Re-Imagining Margins of Kinship: A Special Section of Feminists@Law

This Special Section takes seriously the call to investigate that which is pushed aside and marginalized in particular understandings and formations of kinship. In this, it offers fresh perspectives on the timely topics of sexuality and gender strategies, by contrasting and re-imagining newly emerging margins of kinship, put in the perspective of law, economics and political currencies in three different societies: autocratic Russia, post-socialist Cuba and after-equality Finland
As kinship norms and forms entail inequalities in both public and private domains, our objective is to reveal how marginalised livelihoods and care relations take a range of shapes. Therefore, we problematize how non-conventional relations are valued in different societies through looking at intimate economics of kinship by contrasting three variegating social realities.
The four essays included come from expert scholars in the fields of queer and gender studies, anthropology, sociology, family law and comparative literature. We engage critically with the new conceptual interventions on the topic of kinship to explore what kinds of mobilizations emerge as societies undergo large-scale political and economic change in various parts of the world, asking critical questions about the less-researched spots in in previous research on marginalised family strategies and kinship relations by looking what inspirations the field could draw from the theorizing and study of sexually marginalised experiences.
We do this by contrasting different ’national’ situations where the poor, the marginalized and the activists mobilize new and old configurations of kinship as a complex web of care that escapes, manipulates and anchors the cultural, social, political and legal regimes, in how to live together at the ’mercy’ of global economics. Kinship in margins / margins in kinship – what could we learn about these in the current condition of the world we live in?