Undoing Gender
“Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?The topic of gay marriage is not the same as that of gay kinship, but it seems that the two become confounded in U.S. popular opinion when we hear not only that marriage is and ought to remain a heterosexual institution and bond but also that kinship does not work, or does not qualify as kinship, unless it assumes a recognizable family form. There are several ways to link these views. One way is to claim that sexuality needs to be organized in the service ...of reproductive relations, and that marriage, which gives the legal status to the family form or, rather, is conceived as that which should secure the institution through conferring that legal status, should remain the fulcrum that keeps these institutions leveraging one another.The challenges to this link are, of course, legion, and they take various forms domestically and internationally. On the one hand, there are various sociological ways of showing that in the United States a number of kinship relations exist and persist that do not conform to the nuclear family model and that draw on biological and nonbiological relations, exceeding the reach of current juridical conceptions, functioning according to nonformalizable rules.MoreLess
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