsen, and Vaiou 2006; Browne and Ferreira 2015). They have indicated the urgent need to decolonise queer epistemologies not only by the simple inclusion of hitherto excluded voices but the deeper deconstruction of knowledge foundations and greater sensitivity to the geopolitics of knowledge production. This book joins their criticism and aims to address the lack of knowledge on queer kinship in so far marginalised regions of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It is based on extensive mixed and multi-method study of non-heterosexual families (Families of Choice in Poland/FOCIP) and explores their experiences, family practices, ways of displaying and sustaining family ties, and queer bonding. In focusing on queer kinship on the margin/on the edge yet in the close and still under-explored proximity of the “West”, the book examines how current theoretical work rooted in research about queer families and kinship in Anglo-American contexts gets undermined, questioned, and/or destabilised in other geopolitical locations with different history and constructs of gender and sexuality. It contributes to theoretical discussions on ethnocentrism as the presented findings often contest Western theories of same-sex intimacies, relationships, and kinship, pointing towards the need for a more significant “localisation” of knowledge production and demonstrating how theoretical tools need to be tailored to the experience of queer people living “beyond the pink curtain” (Kuhar and Takács 2007).

My main goal in this book is to demonstrate that while studying queer families on the Western edge, we cannot merely employ models and concepts developed in geopolitical locations with much more inclusive legislation and accepting social attitudes because they might work differently there. We need to look for other epistemological, theoretical, and conceptual tools to embrace diverse ways of queer kinning (Howell 2003) worldwide and challenge contemporary Anglo-American dominance. A look from the edge might sharpen our way of seeing, allowing us to change the scale and perspective on (queer) kinship phenomena, and imagine new forms of thinking about kinship that challenges contemporary Anglo-American hegemony. Instead of looking at queer ways of relating in other localities as a mere derivate of those already described in the West but only more traditional, underdeveloped, and/or premodern, the book reverses the perspective and aims to create a new conceptual framework and more inclusive paradigms that embrace complexities of doing queer families/kinship all over the world.

This introductory chapter presents the epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of the book and its key themes, as well as crucial and inspiring analytical concepts. In the first part, I critically assess the current state of knowledge on queer kinship, particularly engaging with current debates and voices criticising the all-pervasive hegemonic framings of the “West”. I reflect on the key concepts developed in the Anglo-American contexts and their potential (un)translatability into other non-Western localities. I also engage with the work written on queer kinship and sexualities from CEE perspectives to problematise and pluralise the notion of Western kinship and sexuality and indicate its “con-temporal periphery” – that is, the mechanisms of “othering” CEE by rendering it as “permanently transitional”/“post-communist” and in the constant need of catching up (Mizielińska and Kulpa 2011; Stella 2015). In the second part, I situate my work within a larger framework and writings about the “CEE” as the Western Other (e.g., Wolff 1994; Bakić-Hayden 1995; Todorova 1997; Forrester, Zaborowska, and Gapova 2004; Melegh 2006). Works on sexuality and queer studies in and of CEE often question some of the Western ways of analysing queer sexualities and the universality of the dominant theoretical perspectives (i.e., public/private, invisibility/visibility dichotomies, the simplistic polarisation of closet/coming out paradigm, see Stella 2015).

Consequently, they show the urgent need to de-centre Western perspective (Mizielińska and Kulpa 2011; Kulpa and Mizielińska 2011). Works from other geo-locations, with their primary focus on postcolonial regions and “global queering” (Boellstorff 2004; Binnie 2004, 2013; Engebretsen 2013), help me strengthen the critical arguments about othering and orientalisation of same-sex relationships from non-Western locations. Through dialogue with these works, the present book pushes their critical stance further, moving the attention from queer sexualities per se, to queer relationships and ways of kinning in the so-far under-explored region of CEE. In the reminder part of the chapter, I intend to describe the Polish context focusing on living situations and the legal framework of queer families in Poland. First, I present Polish familialism, its main features, and roots. Then drawing on research and public opinion polls, I unveil Polish heteronormativity and its influence on the development of the LGBTIQ+ community and lived experience of queer families. In the final part, I will briefly present the content of the following chapters.

