New kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via social media sites

Abstract

The article investigates how the technology of social media sites facilitates new kinds of intimacy and kinship. It analyses what happens when ‘donor families’ – families with children conceived via sperm donation – connect with each other online. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy as a promise of belonging, the article investigates how new kinship relations facilitate belonging and practices of intimacy. While Berlant uses ‘intimacy’ as a general, normative term, this article explores small, individual and everyday negotiations of – and tensions related to – intimacy in order to illustrate how the narrative of intimacy is experienced and negotiated. Through analysis of and interviews with members of a Facebook group that connects donor families, the article describes the experiences of forming new alternative families and argues that new kinship relations can both lead to new intimacies and be perceived as threats to existing intimacy and nuclear family formations. Finally, the article illustrates how users experience emotions more intensely online than offline, and suggests that the terms traditionally used in relation to intimacy are inadequate for understanding intimacy in a digital era.

Keywords:

• Intimacy
• kinship
• donor families
• LGBTQ families
• social media
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research, under Grant [‘Sapere Aude: DFF-Forskningsleder’, 4001-00229B].

Notes on contributor

Rikke Andreassen (PhD, University of Toronto, Canada; Associate Professor, Roskilde University, Denmark) is a researcher and teacher working within the fields of media, gender, sexuality and race. She is the leader of a large research project titled ‘New Media – New Intimacies’ (2015–2018) and the coordinator and co-founder of the research network ‘Re-developing international theories of media and migration in a Nordic context’ (2011–2016). She has published three volumes, the latest titled Human Exhibitions. Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays (Ashgate, 2015), and a large number of articles in various journals, including Social Identities, the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Race and Class and Nora: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Currently, she is editing an anthology with the working title ‘New media and New Intimacies. Connectivities, relationalities and proximities’ to be published in the ECREA book series by Routledge in 2017.