Over the past decade, a ‘gayby boom’ (Richman, 2002) has occurred in the Israeli male-gay community: hundreds of gay couples became fathers through cross-border commercial surrogacy. This rise was accompanied by political struggles over access to surrogacy for same-sex couples within Israel. This study explores first, the causes of this sudden rise in ‘gay surrogacy’; and second, the social implications, especially pertaining to the alteration of family norms in the 21st century. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), surrogacy is analysed as an 'assemblage', consisting of the interaction between socially shaped practices and desires, the medical and legal technologies involved, and the overarching state apparatuses. To draw out the complexity of the different components of this assemblage (individual, medical and legal, and state), 31 gay surrogacy fathers were interviewed, along with Israeli surrogacy industry representatives (n=6) and policy makers (n=13). Media coverage of ‘gay surrogacy’ and documentation from relevant court appeals and state committees on reproductive technologies were incorporated into the analysis to provide a contextual framework. Three themes were identified. First, surrogacy provides Israeli gay men a unique combination of novelty and sameness: surrogacy offers ‘biological’ fatherhood, similar to that enjoyed by heterosexual couples, but also facilitates the creation of a new family model, the ‘two-father-family’. The contradiction between the application of technology and the idea of ‘procreation’ disappeared through a discursive normalising and neutralising mechanism, in which surrogacy serves as a stand-in for ‘natural procreation’. Through this process, assisted reproduction facilitated the normalisation of the gay family. Second, despite the fact that surrogacy markets operate globally, the State emerged as a significant force in shaping the specific mechanisms of the surrogacy process, as well as the procreative desires of the Israeli surrogacy fathers – who were geared towards both genetic procreation and reproducing the nation. Gay fatherhood through surrogacy was found to be part of the new ‘gaystream’ (Duggan, 2002), expressing desires towards a new (homo)normativity and participating in homonationalist (Puar, 2007) struggles. Finally, cross-border surrogacy operates in a global market, based upon the commerce of gametes and reproductive services involving third-party women, often from impoverished parts of the world (Vora, 2015). This creates a moral dilemma for commissioning fathers, regarding the commodification of women and children in the market for reproductive services, and the related harm and exploitation within surrogacy markets. Surrogacy fathers negotiated these moral conflicts by forming ideas and ideals of reciprocity, intimacy and shared commitment towards and with the surrogate. However, the realisation of these values is heavily dependent upon the regulatory regimes in the surrogacy state and the outcomes of the medical and physical procedures – that is, the birth of a live healthy child. In conclusion, surrogacy offers a site for making families and remaking ‘the family’. It is based on already existing familial norms, but at the same time partially unsettles these; it is shaped by state regulations and national desires; and it is deeply implicated in unequal global markets, while explicitly harbouring ideals of intimacy and reciprocity. As surrogacy becomes the normative familial form for gay men in Israel, the need arises for collective critical reflexion on the impacts of surrogacy practices on global ‘others’, and on minorities within the Israeli queer community.

This study analyses how Kim Kardashian West’s and Fredrik Eklund’s depiction of family and career and the relationship there between are constructed as successful in their Reality TV shows Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007-) and Million Dollar Listing New York (2011-). It is examined in a postfeminist media climate with the theoretical frameworks of Chrononormativity (Freeman 2010) and Queer Kinship Theory (Butler 2002), considering the intersections of gender, sexuality and class, via a critical discourse analysis. The study shows a chrononormative ideal where a successful career and big biological family, through free choices, are vital to become respectable adults. Their careers are built upon their private lives and their heteronormative families. Childcaring is constructed as feminine and can for masculine subjects be outsourced to servants. It is constructed as relatively unproblematic to outsource childbearing to a surrogate mother.

This study aims to undertake a queer reading of four Swedish picture books, with the names: Punkpapporna, Kivi och Monsterhund, När mammorna blev kära and Regnbågsbesbisen. Furthermore its purpose is to explore the concept of family, and more specifically the rainbow family. This will be explored in the relations to previous research made in the field of queer kinship, children's literature, representation and silencing. Aditionaly this will be influenced by representational and queer theory. The methodical approach is as mentioned queer reading, but in combination with thematic analysis, where a few themes have been picked out. These themes will help in analyzing the representation of the rainbow family in the chosen books. The research concluded that rainbow families can be portrayed and represented in many different ways and how they are understood is completely dependent on the story in the books but also on the reader.

