Part of: Queer Inclusion and Exclusion I
Authors: Hannah Sawall, Miriam Lind
Abstract:
The definition of what constitutes a family has long been shaped by blood relationship and heteronormativity: people who are biologically related form a family, as well as married men and women who have children together; necessary for the constitution of family units usually is offspring (Hertz 2006; Jurczyk 2014). While cohabiting adults who are romantically and/or sexually involved with each other form a couple, their status as a family may be questioned without the presence of a child (Blackstone 2014).
Such traditional understandings of family have been increasingly challenged as single parents, co-parenting models, patchwork families and queer families are on the rise, as well as childless couples and people living with companion animals making claims to the family label. While both queer families (e.g. Allen & Mendez 2018) and interspecies families (e.g. Owens 2015) have been theorised and empirically investigated in the social sciences, little investigation so far has been conducted into their linguistic construction (but see Owens & Grauerholz 2019; Laing 2020; Lind 2024). Similarly, queer and more-than-human approaches to family have not yet been brought together, even though it may be argued that both challenge hegemonic concepts of family in similar ways.
This gap in research is the starting point for our paper. Following a posthumanist turn in linguistics that questions the binary division between human and animal (Pennycook 2017), we propose queering the field of human-animal interaction and investigating more closely the practices of doing family we can observe between humans and their cats/dogs. In doing so, we not only focus on queer subjects that interact with their animals but also investigate the harmful normativities (Motschenbacher 2011) that govern the relationship between humans and animals (Haraway 2016).
Based on video recordings and supplementary interviews in six households with different family structures using a conditional video recorder, an automated recording device that recognizes speech and cat/dog sounds and remains in the homes for two to three weeks, we analyse practices of doing family between human and non-human household members. Combining ethnographic methods, we address both how animals are constructed as (dis)belonging to the family and how the study of human-animal communication intersects with the study of queer linguistics more broadly. Based on this material, we argue that family is constructed through practices of kinship and care rather than notions of biological relatedness and procreation and extends far beyond the narrow, heteronormative traditions of who may or may not be a family.
