"Three hundred thousand implications": possibilities of creating families in research about conjugality

Abstract

This work consists in a research development carried out in 2014, which investigated the experience of homosexual conjugality from interviews with four couples, by using the theoretical references from french Discourse Analysis and queer studies. In this paper, from recent contributions on kinship by Marilyn Strathern (2005;2015), especially her discussions on parenting and other family relationships, we present the accounts of women and couples interviewed in order to think the (un)meetings between a certain family order established and new family arrangements. Among expectations, plans and dilemmas, we observe that, with regard to generating children, a couple fears the questioning from the original family about the identification and inclusion of the parent in the family network, as well as the mother’s sexual orientation, etc. The couple's speech points to a complex plot involving different possibilities of parental, family, sexuality and affections arrangements. Nevertheless, the couple interviewed seems to operate under a subversive reiteration: the possibilities are discussed and negotiated with the original family as legitimating reference by working as an institution that is authorized to question its own ties, feelings and desires. In this sense, the analyzed couple appropriates certain family references because they relate to individual stories, while they are also being negotiated, reformulated and submitted to revaluation that are in your project a ‘alternative’ life together.