The Politics of Kinship: Gender, Sexuality, and Relatedness

Catalog description

What constitutes relatedness—and who gets to decide? This course examines how family and kinship are made, imagined, and contested across time and place. Through the lens of gender and sexuality, we’ll explore both normative understandings of “the family” and critical ways of engaging with kin-making practices that exceed them. From debates on marriage equality to houses and families within ballroom culture, and from chosen families to networks of care in sex work, we’ll examine how people engage with—and at times rework—the norms that define plausible stories and practices of kinship. Reading scholars such as Kath Weston, Judith Butler, and Tamar Shirinian, we’ll explore how kinship emerges as both a site of power and a space for reimagining how we relate to ourselves and others. Drawing on ethnographic, performative, and literary works from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United States, we will trace how critical engagements with kin-making unfold within specific historical and political contexts.