The Process

Hey all,

As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, building up the necessary levels of energy for me to update this blog is to a large extent, quite taxing. However, I will not deprave you, dear reader who ever you are, of my research misadventures, blunders and successes. Without further ado:

The project officially started on the 05 July, and I'm currently on day 7 of my project and so far, I might say, so good. I have spent a lot of time getting to know the whole of Brighton, frantically waving my recruitment flyers and posters to every pub/bar/bookshop/hairdressers/group I can get a hold of. I am completely sure that i'm not the only bright eyed bouncy student they've seen claiming that their research is incredibly important to the society at large and therefore I almost as sure I was going to be met with a barrage of negative critiques or worse still. Nothing. However, I could not have been more wrong if I say so myself, every pub/bar/bookshop/hairdressers etc... greeted me with smiles and questions which A) was thoroughly delightful and B) rather threw me off. You see I imagined that I would be hand signalled to the nearest poster/flyer spot after regurgitating my research abstract in broken 'plain english', and then be asked to leave. I did not imagine that I would be met with inquisitive and thought provoking questions by the general public - who may have more important things to do than to entertain an undergrad student with his musings on Queer theory. Anyway I thought I might put up some of the said questions at the end of this blog and maybe open the panel for you to offer your opinion or correct, expand, contribute, rebut, your thoughts about the topic at hand (preferably, refraining from petty insults).

Officially I have not done any 'real' interviews, barring a pilot interview with my supervisor Kate O'Riordan which I feel went well (in that I didn't go down like a fiery zeppelin) and i've organised a few interviews which is exciting. And i've been updating a growing resource list for journals and the like that have some relevance to this research. In actual fact, I've found that Kate Weston's book "Families we choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship" and Jeffrey Weeks' "Same Sex Intmacies" are proving to be quite interesting reads. These articles deal with finding ways to challenge our conventional ideas surrounding families- i.e. the need for there to be a biological connection and the need for there to be a female and male presence in the immediate family - which resolves several tensions that surrounds queer kinship and in doing so, questions the concept of 'family' by exploring “the ways they live their lives, and discourses and ideologies of how they should live their lives” with regards to the heteronormative standards that have been put in place in society (Gittens 1993). Through the initial stages of research I have found that for some, the 'chosen family', requires more attention, the word 'nourish' appears - and people's biological kin are often considered a stable pillar of support. I'm not sure if I agree with Weeks on this point, however, alot of what his work goes through seems to make sense. Let me know what you think of it all.

As promised, questions:
Do you think that the term 'Queer' has softened and perhaps undermined the work of those who took part in the LGBT rights campaigns in the 1970s or is their power in its ambiguity?

What do you consider to be family? especially with the LGBTQ community in mind?

What difference does it make having LGBTIQ family for your own identity? (for this particular question I would like to suggest this article which is quite positive and therefore makes me happy: Raising Children in an Age of Diversity - Advantages of Having a Lesbian Mother

Enough from me, now to pester more people about this project!

The Project

‘Queer’ as a term is fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity; previously, it has been employed as a pejorative, homophobic sentiment. However, with the movements in gay rights from the 60s onwards it has been considered a banner of social/political empowerment, and as an umbrella term, for those who identify with a counter-heteronormative lifestyle, put simply, those who are ‘non-straight’. In this context, this project uses “queer” as an identity that destabalises the “allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire.” (Jagose, 1996).
Queer theory and gender studies have, up until now, primarily dealt with ‘family’ in terms of establishing markers of visibility and resistance, which leads to forming attachments to queer peer groups. When ‘family’ has entered queer academic discourses, it is done in the context of distancing reproduction with heterosexuality. This project investigates how queer kinship networks have a great impact in understanding our own versions of sexuality. The project reviews and traces the existing discourses surrounding kinship and family webs and repudiations in queer genealogies. It also creates a networked media artefact which includes images and audio files mediating queer identity in relation to queer kinship which creates new pathways for these genealogies to be disseminated through the creation of a ‘social life’ of these materials. The aim is to have six interviews, fully tagged and coded a completed research report and a selection of individual clips for inclusion in the web installations.
The end result of the project relies on taking these media examples and organising them within the public sphere, being distributed through social networking sites with the express interest of targeting members of the queer community. In this way, the project is reaching out to the community to better facilitate the experience of understanding one’s own sexuality and the development of sexuality in the family schematic by using the life’s experience of other people in a ‘queer’ family (Bernstein, 2001). This project also contributes to the wider research on the impact of technology in the social relations of members of the queer community with their family connections.

Introductions

Hey all,

I will have to start with the nitty gritty, mandatory, messy housekeeping stuff before we crack on to the cool and exciting bits later (I will get to them I promise!). Right. Basics. To begin with my name is Ross Robinson, I am currently an undergraduate of University of Sussex and am going into my third year of reading Media and Cultural Studies. Extra to my degree I have been given an incredible opportunity to take part in some very interesting research based on learning how individuals from the LBGTIQ(etc.) community have been affected by their queer kinship networks(for example: gay uncles/transgender step-mums/lesbian or gay parents/intersex godparents/ family friends/ families of choice or any others!). I will divulge into that later.

The purpose of this blog is to create a space where people can input their ideas, share their experiences online and hopefully contribute to particularly interesting research project which aims to help contribute to the growing works dedicated towards the queer community. A more comprehensive post on the details of the investigation and just exactly how you can get involved will come up very soon (hopefully within the next 24 hours *fingers crossed*).

My particular involvement with this subject started when I first came out just before coming to university, for 17 years this aspect of my identity was by and large untended and covered in weeds. Once I started investigating how my own personal involvement with this community I took to books, journals, blogs and what have you, to see how much has been covered about 'the queer identity'. I had absolutely know idea how vast this particular field had become in a relatively small amount of time, especially since the stonewall riots was only several decades ago. To avoid any accusatory claims narcism and self-importance I will curtail any more longwinded anecdotes and just emphasise how excited I am for this project and I hope that you guys will show some interest and give feedback, ideas, critiques, contributions, and share this with your friends.

More coming later!