Beyond the Western gaze: Families of choice in Poland

Abstract

Research into queer intimacies and families has been largely conducted from and about the Western (specifically Anglo-American) context. It very often (re)presents a hegemonic, mono-normative paradigm and vision of intimacy and family life, and profoundly influences the scope and methods of such research in other localities. This article uses findings from a large-scale mixed methods study called Families of Choice in Poland which was designed to examine the diversity of intimate and familial practices of non-heterosexual lives. It highlights how geo-temporal conditions shape LGBTQ relational lives and, as such, unsettles the dominant Western knowledge on queer kinship.

Procreative consciousness in a global market: gay men's paths to surrogacy in the USA

“…Yet pathways to gay fatherhood continue to be heavily stratified, and the fertility market is accessible mainly to those men who can afford commercial surrogacy in the USA (see also Jacobson, 2018, Stacey, 2006), even though some gay family associations have undertaken fundraising initiatives to mitigate the economic barriers (Men Having Babies, 2018b). It is also noteworthy that all the men I was able to recruit for this study came from the USA and Western, Northern or Southern Europe – none of them lived in post-communist Eastern Europe or other places which also testified to the ‘Western’ (Mizielinska and Stasinska, 2018) situatedness of gay surrogacy and/or queer kinships, both in terms of economics and in terms of social narratives and acceptance – even if gay men from China and Singapore have also begun commissioning surrogacy in the USA (Wang and Shan, 2017). Stratifications and situatedness of this kind must be taken into account when analysing queer kinships in the context of justice, as does the Symposium issue to which this article belongs (Smietana and Thompson, 2018).…”

“…Gay men's paths to surrogacy, and to parenthood at large, must, however, also be understood in the context of the recent and current histories of marginalization that LGBTQ + people have suffered (Briggs, 2017, Mizielinska and Stasinska, 2018, Pichardo Galán, 2011, Weeks, 2018 [1981]). In this context, to many gay people having children may mean entering mainstream family imaginaries and increased access to social inclusion.…”

“Why is it that here we can be a family, and there we cannot?” How Wider Socio-Institutional Frameworks Shape Experiences of LGB Parenting

“…The absence of a non-Western perspective in this body of literature creates certain blind spots, as the analyses may fail to identify how non-heterosexual families are constructed differently in non-Western contexts (Richardson, 2017). One notable example of such blind spots, provided by Mizielińska and Stasińska (2018) in their research situated in a familialistic Polish context, emphasizes the more important role played by the family-of-origin in providing support and safety nets for the LGB parents and their children than is usually assumed by the Anglo-Saxon literature. This literature is frequently more focused on (intimate and family) relations of choice (Richardson, 2017;Mizielińska and Stasińska, 2018).…”

“…One notable example of such blind spots, provided by Mizielińska and Stasińska (2018) in their research situated in a familialistic Polish context, emphasizes the more important role played by the family-of-origin in providing support and safety nets for the LGB parents and their children than is usually assumed by the Anglo-Saxon literature. This literature is frequently more focused on (intimate and family) relations of choice (Richardson, 2017;Mizielińska and Stasińska, 2018). Another issue highlighted by non-Western research is the danger of adopting linear models of same-sex family "development" followed by interpreting, for example, CEE developments as a delayed stage or imitation of developments in the West, instead of examining how CEE-specific parallel developments interact with adapted social and institutional models, which were often implemented in the context of EU integration (Kulpa and Mizielińska, 2016).…”

“…This extra awareness can be identified in the existing CEE research on LGB parenting, which is situated in contexts where families are forcefully defined in a heteronormative way (Mizielińska and Stasińska, 2018), or where people insist, for example, on asking the lesbian-parent families "Where is the dad?" (Sobočan, 2013).…”