Searching for family: Situating lesbian/queer parents in an anthropology of kinship.

摘要

Kinship study in anthropology is oftentimes considered to be a domain relegated to the past. However, in the last few decades, a new wave of scholarship has sought to reexamine kinship, not as a static object of study, but as a fluid, and therefore dynamic category of inquiry. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, I examine the multiple ways kinship has been theorized in anthropology from the nineteenth century to the present. Second, in an attempt to contribute to the growing scholarship on LGBTQ families, I incorporate original research into a feminist analysis of family and kinship. I illustrate how lesbian/queer parents construct notions of their families while navigating through institutions that are largely heteronormative in structure. In the process of arguing for an approach that is multivocal in scope, I show how other factors, such as homophobia and disclosure play out in lesbian families.