RESUMEN
In the paper, I draw on the data from the ethnographic part of my recently completed research project "Families of Choice in Poland" (2013-2016). I focus on queer families' ways of describing their kin-relations and the meaning of "families." This often involves strategic use of kin language and reference to the importance of blood relations. Analysis reveals a high degree of polemic interplays and ambivalences, especially in reference to the role of social mother within lesbian families. In their narratives lesbian mothers and their children struggle between the biogenetic normative understanding of the family and the practical one based on parental practices of care and shared affections. By investigating the family maps of participants I aim to demonstrate what kind of relatedness matters to them, how it is (re)negotiated and changed. By doing this, I intend to show that queer kinship is always already very plastic, based on contradictions between choice and blood. Blood as an important symbol of kinship is affirmed and simultaneously challenged because biology ceased to be a singular self-evident and natural fundament of kinship.
Asunto(s)
Homosexualidad Femenina , Minorías Sexuales y de Género , Niño , Familia , Femenino , Humanos , Madres , Padres , PoloniaRESUMEN
In this article we showed how the notion of heteronormative citizenship embedded in the Polish Constitution was (re)produced in the public sphere, and how heteronormativity as an ideal was slowly undermined by the emergence of new narratives on LGBT families. We did so by first conducting a critical reading of the Polish Constitution, public opinion polls, national censuses, and so forth. Then we presented the results of a discourse analysis on families of choice in Poland from crucial public debates of the last decade. Through this we identified the main public strategies of silencing and excluding, its dynamics, main actors, possible changes, and shifts over time. The results of the research showed the change that occurred in the public discourse on LGBT families in the last decades in Poland moving from defining family in very conservative and traditional terms at the beginning of the 2000s to a more open definition of family in 2010-2011. However, they also demonstrate some undesired alliances among supporters and opponents of same-sex partnership and possible dangers of some strategies used by LGBT activists.