Ain't We a Family?

This chapter, titled "Ain’t We a Family?", explores ways of self-defining and displaying families by queer people in Poland. Particular attention is given to the analysis of interviews around family maps done during the ethnographical part of the research. Strategies of conceptualising family identified during the analysis focus more on practices of care, giving support, sharing daily concerns, emotional closeness (called by participants “practical family”) than the normative and idealised notion of family (called “theoretical family”). Family/kinship in informants’ definitions becomes a set of relational practices with often ritualised, ordinary, but also chosen characters. The chapter draws on the self-definition of families of choice in the context of particular value given to families in Poland and argues that calling oneself a family is deeply embedded in local constructs of gender, sexuality, and family. As such, it often becomes a political strategy to gain recognition and disrupt the heteronormative notion prevalent in public discourse. The move towards embracing the term “family” is read as deeply rooted in daily experiences, emotions, and needs of queer people in Poland. It contradicts binarism between queer and homo/heteronormativity (Duggan 2002) inherent to some of the Anglo-American scholarship. By doing so, the chapter provides new critical insight into the Anglo-American debate on the normativity of queer families and its role in producing neo-liberal apolitical queer subjects (Duggan 2002; Puar 2007).