What does it mean to be queer?
When Judith Halbersham spoke at UC this quarter, she briefly discussed the idea of queering the family. She said that the family serves to consume queers, and that the idea of queering the family is a fallacy. This discussion reminded me of one that I had in my Family Theory class in Fall 2006. We were responding to a chapter in the Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research, in which the author argued that any family structure that differs from our traditional idea of a nuclear family, constituted queering the family.
The example provided by the textbook occured when a woman was sent to a nursing home against her will. She chose to make the nursing home residents her new family and cut off contact with her immediate family. The author of this chapter alleged that this woman was “queering” her family by altering the definition of who was in her family.
I’m not entirely sure, however, that queering the family has nothing to do with sexual identity. In fact, I take offense to the use of “queering” in such a way by the author. Queering is not simply to make the family different, it is redefining a family based upon lines of sexual identity. Can we really queer the family? Can the family serve to let queers in — or is the family, in itself, tied up in heteronormativity and moderately ridgid gender roles? I’m not entirely sure. I understand that queer people want to have families and to be part of families, but is a family not a family if it has queer individuals in it? How do most people define who belongs to their families? Do we claim biology or do we claim kinship or social ties?
The book for my Family Theory Class was:
