Book Review: Queer kinship: South African perspectives on the sexual politics of family-making and belonging by Tracy Morison, Ingrid Lynch, and Vasu Reddy (Eds)

Abstract

Queer Kinship: South African perspectives on the sexual politics of family-making and belonging, is a book aimed as a political intervention that is committed to the local alongside the structural as a way to think about transnational queer movements and familymaking. The book is an impressive edited volume that maps out intricately complex and intertwined everyday engagements around kinship and belonging in South Africa over the course of 14 chapters. While sustained analysis on queer kinship drives this edited volume, it is enlivened by the diversity of voices and style of delivery, with contributors who are academics, artists, and community activists. It is in many ways an interdisciplinary engagement that asks a pivotal question that the authors outline as: "If, as Butler has asserted, kinship is always already heterosexual, then can the Queer, the 'Others', ever comfortably seek belonging within the bounds of existing kinship and family structures?". The book provides us with context from South Africa that not only engages with this question, one that queer scholars globally continue to ask, but also emphasises that attending to the specifics of diverse queer experiences allows for a multiplicity of textured answers. It allows for a local lens to the transnational efforts to make kinship queer, offering refreshing reflections on the "two-sided commitment" to making families that are queer and queering family-making. This book makes clear, in conversation with global scholars, that queering kinship is not only about "entrance" into kinship structures by queer people but to queer, stretch, and reimagine kinship altogether outside of heteronormativity and/or homonormativity.While we outline below some key strengths of the sections and chapters, we also want to take a minute with the extensively researched and concise introduction. Laying out the key debates around family and belonging, in the personal, and as the political project of the state, the editors have two important sections titled "families we live by" and "families we live with". Both of these sections outline the social and structural ways families that do not reflect particular ideologies are marginalisednot seen, not heard from, and not talked about. In writing about those excluded from kinship norms, the editors and authors