Family Pictures: The Queer Relationalities of Multigenerational Queer Family.

ABSTRACT

Combining queer theorizing, autoethnography, and relational dialectics theory (RDT), this essay examines how my lesbian mothers and donor struggle to define family, queer family, and their emerging familial identities as grandparents to my own donor-conceived daughter through the competing discourses of biology and history. I further explore how my parents engage their relational history as queer parents as salient models for understanding their emergent familial identities as queer grandparents, as well as how they talk about an anticipated queer grandparent relationship with my daughter in the future. Ultimately, this essay works to articulate a queer(spawn) relationality-one that possibly exists at the (non-)intersection of multiple liminalities-as a means of building on earlier mappings of queer relationality.