Family Pictures: The Queer Relationalities of Multigenerational Queer Family

ABSTRACT

Combining queer theorizing, autoethnography, and relational dialectics theory (RDT), this essay examines how my lesbian mothers and donor struggle to define family, queer family, and their emerging familial identities as grandparents to my own donor-conceived daughter through the competing discourses of biology and history. I further explore how my parents engage their relational history as queer parents as salient models for understanding their emergent familial identities as queer grandparents, as well as how they talk about an anticipated queer grandparent relationship with my daughter in the future. Ultimately, this essay works to articulate a queer(spawn) relationality—one that possibly exists at the (non-)intersection of multiple liminalities—as a means of building on earlier mappings of queer relationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer theorizing
• autoethnography
• relational dialectics theory
• LGBQ family
• dialogism
• queer relationality
• queerspawn
• ambivalence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I omit the often include T of transgender because I believe this mistakenly conflates gender and sexuality and ignores the particularity of transgender people’s experiences.

2. Following Hall in Grossberg (1996, p. 150) I prefer “theorizing” to theory.

3. As I have previously written, I identify as “an ambiguously brown, white privileged, middle class, queer heterosexual, able-bodied Jewish man” (Sachs & Schönfeldt-Aultman, 2018), an identity filled with contradictions and which is constantly being disciplined when it fails to fit nicely into particular categories that fit the expectations of others. It is also an identity I strategically manipulate, queer, and essentialize in order to theorize and realize particular political and academic ends.

4. Drawing on Hirsch (1997), particularly her examination of Barthe’s semiological analysis of photography, Pidduck (2009) elaborates on the ambivalent queer dialogic of family photos within queer autoethnographic documentary video, a precedent I hope to evoke here with my descriptions of family photographs. I also appreciate the reference to the organization COLAGE, which advocates for people with LGBTQ parents, whom it calls COLAGErs.

5. This data was collected with Saint Mary’s College IRB approval, received July 20, 2012 from IRB Chair Keith Garrison.

6. I must acknowledge the passing of my donor/father in 2020, after the acceptance of this article and before its publication. May his memory be an eternal blessing.

7. Almost seven years has passed since this data was collected, and I have been able to observe the ways that my parents’ relationships with my donor-daughter have evolved in the time since. Though I attempt to anchor this contribution in the formative period in which the interviews occurred, my analysis cannot help but consider the time between. I was dating cis-gender women when the interviews took place, but largely lived a bachelor’s life. However, I have since married a cis-gender woman and we have had identical twin girls. This has no doubt changed my own reflections on my parents as now they have two additional daughters to relate to from within a more conventional family relationship. I have purposefully avoided a comparison of my parents’ relationship construction between my older daughter and younger daughters.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.