From the intersection of queer studies, area studies and critical kinship studies, this groundbreaking collection explores queer (non-heterosexual) family practices and kinship formations from converging perspectives and in a range of geopolitical settings around the Baltic Sea region and beyond. Empirically grounded and in critical dialogue with international scholarship, the volume simultaneously places (queer) kinship and reproduction at the centre of area studies and contributes to the de-centring of Western, Anglo-American theoretical and empirical dominance within feminist and queer kinship studies. 

Using examples from Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Poland and  Sweden, this book highlights the importance of geopolitics in the understandings of queer kinship. Contributors explore the centrality of sexuality in assisted reproduction, family-making and other forms of queer/ing kinship and intimacy by focusing on equality, the role of the state, of technologies in making and breaking kinship, and further the theoretical discussion on matters of mourning, inter-generationality, embodiment, labour and citizenship.  

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

This book examines how a geopolitical grammar works in Nordic and Russian academic feminism and how understandings of a joint feminist “we”, of “Nordicness” and ideas of an “East/West-Divide” shape the formation of gender research fields. In three distinct chapters, each with a different approach to theories, methods and source materials, the book explores the implications of language, translation, and situated knowledges in the development of gender research as a geopolitical area and particular academic space during the mid-1970s until 2005, and considers feminist knowledge production as a field of power relations.