Unisa Press

Queer Kinship

South African perspectives on the sexual politics of family-making and belonging

Author: Tracy Morison, Ingrid Lynch and Vasu Reddy
Published: December 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-86888-984-6
Number of pages: 210
This book is not available in electronic format

About the book

Queer Kinship

 

South African perspectives on the sexual politics of family-making and belonging

 

Edited by Tracy Morison, Ingrid Lynch and Vasu Reddy

 

What makes kinship queer? This collection from leading and emerging thinkers in gender and sexualities interrogates the politics of belonging, shining a light on the outcasts, rebels, and pioneers. Queer Kinship brings together an array of thought-provoking perspectives on what it means to love and be loved, to ‘do family’ and to belong in the South African context. The collection includes a number of different topic areas, disciplinary approaches, and theoretical lenses on familial relations, reproduction, and citizenship. The text amplifies the voices of those who are bending, breaking, and remaking the rules of being and belonging. Photo-essays and artworks offer moving glimpses into the new life worlds being created in and among the ‘normal’ and the mundane.

 

Taken as a whole, this text offers a critical and intersectional perspective that addresses some important gaps in the scholarship on kinship and families. Queer Kinship makes an innovative contribution to international studies in kinship, gender, and sexualities. It will be a valuable resource to scholars, students, and activists working in these areas.

 

Tracy Morison lectures in the School of Psychology, Massey University (New Zealand) and is an Honorary

Research Associate at Rhodes University (South Africa). Tracy’s research interests are in genders and sexualities, sexual and reproductive health, critical feminist theory, and qualitative methodologies.

 

Ingrid Lynch is a senior research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council and an Honorary

Research Associate at Rhodes University (South Africa). Her areas of research interest include genders and sexualities; feminist approaches to researching sexual- and gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

 

Vasu Reddy is a Professor of Sociology, and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of

Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests are genders, sexualities, HIV/AIDS, inequalities and social justice.

 

At its heart, Queer Kinship poses a question with which no one can live fully and without fear: what is to love and be loved without obstruction. Few questions are as politically, culturally, and personally significant for our human need to belong-with-others. The book is at once critical, questioning, queering, enabling, and generative, surfacing the different possibilities and challenges of doing kin and family differently. – Kopano Ratele, Professor: Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa (Unisa) & researcher: South African Medical Research Council (Unisa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit)