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Lecture series "Queer kinship and ecologies of (inter)bonding": Queer Galaxies
Queer Galaxies: Kinship in Science Fiction (Victoria Hegner)
The IAG lecture series of the summer semester 2022 focuses on the nexus of kinship/family, queer* and trans* studies and feminist-posthumanist ecology and deals with questions about the (re)conceptualization of kinship beyond and in the context of heteronormative gender and reproductive relations.
Approaches from feminist and queer perspectives have taken a critical look at heteronormative orders of family, kinship and gender, made complex forms and practices of "doing family" and "doing kinship" visible and examined these in their diversity, dynamics and intersectionality. Scholars from these fields have argued, for example, that with the progress of bio- and reproductive technologies and the increasing legal and social recognition of family forms beyond the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, such as LGBTIQ families or three-parent families, definitions of kinship are (or must be) constantly renegotiated.
The denaturalization of the concept of kinship has proven to be central to queer and feminist approaches - not least through the critique of its fundamental premises of gender, reproduction and power relations. What constitutes kinship - or 'kinship' - is therefore not determined by a supposed 'nature', but rather depends on a variety of biological, social, legal, political and ecological factors that are always in negotiation with each other. With the subsequent rethinking of the relationship between 'nature' and 'culture', approaches from the field of feminist posthumanism and posthumanist ecology also open up a view of cross-species kinship relationships beyond the 'merely' human. Against the backdrop of the destruction of nature and the climate crisis, new questions of communitization, bonding and connectedness with a variety of life and hybrid forms as well as ecological processes arise.