Queer kinship/family theoretical framework

In my approach to queer kinship and families, I am inspired by the British “new family studies” (NFS) and its practice-based approach (Morgan 1996, 2011a, 2011b; Bernardes 1997; Cheal 1993; Levin 1993; Gabb 2008) but also indebted to the relational/personal turn in researching families (Smart 2007b; Roseneil and Ketokivi 2016; Wall et al. 2019). NFS postulate the rejection of the “universality” and “naturalness” of families (especially the nuclear family, put at the centre by the “traditional” sociology of the family), and the traditional concept of family as ideologically burdened. Instead, they propose investigating how social actors understand family and stress the importance of real and everyday practices in family life (Cheal 1993; Levin 1993; Morgan 1996; Bernardes 1997). This approach offers a new perspective on social reality by identifying family configurations that have hitherto been invisible or perceived as a deviation from the norm (Levin and Trost 1992). NFS calls for a more complex and dynamic understanding of underlying actuality and everyday familial practices (focusing on the family members’ point of view). This approach offers new accounts on social reality by recognising family variations that have been invisible for sociology or have been perceived as “deviant” (Levin 1993; Trost 1993).

In the sociology of family, the emergence of NFS marks the transition from analysing the family structure and its functions to exploring the ways in which relationships (family, intimacy) are experienced and materialised in everyday practices. The foundations for this type of thinking were given by the works of David Morgan (1996, 2011a, 2011b), who coined the concept of “family practices”, shifting the researchers’ attention from thinking about the family as an unchanging being to its processual character – “doing families” vs. being family. In his opinion, in families, we do not deal with pre-conceptualised permanent reality but with something that is always happening and is built in relationships with others through various everyday practices. Emphasising the importance of family-forming practices instead of static shots, he introduced its dynamic understanding. His approach puts at the centre relationality and a variety of ways of doing families, which on the one hand are individual and, on the other hand, always bear the hallmarks of the influence of predefined forms, depending on the socio-cultural-legal context.

In her “displaying families” concept, Janet Finch refers to Morgan’s family practices (Morgan 2011a, 2011b). However, she develops further his idea by introducing an additional element, emphasising that “families need to be displayed as well as done” (Finch 2007, 66). In her opinion, displaying families means all the efforts to present one's relationships as a family, combined with the need to be recognised in other people’s eyes. She distinguishes three essential elements of this display. First of all, it means a direct meeting of those who create a family together. Secondly, to be effective, it must contain an element of reciprocity. Thirdly, external others play a significant role in confirming this self-presentation, that is, performing the necessary function of an exterior auditorium, watching and accepting (or not) a given performance.

Finch believes that everyday presentation practices as a family are always associated with the desire to have the status of their relationship adequately recognised by more or less significant others. This last element is especially crucial for this book because it demonstrates how private dimensions of family life always already intersect with the public ones. For the manifestation of one’s relationships as a family to be effective, it must be “properly” read by other social actors (close and distant family, friends, institutions, etc.). As I will try to show, this external auditorium regularly assesses, rejects, reads in accordance with or inconsistent with the intention, and continuously compares with the taken-for-granted heteronormative standards. Its presence forces same-sex couples in Poland to make a constant effort and work out strategies to combat the possibility of being misread and to (re)negotiate their position as a family.

Although I deliberately chose the concept of “family”, as I described earlier, I find Carol Smart’s (2007b) idea of “personal life” a significant sociological intervention offering a broader conceptual frame to capture diverse ways of people’s relationships. Smart agrees with Morgan that family is something we do (Morgan 1996) but underlines the need to describe the families and relationships existing in our imagination, emotions, and memory, as they are just as essential and fundamental as our daily family practices. Not only does she go beyond conventionally understood families and opens up to new family forms, but she opposes the thesis on individualisation and detraditionalisation, as executed by Anthony Giddens, Urlich Beck, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (i.e., family as a zombie category). In contrast, Smart shows the importance of embeddedness and relationality and their sometimes-sticky nature. She believes t...