Reconfiguring the family: queer lives and plastic kinship in Australia

For queer individuals, families of origin have been historically represented as sites of exclusion and violence, where there is an implied binary opposition between “families of origin” and “families of choice.” Such framings (re)produce the idea that families of choice, particularly in the “west,” follow a neat, linear path of becoming that begins only after rejection by the family of origin as an a priori event. Drawing on qualitative interview data with 34 queer people aged 18–64 living in Australia, this paper examines the meanings of both families of origin and choice, to analyze the evolving nature of these relations, as shaped by queer experiences. Our findings show that younger queer people in particular, are experiencing closer, more intimate connections with their families of origin in comparison to previous generations, as well as curating a wider network of people that they consider family in complementary, rather than antagonistic ways. Our findings question the need to demarcate families of origin and choice, instead pointing to the value of conceptualizing these relations as a form of “plastic kinship”, referring to how queer people stretch, reconfigure, and even “reinvent” dominant understandings of family.