| In the following pages I discuss the families of gay men with children. I begin by showing that relatedness is continually being invented, manufactured, and contested across multiple sites. Such a beginning enables the process by which relatedness becomes construed as originating in a singular event, and to thus gain the status of a fact, to be questioned. Posing such questions is important because the construction of the family as a factual entity has its origins in what is now recognized as the very Western and very modern idea that relatedness is produced by heterosexual reproduction. If one is to understand non-heterosexual forms of family, one must approach the question of what constitutes a relative in such a way that anatomical birth is not valorized as the means, or metaphor, upon which the origins of the subject and subjectivity rest.; Drawing from fieldwork conducted with twenty-two families along the eastern seaboard of the United States of America from January 2000 through October 2001, I argue that locating the origins of relatedness and the subject in anatomical birth defines the families of gay men with children as different, and thus alternative to those associated with the heterosexual norm. Difference is seen to arise from the fact that same sex intimacy does not possess a reproductive potential. Since the relationships between gay men and their children are not formed through what are assumed to be “fertile” unions, they are imagined to hold a different configuration, and thus meaning, to those that mirror the heterosexual nuclear family. It is through such a definition of relatedness, not only of the family but of identity as well, that non-heterosexual forms of relatedness have gained entry into anthropological discourse.; In the pages that follow, I pursue the implications of such logic and challenge the commitment displayed in anthropological discourse towards anatomical birth as the origins of the subject, sociality, and relatedness. I illuminate how non-heterosexual relationships are productive of life, and possess a reproductive logic that challenges the idea that anatomical birth constitutes one as a relative, and as belonging within a family. |
