Gay Back Alley Tolstoys and Inheritance Perspectives    : Re-Imagining Kinship in Queer Margins

My chapter discusses the ways that inheritance system impacts queer kin relations and practices off-the-centre. In which ways the internal psychical structuring as well as external social forces influence the configurations of support and care networks in margins of urban gay culture? Drawing on Marilyn Strathern’s intellectual work on new kinship forms and on my own multinational qualitative and quantitative data, I offer a point for discussion on how queer kinship ties rely on constant everyday and conceptual renegotiations and reconfigurations. These take place between on-going legal, social, political and cultural categorizations and conceptualizations. Based on a long-term observation of the intimate, mutual relations of four off-scene gay men – Back Alley Tolstoys – in Helsinki, I investigate how dominant legal and cultural commitments to kinship relate to queer configurations of care in a diminishing welfare state. I suggest that will-writing – as queer act – and queer kin charts – as queer method – may work as a new devices and critiques of kinship, in producing, practising and providing knowledge of such relations that could not easily be articulated. They could help us to approach queer lives from the perspective of social practices and cultural identifications rather than only from sex and sexuality.