The queer family: a perspective on transforming family relations

15.07.2026 Uncategorized

The article is published in the original language

The scholarly and political battles over the crisis of the modern family — which, as everyone learns at school, is that notorious “cell of society,” the foundational social institution — are driven in no small part by the fact that this institution secures the so-called “gender order.”

Following R. CONNELL, the gender order is understood as a historically established pattern of power relations between men and women, as well as the ways in which those relations define what a society considers feminine and what it considers masculine /1/.

Why does the crisis of the family trouble people so much? Because the workings of this institution are directly tied to the content of masculinity and femininity — key characteristics of our personality, our behavior, and our relations with other people.

Why does the family acquire the status of a “sacred cow” in political discourse; why is this institution sacralized? Because a particular understanding of the family is bound up with power relations: who ranks higher, whose interests matter more, what opportunities we will have to satisfy them, what will be available and what will be out of reach for particular people.

The term “institution” itself entered social knowledge from jurisprudence, where it denotes a body of norms regulating relations between partners /2/. Accordingly, the family as a social institution has as its principal function the organization of social life and the maintenance of stable ties in a particular domain — in the sphere of the most varied relations that involve a person’s sex and sexuality. This includes the regulation of the ways sexual pleasure is obtained (the so-called “sexual function”), and the assignment of responsibility for the new member of society who appears in the course of satisfying sexual desire (the “reproductive function”), and the transmission of culture from the older generation to the younger (the “educational function”), and the regulation of relations of production and consumption (the “economic function”).

But the main point — in defining what counts as a family and who may make one up, in defining the character of relations among the members of this group, there is always a power component built in as well, one that regulates the expression of sexuality as a whole. Since people, in entering into relationships, come together in various groups, they build relations that are based, among other things, on definitions of sexuality.

Any change in the normative definition of the social institution of “the family” entails serious changes in the social order as a whole. For centuries this order rested on the principles of a vertical of power, of domination and subordination, of dependence and unequal opportunity. The traditional family, the bourgeois family, the Soviet family — each in its own way reproduced and sustained that order at the interpersonal level of relations, determining who in the family is the key dominant figure and who are the subordinate, dependent subjects, depending on the sex and sexuality of the partners.

Most contemporary models of family relations rest on two principles: heteronormativity and patriarchy. Heteronormativity is taken to mean the establishment of the forms of relationship common among heterosexuals as the standards or norms one is supposed to aspire to. Patriarchy, for its part, is characterized by a rigid division of female and male roles, of female and male qualities and attributes, accompanied by the assignment to the man of the principal and leading role and by the a priori perception of “the masculine” as the general norm.

One manifestation of heteronormativity is the conviction that people always divide into two opposing groups: men or women, homosexuals or heterosexuals, the masculine or the feminine, those who play the male role or the female one. Heteronormativity fixes an order of gender relations in which people of different sexes, different sexual preferences, and different kinds of sexual behavior end up in different dimensions of a social space divided into a public sphere and a personal one (the private sphere, “invisible” to the majority).

Normativism as an attitude toward the world is, in essence, always bound up with a dichotomy — the division of the world into two competing parts that turn out to be unequal in relation to each other: one part acquires rights and privileges because it is “normal,” while the other is deprived of rights and discriminated against because it is “abnormal.” Normativism is linked to a wide range of practices for excluding the “abnormal” from the space of “normal” social relations. But what is the normal, and why is one thing perceived as more significant than another? Until the 1990s, the answers to these questions remained outside the scholarly consideration of normativism in general and of heteronormativity in particular.

The patriarchal character of family relations manifests itself, above all, in reducing the sphere of sexuality exclusively to biological foundations, in the biologization of the behavioral roles performed by men and women, including those with different sexual preferences. At the heart of patriarchy lies the conviction that the manifestations of the sexual dichotomy are total and that the childbearing function of sexuality takes priority. In accordance with this principle, all the roles that men and women perform in communication and interaction are regarded exclusively as a manifestation of sexual organization, which, as we know, distinguishes men from women by the childbearing function alone. The patriarchal mindset, however, “glues” the different facets of the person into a single complex: woman-as-mother, man-as-head, and so on. What gets “left out” is the circumstance that a mother, for example, is one of the agents of the social phenomenon of parenting — the accompaniment by adults of a child’s physical, emotional, intellectual and social development. And the connection between this social phenomenon and the biological organization of one parent’s body is highly questionable.

