Finding the heart of kinship

  • Michelle Elmitt

    Student thesis: Master's Thesis

    Abstract

    This is a study on the intelligibility of love in social families. Using field research
    from contemporary Australia and Bahir Dar, Ethiopia it examines the ways that
    adults are performing in loving relationships with non-biological children to
    make their relationships intelligible, particularly when spoken language may not
    allow articulation of the intersecting lines of desire, conflict and loss. The
    examination occurs across different social worlds, where the divide between
    biological and social kinship differs, and anticipates revisions of kinship in all its
    complexities. It involves analyses of fifteen face-to-face interviews and provides
    interpretations of the emotional and psycho-social phenomena revealed in the
    interviews both academically and through a creative writing process.
    In this research a rich theoretical tapestry is woven to investigate the complex
    and multifaceted lived experiences of the participants, as well as the possibilities
    of love and kinship that arise. Key to this is an engagement with Judith Butler’s
    work, in particular Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000).1
    Butler’s work helps to uncover tensions and ambiguities that arise when
    relationships are formed amid a current of opposing discourses, particularly in
    societies which persist in privileging the nuclear family model, and make the topic
    hard to talk about. Her concept of performativity also provides a means of
    understanding why each family is doing things differently. Foucault’s concept of
    subjugated knowledges2 is another structuring thread throughout this
    investigation. It informs my aim of bringing to light and interrogating the buried or
    hidden knowledges of social parents to uncover alternative discourses and possibilities
    for action.
    The dissertation includes six chapters. Each chapter contains scholarly and
    fictional analysis of the fieldwork, which consists of interviews with fifteen participants: eleven adults parenting children in step, adoptive, foster and same sex
    families in Australia, and four adults who have adopted children in Ethiopia.
    In line with a reflexive methodology based on visual ethnography, the fifteen
    participants were invited to bring photographs of themselves with their nonbiological
    children to discuss with me in one-hour long unstructured interviews.
    In Ethiopia I was accompanied by a co-researcher, Mr Temesgen Beyene.
    In the scholarly analysis of the fieldwork I review discourses to capture the effects
    of the many power-plays that influence the participants, and I explore playful and
    creative spaces where the subjects’ inner and outer worlds may meet in ways that
    foster loving relationality, drawing from Donald Winnicott’s Playing and
    Reality (1971)3. It is my intention, through such a focus, to cast light on the way
    that processes of love and aspects of the unconscious interact. The fictional
    analysis, by way of creative writing methodology, works through some of the
    more immeasurable emotional phenomena, and highlights moments of conflict,
    confusion and ambiguity in the interviews and scholarly analysis. It explores the
    more immeasurable emotional, haptic and affective information that was
    conveyed outside of spoken language and leaves space for the reader to navigate
    some of the confusions and tensions that arise in the participants’ descriptions of
    their relationships for themselves. It also incorporates the researchers’ lived
    experiences and positions more fully into the research.
    The findings indicate that, while loving relationships in social families can be
    confusing and fragile, people are reworking discourses to find ways of making
    them intelligible. In some cases adults appear to be creating transitional spaces
    where differences might be negotiated, and intersubjective relationality can
    develop in complex psycho-social terrain. In other cases, adults appear to be
    making use of such spaces that already exist. Just as Antigone’s Claim anticipates a
    social revision of kinship — where the unwritten rules are examined and new
    possibilities of fulfilling family relationships can emerge — the findings of this
    study anticipate a social revision of kinship where the hegemony of biological
    relationships weakens and people come together in new kin-like formations to
    extend ideas of what family, home and kinship are.
    Date of Award2020
    Original languageEnglish
    SupervisorPaul MAGEE (Supervisor) & Bethaney TURNER (Supervisor)

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