In this academic but fascinating volume, Jaya Keaney, a lecturer in gender studies at the University of Melbourne, explores the intertwined strands of queer family formation, racial identity, and culture. She draws on interviews with a variety of Australian queer families to uncover how the choices and constraints they faced disrupt traditional notions of racial belonging and kinship. “Reproductive technology and its associated cultural transformations,” she argues, “foster a multiracial imaginary of queer kinship.” Keaney draws on queer theory, critical race theory, and feminist scholarship to show how, among other things, “Queer family-origin stories rearrange the gendered and sexual tenets of reproduction, unhooking parenting from binary gender with the aid of reproductive technologies and laborers. In doing so, such origin stories make trouble for race by disrupting one of its foundational axioms: that race is derived from one’s parents.”
At the same time, she argues, “Queer love must not be used to deny racism but can be employed as a powerful resource for cultivating antiracist solidarity.” In the final section of the book, Keaney offers a manifesto for nurturing queer families and disentangling the strands of family care from the systems and institutions that privilege nuclear, monoracial families.
Grounded in theory but informed by the lives of real queer families (including the author’s own), this book is bound to provide much food for thought—and hopefully also for action, both within families and in the wider world.
