�����ƽ��

It had been clear throughout my 15 years as a queer parent that genetics is less a fact of biology and more a state-driven project for constructing (worthy) citizens through and productive of acceptable family forms. And yet the role and power of the border and its regulatory systems in constructing and maintaining (hetero) normative families had become painfully clear. Understanding that this was symbolic may sound easy, and indeed I did write it off as an artifact of the antiquated, biologically deterministic, (hetero)sexist, racist, colonial domain of the British. And yet, the violence of this erasure and its significant instrumental effects welled in me for months to follow.

Structural Intimacies of LGBTQ Transnational Kinship

Bio-genetic parenthood, as “one of the most enduring social norms, identities and experiences in (American) culture” (Mamo 2018), is the subject of an increasing body of work theorizing the ways in which LGBTQ families variously replicate and resist normative family structures through family making practices and navigation of bio-genetics, kinship and race (Jones 2005; Nordqvist 2017). Analyses of decision making and engagement with reproductive technologies are critical, and further sociological analyses are needed of the bio-medical, social, political and economic institutions that continue to structure the very possibilities and practices of family-making across the life-course of queer families and across the various literal and figurative borders of our lives. It is here that we must theorize the biological as a “fascinatingly ambivalent resource through which to fashion essentialising, but malleable, meanings of gender, kinship, and shared reproductive substance” (Franklin 2014), while examining the role of state institutions in re-producing biological, heteronormative forms of kinship. Crossing borders, access to schools and other social institutions, and even the (failed) guarantee of physical togetherness and care – these are all structural intimacies of LGBTQ kinship, narrated through birth certificates, passports, and imaging of bodies via biometric technologies that attempt to situate bodies in heterosexual practice, time and space – and, importantly, the stories we tell.

The late twentieth century has seen the rise of sexual stories or what sociologist Ken Plummer calls “narratives of the intimate” (Ken Plummer 1995). Stories are “social actions embedded in social worlds,” and are both symbolic interactions and political processes that render, through symbols and language, meanings of the self and others.  Our passports told stories – and held silences – of ‘intimate citizenship’ (Ken Plummer 1995) (or non-citizenship) - that traced state narratives of our kinship structure and configured compulsory heterosexuality in and through the border. Structural intimacies are structural: they denote those social institutions, material circumstances, and relationships between the state and populations that are played out through forms of domination. Structural intimacies are, and are about, the intimacies of everyday life; holding within them closeness and pleasure, longing and silence, and often tenuous struggles for life itself. Structural intimacies create a rhetorical space at the nexus of large-scale social forces, local cultural worlds and their embodiment in kinship structures, situating the practices and experiences of family-making – often understood in the language of neoliberalism as intimate and/or of the private domain - in the context of racism, classism, homophobia, and heterosexism. These narratives indicate that structural vulnerability is felt—quite literally—in the blood, in the possibilities and constraints on kinship, and in the rhetorics of their telling. In this sense, the practices of family-making are themselves situated within the broader fabric of societal structures and the insistence of the regulatory mechanisms of the state is upheld over time in and through the border for transnational LGTBQ families. In this instance, the border becomes a literal and figurative space for the re/production of (heterosexual, bio-genetic) family forms.

Biometrics and beyond: Visualizing queer family citizenship

The dramatic sunset view of Birmingham’s industrial-yet-modern skyline from the seventh-floor immigration office provided a perhaps appropriately layered backdrop for our presence at my daughter’s required biometrics appointment. Biometric technologies – or, rather, the state’s “border technology par excellence… [as] a classification process fueled by xenophobic anxieties and intimately connected to capitalist enterprise” (Magnet 2011) provide the requisite measurements of finger prints and visual ‘evidence’ to substantiate – indeed, even to submit the application for – a UK citizenship application. Biometric scientific practices presume that the human body exists as a “stable, unchanging repository of personal information from which we can collect data about identity” (Magnet 2011). These technologies assume a key role in the construction and regulation of borders through state-driven cultures of security and fear and their exclusionary effects, by controlling and classifying vulnerable populations and serving as an instrument of race, class, sexuality, ability and gender oppression (Wevers 2018). Questions of the role of policies that promote equity at the border remain critical to shifting meanings of borders, nations, biology and kinship – and the overlap thereof. We were here by virtue of the fact that my daughter was not a worthy (UK) citizen based on (non) birth status; and had to participate in the requisite process of classification of her body (and our queer family) as a potential risk to the state.

All the while, children squirmed impatiently and translators sought to render linguistic sense of the process while photos were taken and fingerprints were marked among the hopeful-citizens-to-be lined up in the technologies of citizen-making. Despite being caught up in what Donna Haraway has described as the ‘corporeal fetishism’ of biometrics and the profoundly problematic erasure of the situatedness of its knowledges (Haraway 1997), the queer stakes at hand found us also strangely relieved to be here as my daughter brought her bodily material forward for visualization/regulation as a worthy UK citizen. ‘No, fingers together like this’ – she lined her fingers up, now appropriately, for the state. Our administrator let us know that he was going to review the data on her application. Moments passed, silence. He paused, looking up at me from his kiosk – ‘Sonja Mackenzie – father. XX – mother. Is that right?’ My daughter and I glanced at each other, smiling knowingly behind our masks. ‘Yes, that’s right. Sonja Mackenzie - Father.’

‘Ok, are you ready for me to submit your application?’

‘Y���.’

The rain fell hard and the wind blew as we left the office, running arm in arm down the abandoned streets of Birmingham that night – caught up in all it meant to be in these systems – and yet, we hoped, soon to officially be able to remain together as parent and child.  Soon to be able to attend school, no questions asked. My daughter saw beauty from those windows. I see a frame that lets us see forever – and meanwhile, an opening onto questions of structural intimacies of transnational kinship.

---