Recognizing Families Beyond the Hegemonic Heteronuclear Order: Imagining Alternative Practices of Kinship, Belonging, and Care

This panel takes families as its central site of critique and as a concept whose meaning is actively contested, subverted, and remade in people’s everyday practices of intimacy and care. In particular, we seek to focus on research in hostile and exclusionary contexts of ‘compulsory heteronuclear familialism’, where states narrowly grant normative legitimacy and privilege to relationships based on heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction. This panel asks: what forms of intimacy, care, and kinship are being lived and practiced in the gaps, shadows, frictions, and refusals of the hegemonic heteronuclear family order? How do people navigate, resist, and remake structures of normativity in their everyday lives? What unrecognized or emergent forms of kinship and care are taking shape in the fissures of the normative family order?

We aim to generate a conversation around how people live, care, and connect beyond the normal family, and about what this tells us about the limits and futures of family as a sociological concept. We welcome contributions from diverse national and regional contexts of ‘compulsory heteronuclear familialism’ that speak to the theme as well as comparative research. Papers may address, but are not limited to friendship and non-conjugal intimacy; LGBTQ+ kinship formations and chosen families; non-normative intimate partnerships and cohabitation; care arrangements that operate beyond or against the conjugal household; the lived experience of singlehood, celibacy, and the refusal of coupling; queer parenting and reproductive politics; and the discursive and institutional conditions that render certain intimacies legible, illegible, or precarious.