Queer Family

Found out about this story this morning via feministing, and it really has my blood boiling. The implications of a discourse that regulates our families and domestic space is this matter is troubling to say the least. When the government defines family, we are all in trouble. All of us. For a long time I have wondered and theorized about the potential efficacy of a broadbased coalition between queers and those who are marginalized along racial and class lines. Situations like this make me feel that that coalition would be fruitful if incredibly challenging.

At some point I need to write about my racial and class identities in detail, so that my positionality in all of this is more clear. However, right now, I need to charge ahead, bear with me, I know where I'm writing from and even I am taking myself with a grain of salt. Even beyond my positionality there is still a lot of backstory to this post -- I don't think marriage is the be-all-and-end-all, for queer people, brown people, or any people. My family is queer. I live with two friends who I define as family. We decided to live together after college before we decided anything else about our post-college lives. We share all the bills, we are thinking about buying a car together; we are not the standard roomies. We are also almost illegal (if we lived in Black Jack, MO).

Ok. All that said, let's chat coalition. The oppressions faced by queer people, the poor and the working poor, and people of color are not the same, and I don't want to minimize that -- but the ways in which we are oppressed have some similarities. Most of these circle around ideas of (re)productivity. This spins out to being about controlling our labor, our sexuality, and our domestic space. Anxieties about these three things have been warping the lives of people on the margin for the last ... long f-ing time. This is another example of that. This law prevents families from living together, families like mine, families who need to cohabitate without marriage for a whole host of economic and cultural reasons that really aren't any of the government business unless they actually want to do something about it, and even then I don't know how I feel about it from a theoretical point of view, since it still has them in our bedrooms. So until they look a lot more like us, I'll be wary of the possible pernicious outcomes.

I do think that communities and the government should support the families as they exist, nurturing those organic networks of love and obligation that we make with each other. This should mean that there are supports for two single mothers who want to share a household and benefit from all the things that are good about having two adults in a home. It should support families that are multi-generational, "female-headed", and queer in a whole host of other ways. And affordable housing in safe neighborhoods, I think that should be a given. I think this coalition should work for this and many other things -- yes, I do want to destroy capitalism and the american family as we know them -- does that make me a good queer or a bad queer?