Heteronormativism and patriarchy are closely linked and reinforce each other. After all, what is the “normal” family that is “going through a crisis” in our day? It is a hierarchical structure with rigidly fixed gender roles. Husband and wife — spouses who at the same time act as at least potential father and mother — perform repressive functions within it: each in their own sphere and in relation to different family members.

The internal hierarchical structure of the members of the “normal” family and the character of the power relations among them in effect reproduce and sustain the larger systems of hierarchy in which this “cell” of society is embedded. The family acts as a “mediator” of relations between individual people (the individual level of human existence) and the large social systems in which they are included (professional, ethnic, national-civic and similar groups). This is precisely why, in order to be included in (rather than excluded from) the process of normal social interaction, a person must also be included in a family that will be considered “normal” from the standpoint of dominant social representations. If, in the prevailing social representations, gender is hierarchized along the lines of sex and sexual preference, then the family — in order to count as normal — must likewise be built in accordance with that hierarchy and will be judged in terms of its conformity or nonconformity to the norm upheld by the dominant gender. If gender exists in social representations as a binary opposition, then the family will be considered normal only when it contains a hierarchical structure built on the binary opposition that is key to this institution.

From the standpoint of heteronormativity and patriarchy, only a heterosexual family that reproduces the prevailing gender hierarchy can be considered “normal.” Yet since, alongside rigid normativism, a normativism of allowances is possible — one that takes into account the reality of the shared relationships that people of different sexes and sexual preferences enter into — a continuum of families may take shape within the social system, with varying degrees of “deviation” from the prescribed heterosexual norm grounded in male dominance and female subordination. In any case, in a society founded on the principle of heteronormativity only the “healthy” heterosexual family will be seen by everyone as a kind of ideal model that one should resemble as closely as possible in order to count as a “normal” member of a gender-hierarchized society.

And once patriarchy is mixed in as well, only a family that comes as close as possible to binary heterosexual relations — in which the “truly” masculine and the “truly” feminine are clearly separated — will be considered normal. It is precisely the principle of patriarchy, incidentally, that produces such phenomena in non-heterosexual relations as the division of partners into the sexually “active” and the sexually “passive,” with “masculine” or “feminine” qualities ascribed to them accordingly. And the mechanisms of social influence operating through gender expectations shape the corresponding personal characteristics in non-heterosexual partners who have been sorted into oppositions by their sexual roles (“if you have called yourself a ‘top,’ then be a ‘man’ about it, and vice versa”). It is likewise the principle of patriarchy that produces, in heterosexual relations, the phenomena of asymmetrical parenting (when the mother is given preference in raising the children while the father has the role of “breadwinner” imposed on him).

Under rigid heteronormativism, no families other than those made up of different-sex partners will be considered a “normal” family deserving of social recognition. Such a rigid normativism of heterosexuality in the sphere of family relations, however, is possible only under the following conditions: first, when sexuality is fixed solely on childbearing rather than on pleasure; second, when freedom of personal self-expression (including in the sphere of sexuality) is valued far less than the social conformity/typicality that guarantees “normality.”

The reality of life today is that sexuality increasingly takes on the character of an individual choice centered on pleasure rather than on childbearing. The informal public sphere is expanding — a sphere in which norms of intimate relations and assessments of sexual behavior operate that differ from the dominant ones. As E. ZDRAVOMYSLOVA and A. TEMKINA note, substantial changes in sexual practices had already begun in the Soviet society of the late 1970s, changes in which non-reproductive sexuality was acquiring the mark of cultural legitimacy /3/.

This movement is broadly consistent with changes in attitudes toward sexuality across contemporary European culture. The strengthening of the value of individual freedom relative to the group reduces the degree of social control over sexuality, including — control exercised through the institution of the family. Where personal freedom is a value, the family ceases to perform the function of controlling sexual behavior, at least in the forms and to the extent that it did before. Sexuality generally emerges as a sphere autonomous from family relations. Against this background, as E. ZDRAVOMYSLOVA and A. TEMKINA note, sexual behavior is separated from reproductive behavior, the age boundaries of sexual activity expand, and attention to the sexual attractiveness of the body increases.