I will focus on the resistance to white heteronormative depictions of the American family occurring within two contemporary films directed by gay black men—The Skinny, directed by Patrik-Ian Polk, and The Happy Sad, directed by Rodney Evans. These movies complicate understandings of black gay male relationships by humanizing the characters and providing clarity about the motivations behind the decisions these characters make. As opposed to simply associating their queerness and immorality, the directors of these films explore what brings people to the various social positions they occupy. In this way, these directors resist the tendency to pathologize either blackness or queerness (and blackness/queerness at the expense of one another). The films I use do not structure family through the heteronormative model of relationships. Of there is no sight or mention of actual biological family members. Despite these factors, the groups of people presented in these films display their love and affection for each other in ways that resist monolithic narratives about queer kinship. Additionally, I will argue that these narratives regarding black homosexuality are not attempting to fit inside the mold of the racialized patriarchal determinants of the family.

Stereotypes about Appalachia abound through dubious and reductive representations of the ‘hillbilly’ icon. Sexuality and how it functions in Appalachia is usually cast from the outside as wild, violent, bestial, incestuous and generally base. Movies such as Deliverance and television shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazard render images of Appalachian sexuality as hyper-sexual, both naive and violent. These images of Appalachian sexual ignorance and violence that permeate popular culture have had problematic and reductive implications for rural gay/trans Appalachian folk. Mainstream gay culture has often used the perceived meanings of these images to circumscribe and foreclose upon the possibility of rural queer life, rendering the rural as monolithically homophobic and impenetrable. This research attempts to destabilize this perspective and critique the impulse for mainstream gay culture to further marginalize rural gay/trans folk in Appalachia. The project reveals the possibility for rural queer life to exist in Appalachia to show not only its presence, but also its varying forms of visibility. To do this, experimental methodologies are employed, drawing on autoethnography that have located my body as an active participant and research object in one particular Appalachian queer geography. By actively participating in a rural queer network, the possibility for Appalachian queer geographies to exist in ways that surpass popular representations emerge in a way that force us to renegotiate our understandings of homophobia and what sets its conditions. This project begins to uncover and theorize the ways in which kinship as a ‘social technology’ mitigates social strangeness and operates as a means for social protection and intimacy within rural queer populations. This research is presented in a way that neither dismisses nor emphasizes homophobic violence, but rather argues the imperative for strong political advocacy that recognizes both the struggles and accomplishments of rural gay/trans folk. Three interlinked approaches are used to highlight these possibilities and foreclosures: the exterior representation of Appalachian sexuality in American metropolitan gay cultures and its politico-cultural effects on rural gay/trans folk, a more nuanced interpretation of homophobia in Appalachia, and how ‘place’ is made through the operation of rural queer networks.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to examine queer aspects of the animated television show Steven Universe (2013-present), created by Rebecca Sugar and produced by Cartoon Network. Situating Steven Universe in the context of Cartoon Network and children’s animation in general, and drawing on queer theory, as well as feminist cultural studies and kinship studies, the thesis aims to contribute to understanding of non-normative family representation in children’s entertainment. Through a close reading of the material, the thesis explores how Steven Universe queers the notion of family. It focuses on the show’s depiction of kinship, temporality and reproduction, and examines how each of these aspects subverts reproduces different modes of normativity. In Steven Universe, the family of the main character, Steven, is depicted as socially unintelligible, and as a mixture of biological and chosen kinship, highlighting the importance of both. It places great emphasis on being accepted by one’s family and community, and I discuss how this message can be both empowering and undermining. Steven’s family mostly inhabits queer time and does not give in to chrononormative structures. However, I also explore and critically evaluate parts of the series in which queer temporality is provisionally replaced by chrononormativity and striving for maturity. Finally, Steven Universe queers reproduction, by defamiliarizing the notion of (hetero)sexual reproduction and providing other alternatives for reproduction and motherhood. In general, the depiction of family on Steven Universe is characterized by transgressing multiple dichotomies and by having a complex relationship to different modes of normativity, by both resisting them and engaging in them.

My dissertation, Kinship Cross-Talk: Love and Belonging in Contemporary Comparative Literatures, examines contemporary models of kinship as expressions of relationality, resistance, responsibility, witnessing, and love. I ask: how do literary texts depict “never-easy kinship[s]” (Grosz 128) that bind the self to others and the world in particular expressions of love and responsibility, inseparable from familial, national, transnational, and/or trans-Indigenous modes of belonging? Specifically, my dissertation looks at Indigenous, queer, and human rights-based literary texts that articulate shared kinships and intimacies, and facilitate a “critical re-imagining” of “being-together” (Mackey 168) in global contexts. My research methodology emphasizes the historical and cultural contingencies of contemporary models of kinship by engaging the epistemological traditions I encounter on their own terms. Often this means a turn away from Euro-American humanist approaches to subjectivity and relation to attend to other modes (critical or wry humanist, diasporic, spiritual, ecological, gustatory) and materials or environments (water, salt, ocean, for example) that shape kinship beliefs and practices. This dissertation studies three primary literary texts: the fictional autobiography What Is the What authored by Dave Eggers, Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt, and The Salt-Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai, a collection of poetry by Hawaiian author Brandy Nālani McDougall. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)