Queer Kinship

At its heart, Queer Kinship poses a question with which no one can live fully and without fear: what is to love and be loved without obstruction. Few questions are as politically, culturally, and personally significant for our human need to belong-with-others. The book is at once critical, questioning, queering, enabling, and generative, surfacing the different possibilities and challenges of doing kin and family differently.

Kopano Ratele, Professor in the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (Unisa) and researcher in the South African Medical Research Council-Unisa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit.

As this important book demonstrates, the global struggle for sexual and gender equality is one of the most critical and contested issues of our times. This exciting collection brings together innovative contributions that address the sexual politics of belonging in South Africa through the lens of queer kinship. In particular, it challenges us to think in a more intersectional way about questions of sexual and reproductive citizenship. The result is a book that opens up contemporary debates about queer belonging in new and important ways, and is bound to be an an invaluable resource to scholars and students.

Diane Richardson, Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University, UK and author of Sexuality and Citizenship.

In this bold new text Morison, Lynch, and Reddy bring together a diverse collection of contributions, all of which speak to the 'comfort' offered by normative ideologies of kinship in the South African context. Whilst many of the chapters speak to a hope that such normative ideologies might expand to encompass queer family forms, many also challenge the costs that come with accepting the 'comfort' offered by such ideologies. As such, the collection opens up spaces that both assert the importance of reproductive justice, whilst questioning the very terms upon which reproduction is made to matter.

Damien W. Riggs, Associate Professor, Flinders University