The rising value of individual freedom, together with the development of life technologies, gradually shifts the hierarchical system of gender relations toward egalitarianism; tolerance in the sphere of sexual morality increases, which leads to the normalization of homosexuality at the level of everyday, ordinary relations in the private sphere.

The emphasis on sexual pleasure makes it possible to soften heteronormativism. If, in the private sphere, pleasure can be obtained with different sexual objects, then it can be normalized so long as the format of traditional, patriarchal heterosexual relations is preserved as the ideal model of any sexual relationship and so long as there is no publicity.

Thus, as attitudes toward sexuality liberalize, heteronormativism shifts attention from the question of choosing the sex of the sexual object to the question of whether relations with a sexual object of any sex conform to the heterosexual model. In this case a tendency arises toward legalizing types of families in which the partners are not heterosexual but in which relations are normalized as if those partners were heterosexual.

Normativizing all gender relations on the model of relations in the patriarchal heterosexual family makes them recognizable and acceptable under the liberalization of sexuality. But how far does this assimilation reflect the actual desires and actual practices of all people? In any case, there remain those “abnormal” people who do not enact the heterosexual patriarchal norm. Does that make them “bad” members of society? Deserving of discrimination and ostracism, unlike the “good” and “assimilated” “others”?

The liberalization of heteronormativism merely widens the boundaries of the acceptable; it leaves outside consideration the question of why it is the heterosexual union in particular that must be regarded as the one true norm. The appeal to biology, according to which heterosexuality is supposedly the objective norm, is nothing more than the ideological base of heteronormativity. Nature may operate by entirely different criteria of normality. Take, for example, the concept of the biological norm in P. K. ANOKHIN’s theory of functional systems /4/.

According to that theory, a normal organism unites a multitude of smoothly interacting functional systems that belong to different structural formations or to one and the same formation and that, through their concerted activity, secure homeostasis and the adaptation of living beings to their environment. Homeostasis and adaptation can be secured equally well by the childbearing function of sexuality and by its hedonistic function.

A reduction in the degree of control over sexuality leads to its becoming autonomous with respect to the other components of the gender order — the content of gender categories (who is to be considered a “normal” man or woman) and the division of gender roles.

Thus the liberation of sexuality undermines not only traditional heteronormativity but also patriarchy as a basic principle of hierarchical power relations. The binary opposition of the masculine and the feminine in normative representations begins to blur. Heteronormativity, which travels in tandem with patriarchy, therefore begins to hinder spontaneous personal self-expression in relationships that do not fit the former gender order. As the value of a person’s individuality and freedom rises, heteronormativity comes under critical review in various spheres of public consciousness. The recognition of how the principle of heteronormativity affects the character of gender relations as a whole, as well as the forms and directions of the transformation of family relations, led to the emergence of a new term — queer.

The word queer appeared in English in the 16th century as a derivative of the German quer (across, askew) and originally denoted any socially non-normative, unacceptable behavior. At the end of the 19th century its meaning began to narrow to the sphere of unacceptable sexual and gender behavior: it was increasingly applied to effeminate homosexual men who were believed to enjoy being the passive sexual partners of other men (this sense of the word queer is conveyed more precisely by Russian equivalents with a pejorative connotation — “pidovka,” “pedik” or “pederastic”).

As the idea that the heteronormative social order is unjust took hold in public consciousness, unknown participants at one of the gay Pride events held in New York in June 1990 circulated a leaflet with the provocative title “Faggots Can Understand This” (“Queer Read This”). The leaflet voiced an open protest against the use of the word “gay” (that is, merry, cheerful) as the only positive self-designation for homosexual men. Its authors declared: “Yes, we are merry at times, that is certainly true. But when many of us — lesbians and gay men — wake up in the morning, we feel anger and disgust; we are not merry. So it is better to call us faggots (queers) honestly — at the very least this will remind us how the rest of the world sees us, and not only how we see ourselves. We are under no obligation to be witty and charming people in a straight world where we have to live circumspectly and only on the margins of life. We use the word ‘faggot’ (queer) both as gay men who love lesbians and as lesbians who love being dykes.

