What Does Family and the Concept of “Family Ties” Mean to Me?
Families have always come in all shapes and sizes, but the discussion of chosen families (sometimes called fictive kin) is one that provides opportunities for us to imagine a better future…
Focusing on the lives of queer folx within the context of family structures extends far beyond the limitations of traditional sociological research, which has historically centered heteronormative families as the baseline unit of analysis. Early sociological approaches often treated the nuclear family as the “natural” organizing unit of society (Parsons 1955), and while subsequent critiques expanded the lens to include variations in class, race, and culture, queer families largely remained peripheral. As Kath Weston (1991) disrupted in her foundational Families We Choose, queer kinship cannot be reduced to deviations from heterosexual norms; instead, it must be understood as a radical reconfiguration of kinship itself. Weston’s ethnography of lesbian and gay kin-making revealed that “chosen families” are not simply substitutes for natal ones but carry their own logics of intimacy, obligation, and ritual. This insight set the stage for decades of scholarship that continues to challenge the naturalization of family and kinship in both sociology and queer theory.
The emergence of homonormativity as a critical framework further sharpened this critique. Lisa Duggan (2002) describes homonormativity as the depoliticized, assimilationist politics that privileges certain queer subjects—monogamous, middle-class, often white—by aligning them with neoliberal ideals of privacy and consumerism. Building on this, Jasbir Puar’s (2007) Terrorist Assemblages demonstrated how queer inclusion operates through uneven logics of recognition, often folding certain LGBTQ subjects into the nation-state while criminalizing or pathologizing others, particularly queer and trans people of color. These works collectively highlight how same-sex marriage, adoption, or the right to military service, while legally significant, may reinforce normative ideals rather than dismantle them. The scholarly consensus that has since emerged insists that examining only those queer families who “fit” the normative mold risks reproducing the exclusions that queer theory originally sought to challenge.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the need for intersectional approaches to queer family research. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality—initially formulated to account for the erasure of Black women’s experiences within legal discourse—has become indispensable for analyzing how race, gender, class, and sexuality interlock in queer kinship studies. Mignon Moore’s (2011) Invisible Families demonstrates how Black lesbian mothers negotiate racialized expectations of kinship alongside their sexual identities, revealing the inadequacy of “color-blind” models of queer family research. Similarly, Kath Browne and Catherine Nash (2010) have examined how geographies of sexuality intersect with familial norms, arguing that queer families must be understood in relation to both spatial and cultural contexts. These studies collectively underscore the inadequacy of universalizing approaches and demand attention to the uneven terrain of queer kinship formations.
On a global scale, queer family recognition reflects stark disparities in both legal frameworks and cultural acceptance. Alexander Dewaele et al. (2017) highlight how legal recognition of same-sex partnerships does not necessarily translate into social acceptance, as stigma and discrimination persist across multiple contexts. Other scholars have drawn attention to the ways transnational adoption, surrogacy, and migration regimes create further barriers and inequalities within queer family formation (Lewin & Leap 2009; Smietana, Thompson, & Twine 2018). These perspectives problematize the celebratory narrative of “progress” often attached to Western queer rights discourses, reminding us that global queer kinship is shaped by colonial legacies, nationalist projects, and economic stratifications.
Within this growing body of literature, one relatively underexplored but promising avenue lies in the intersection of food studies and queer kinship. Food practices—ranging from shared meals to collective cooking and ritualized holiday gatherings—have been increasingly recognized as central to the constitution of social life (Counihan & Van Esterik 2013; Alkon & Guthman 2017). In queer contexts, these practices often acquire heightened significance, as exclusion from natal families or state recognition necessitates the creation of alternative spaces of belonging. Weston (1991) observed how holiday meals served as a symbolic site of chosen kinship, while more recent studies (Heldke 2012; Simonson 2020) emphasize how queer potlucks and communal dining function as both survival strategies and counter-hegemonic rituals. Food, then, becomes not only a marker of sustenance but also a medium for articulating dignity, intimacy, and solidarity within queer life.
Taken together, the scholarship reviewed here points to a significant gap: while queer family research has extensively documented chosen families, homonormativity, and intersectional dynamics, it has not fully explored the quotidian material practices—such as food and shared meals—that mediate these kinship networks. By investigating the everyday negotiations of queer kinship through food, scholars can bridge family sociology, queer theory, and food studies, producing a more nuanced account of how intimacy and belonging are enacted in lived practice. Such research promises to move beyond questions of legal recognition and toward a richer understanding of relational life as embodied, affective, and material.