New Kinship: Families, Reproduction, and Technology

A body of scholarship (from the 1980s, largely feminist and queer) arguing that biology is not the foundation of kinship but one idiom among several for making relatedness.

In American Kinship (1968) and A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), he argued anthropologists smuggled a Euro-American folk theory — kinship = 'blood' = shared biogenetic substance — into their supposedly universal analytic.

It is the relationship made by 'law' rather than 'nature' — which is why you can divorce a spouse but not your brother.

A softer replacement for 'kinship': whatever local practices make people feel and act as though they belong to one another.

Gradually, through feeding — breast milk and rice cooked in the same hearth create shared substance, so fostered children become genuine kin over time.

Arrangements in which, e.g., a barren widow could marry a wife and become the legal father of her children — showing pater (social father) and genitor (biological begetter) are distinct.

A study of lesbian and gay people in 1980s San Francisco who built durable 'chosen families' of lovers, ex-lovers, and friends doing the work kin are supposed to do.

Because in practice kinship *is* the doing — nursing through AIDS, hospital visits, lending money, holidays — not merely biogenetic connection.

Routine adoption/fosterage in which a child raised by an aunt is not 'given away' but invested across a wider web of kin.

IVF, gamete donation, and surrogacy split the once-unitary 'mother' into egg provider, gestational carrier, and social/legal mother.

Her term for the world made thinkable by reproductive technologies, in which people re-domesticate new possibilities within local moral logics.

Kin networks among Black and Latinx queer New Yorkers, organized with mothers, fathers, and children — another form of chosen family.