‘Queer,’ unlike ‘gay,’ is not only about men” /6/. This appeal set in motion the process of giving an offensive word a different meaning and became a challenge to the dominant notion of normality under the compulsory heterosexuality of the social system. The political subtext of the new usage quickly turned the word queer into an “umbrella” term for the entire community of lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender people (LGBTQI+).

The new political meaning of this provocative usage was taken up and developed by feminist scholars. According to Katherine WATSON, the term queer was introduced into scholarly circulation by the American thinker Teresa de LAURETIS in 1991 /5/. Its new content was to designate everything that does not fit the patriarchal heteronormativist order and falls outside the notion of the “normal” within that order. In other words, it designates everything that lies beyond the bounds of a “normal” society founded on the gender dichotomy. And since the phenomenon of gender identity — which reflects the social division of people into distinct gender groups (by sex and by sexual preference) — is also bound up with the gender dichotomy, the term queer came to draw attention to the conventional and unstable character of the boundaries of any clear-cut definition of gender identity, definitions that find expression in the most varied and mutually intersecting behavioral practices.

The term queer sharpens our attention to the fact that in everyday, routine life it is not possible to fix the boundaries of sexual certainty precisely. The urge to define oneself as straight, or as a lesbian or a gay man, or as bisexual (which in practice proves even more problematic because the markers of gender certainty in terms of sexual preference are mixed), as well as the urge to define oneself (to prove to oneself and to others) in terms of “a real woman”/“a real man” (even if your preferences are not strictly heterosexual), arises only under a patriarchal heteronormative order that demands a clear-cut definition along the lines of “are you with the leftists or with the reds?” Such self-definition, in turn, sets the normative location of the subject in social space (public or private) and shapes a particular order of thought that naturally inscribes him or her into the dominant gender system.

Under heteronormativity, the various private practices of heterosexual partners living a family life that are “indecent” from the standpoint of social expectations turn out to be hidden and shameful at the level of publicity. Here it is worth recalling an important refinement in the understanding of publicity made by J. HABERMAS. There is official publicity, which is formed by public authority, by the state (that is, political publicity), and there is “unofficial” publicity, formed by particular social groups and private individuals around aspects of life that are significant only to them /7/.

At the level of unofficial publicity, individuals may perfectly well act out liberal tendencies in the development of sexuality and see nothing wrong in doing so, as long as this remains part of their private life, or of life within a limited community of “understanding” people, of like-minded peers. The refusal of the official public sphere to follow the changes in society’s attitude toward sexuality leads, on the one hand, to the emergence of a so-called “hypocritical” sexuality and, on the other, to entirely predictable attempts by the authorities to reverse the trend toward the liberalization of sexuality that is manifested at the level of unofficial publicity: for that trend undermines the former social order in a fundamental way. This is the source of the hysterics about the moral decay of society, of the attempts to fight through legislation, of the resistance to any attempt to change the legal framework of family law, of the hysteria surrounding the legalization of same-sex marriage. All of this is indeed connected with a change in the value system of society “from below.” Yet once the process of liberalization has been set in motion, the idea of critically reviewing the existing foundations of the heteronormative and patriarchal order of the family as an institution cannot remain outside our reflection on this experience.

The liberalization of attitudes toward sexuality and the development of the institutions of unofficial publicity, together with a critical reckoning with the influence of heteronormativity, foster the appearance of various queer family practices (practices that do not fit heteronormative patriarchal models of relations within a family union or partnership). The rejection of the rigid framework of binarity that the term “queer” carries also blurs models of the family built on binary relations. This gives rise to the thought that some models of partnership realized in the LGBTQI+ community essentially show us the possible directions in which the heterosexual family may develop. Since queer practice places the emphasis on disregarding the principles of patriarchy and heteronormativity in relationships, it is clear that heterosexual couples can also be queer, whereas homosexual couples may perfectly well be non-queer, wholly inscribed in the space of heteronormativity and adapted to it.

