Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic region

How is (gender) identity, (national) belonging and (cultural) heritage understood, renegotiated and contested through (queer) kinship? What is reproduced in and through reproduction and family making and how are futures imagined?

This empirically based and theoretically driven project in interdisciplinary gender studies  asks how non-heterosexual, or queer, families are made, represented and treated in several nations around the Baltic Sea at the beginning of the 21th century and what this might teach us about the meaning and status of kinship, family making and ideas of the future more broadly.

Looking at and across four different national, cultural and legal contexts: Sweden, Finland, Poland and Estonia, it combines ethnographic and textual research on the effects of both new legislation and non-sanctioned forms of queer kinship, such as rainbow families, same-sex marriages, and queer community arrangements of care and inheritance. Through a unique research design based in intellectual kinship between project participants, and combining data from existing and new studies, the project aims to decentre Anglo-american dominance in the field of critical kinship studies.

Based in intersectional analysis, the participating studies examine not only to how (queer) kinship reproduce gender and sexuality but also to how questions of race/nationality, class and migration/citizenship are shaped by and shape such formations.  

This project is placed at the Södertörn University and PI is Ulrika Dahl, Professor at the Centre for Gender Research.