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Dear Mailing list Subscribers,
It is my pleasure to announce the pre-publication of special issue of Sexualities journal on Queer Kinship and Relationship co-edited by Joanna Mizielińska, Jacqui Gabb and myself. The source of inspiration for this collection was a Queer Kinship and Relationship International Conference, organized in 2015 in Poland as a part of the Families of Choice in Poland research project (see Mizielińska and Stasińska, this issue). During this conference, scholars from a range of disciplines and countries came together to present, hear and discuss different understandings of queer kinship and the dynamics of non-normative relational configurations in diverse geo-temporal contexts. This special issue includes some of the key papers from this conference. Together, they explore how a focus on different geo-political locations can refine understandings of queer kinship. This begins to unpick the dichotomies of Western/non-Western, Anglo-American/non Anglo-American knowledges and positions them in relation to each other. Contributors come from diverse locations and also write about different social and cultural contexts that are sometimes distant and sometimes in personal proximity – bringing the matter of queer kinship close to home. Authors use local theorizing alongside Anglo-American frameworks of understanding in ways that question their usefulness and applicability, and sometimes to show how certain key concepts might need to be re-developed if they are to address the specificity of non-Western experience. The examples presented here do not therefore simply serve as illustrations of Otherness or difference, located in ‘far away’ countries; instead they complicate our understanding of taken-for-granted phenomena and offer new points of departure that queer the kinship lens.
Table of contents include:
Please distribute the news to anyone who might be interested and
contact me in case of any questions regarding the special issue.
Best regards,
-- Agata Stasinska Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw http://uw.academia.edu/AgataStasinska