What does a queer family mean in the LGBTQI+ variant? It is not at all a legalized same-sex union — more precisely, it does not come down merely to legalization and to equalizing heterosexuals and LGBTQI+ people in marriage and family law. If a de facto family is understood as any paired union regardless of its legal status and of any requirement to live together, then an LGBTQI+ couple is indeed a family in substance (ad rem). Only it is a family that goes unrecognized at the level of official publicity.

One of the key differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships is the exclusively hedonistic use of the sexual function. Under heteronormativity and the hierarchical organization of the gender system, this use of sexuality becomes an important criterion for distinguishing and forming a distinct gender identity. That identity turns out to be focused on the free satisfaction of sexual desire and on the playful conversion of statuses (an equal who is nevertheless used sexually, and vice versa). Under rigid heteronormativism, a clear division of sexual roles may form in homosexual couples, one that is enacted mostly in the public sphere, whereas in the private sphere that division will not necessarily be rigid. Under “soft” heteronormativism and a lower degree of polarization of gender differences, homosexual couples develop the phenomenon of “versatility,” of flexible sexual roles.

The emphasis on the hedonistic component of sexuality pushes the partners’ sexual fidelity into a secondary role. Under heteronormativism this leads to a split between behavior in the public and in the private spheres of a partnership: in public — fidelity; in reality — “sluttiness,” which is regarded as an inevitable consequence of male homosexuality at the very least. Recognizing how the phenomenon of heteronormativism influences such behavior — or else disregarding it altogether where a relatively closed and friendly LGBTQI+ social environment has formed — creates the ground for queer family practices that are non-normative from the standpoint of the dominant gender order: the open discussion of the possibility, and the practice, of sexual contacts “on the side” that do not violate, “by agreement,” the special character of the relationship with the primary partner (the negotiation of mutually acceptable arrangements for the free use of sexuality); the division of living space (the practice of relationships “on a schedule”) in order to secure opportunities for the free realization of sexuality — for promiscuity. And these characteristics of a relationship may be combined with stable, lasting and satisfying sexual and emotional relations between the partners, with a shared household and a consolidated budget for the couple.

The absence of sexual fidelity and of any effort to maintain it at the level of publicity (normative visibility), the intermittent character of the relationship (for example, 2-3 days together, the rest of the time apart), a high degree of autonomy for the partners, separate leisure time, respect for a partner’s right to the free use of their sexuality (for example, giving notice when the schedule of meetings has to change) — all of this makes such relationships “strange” precisely from the standpoint of patriarchal heteronormativity. Relationships of this kind are hard to imagine in couples for whom childbearing is the leading function of sexuality, since such a format makes it maximally difficult to realize that function.

But such a format of relationships. But it is easily extended to those different-sex unions for which childbearing is likewise not the goal. The only thing holding back such an extension is the restriction of freedom of choice imposed by official public heteronormativity, which sets the parameters of normal and abnormal behavior for members of the dominant gender groups (heterosexual men and women) and presumes the need for a clear dichotomy between “true” relations between people and “pederastic” ones (“queer” in the broad sense, and not only in the sexual one).

To sum up, one may advance the thesis that certain queer practices, which I identified earlier in a study of the specific features of partnerships in the LGBTQI+ community /8/, demonstrate the possibilities for the development of the family as an institution once the repressive binary model of gender relations based on the principles of patriarchy and heteronormativity is abandoned.

References

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Queer Read This: A leaflet distributed at pride march in NY. Published anonymously by Queers, June, 1990. [Electronic resource]: http://www.qrd.org/qrd/misc/text/queers.read.this
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Author: Dmitry Vladimirovich VORONTSOV, Candidate of Sciences in Psychology, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Psychology, Southern Federal University (Rostov-on-Don, Russia)

How to cite: Vorontsov D. V. The queer family: a perspective on transforming family relations // Models of the Family: Transformations and Development Trends. Proceedings of the conference of 25.09.2010: a collection of papers and abstracts / comp. by A. B. Sharyhina, Kharkiv Women’s Association “Sfera” NGO. — Kharkiv: Tochka Publishing House, 2010. — Pp. 27–39.