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Lecture Series "Queer Kinship and Ecologies of (Bonding)": Politics of Belonging of 'Rainbow Families'.
Between Emancipatory Change and Homonormative-Nationalist Change (Yv E. Nay).
The IAG Ring Lecture of the summer semester 2022 starts at the nexus of kinship/family, queer* and trans* studies, and feminist-posthumanist ecology and works on 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 critically examined heteronormative orders of family, kinship and gender, made complex forms and practices of "doing family" and "doing kinship" visible and investigated them in their diversity, dynamics and intersectionality. Scholars from these fields have argued, for example, that with the advancement of bio- and reproductive technologies as well as an increasing legal and social recognition of family forms beyond the classical heterosexual nuclear family, such as LGBTIQ families or three-parent families, definitions of kinship are (have to be) constantly renegotiated.
Central to queer and feminist approaches has proven to be the de-naturalization of the concept of kinship - not least through the critique of its fundamental premises of gender, reproduction, and power relations. What constitutes kinship is therefore not determined by a supposed 'nature', but rather depends on multiple 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 or posthumanist ecology furthermore open the view for cross-species kinship relations beyond the 'merely' human. In this context, especially against the backdrop of nature destruction and climate crisis, new questions of communalization, bonding, and connectedness with a diversity of life and hybrid forms as well as ecological processes arise.