Katie L.
Acosta Georgia State University
Queering Family Scholarship: Theorizing from the
Borderlands
In this article, I explore the potential in pro-
ducing queerer intersectional family scholarship
for the advancement of theory. I offer an anal-
ysis of the ways queer theory enriches fam-
ily scholarship while remaining critical of how
its inattention to race as an identity category
has limited its potential and scholarly theoriz-
ing across difference. I highlight queer Latinx
family research to illustrate some of the nuance
that is missing in scholarship that centers only a
White middle-class subject. I suggest that schol-
ars take note of how queer feminists of color
have approached building theory in the flesh. I
offer that queerer intersectional family scholar-
ship should occur from the borderlands. Doing
so furthers an important goal in queerer family
scholarship: to better attend to lived experience
and develop a more intersectional theory.
Shortly after the birth of my daughter, it became
clear that she might have a food allergy. After
consulting our pediatrician, I made an appoint-
ment with an allergy specialist and brought my
daughter for testing. On the day of the appoint-
ment, I sat in the patient room nursing my baby
when the allergist walked in. A young Black
man of African descent, the allergist introduced
himself to me, and we shook hands. I stopped
nursing and he started to coo at my daughter to
Department of Sociology, 38 Peachtree Center Ave.,
Georgia State University/Soci Atlanta, Atlanta, GA
30302-3965 (kacosta@gsu.edu).
Key Words: Intersectionality, Latinx family, queer methods,
queer theory.
Journal of Family Theory & Review (2018)
DOI:10.1111/jftr.12263
make her smile. “She looks just like you,” he said
and began asking the usual background ques-
tions: baby’s age, sleep and feeding habits, and
family members living in the home. I answered,
and he continued asking background questions:
“Do you have any food allergies?” At this ques-
tion, I began to feel uncomfortable, because I
knew he was asking about my medical history
in the hopes of better understanding my daugh-
ter’s. I stumbled through my words, “No, I don’t
have food allergies, but she isn’t my biologi-
cal child.” The allergist stopped speaking, put
down his pen and notepad, and looked at me,
confused. “Wait,” he said, “if she is not your
biological child how are you nursing her?” He
laughed uncomfortably and went on to say, “I
mean, I’m a doctor and all but. ..” I interrupted
him and explained that I am my daughter’s birth
parent but my wife is her biological parent. My
daughter was conceived using my wife’s eggs
and donor sperm. I am her gestational parent and
carried her to term. “Oh,” the allergist said, vis-
ibly flustered, and quickly moved on.
Even among individuals accustomed to see-
ing same-sex couples raising children, there
remains an assumption of how those children
came to be a part of the family, assumptions
that are inconsistent with how my family came
to be. This vignette illustrates the many ways
that we queer family. First, my explanation that
my daughter has two moms disrupts the doctor’s
vision of a heterosexual two-parent family. Sec-
ond, the doctor observing me nursing my baby
assumed me to be the gestational and biological
parent and thus began asking questions regard-
ing my genetic history. Here, I complicate the
1
2 Journal of Family Theory & Review
doctor’s perception of the relationship between
birth and biology. The third queering of family
in this vignette is much more nuanced and relies
on what is unsaid during the encounter. The doc-
tor commented on my daughter’s resemblance
to me, which in addition to suggesting a pre-
sumption of biology also suggests a presumption
of shared race. Half of my daughter’s genetic
makeup comes from her White biological parent,
the other half from a Black sperm donor. I do not
share her mixed-race ancestry. While the doctor
and I did not discuss race or ethnicity directly,
I wondered as I left the office how he would
racially classify us. Did he read my daughter as
Black because he read me as Black? If he read
me as Black, did he assume I am African Amer-
ican? If I had started speaking to my daughter in
fluent Spanish, would he have been confused by
my latinidad?
I open with this vignette in the spirit of pro-
ducing theory in the flesh (Moraga & Anzaldúa,
1981). Theory in the flesh invites us to center
lived reality in the knowledge production pro-
cess rather than in the abstraction that is often
characteristic of queer theory. Producing theory
in the flesh means allowing our experiences to
fuel our politics, activism, and scholarship. Fore-
grounding this vignette is also a way of posi-
tioning myself as a scholar in the borderlands.
For Anzaldúa (1987/1999) the borderland was
a space full of contradiction and discomfort.
The marginalized who live there use this contra-
diction to develop la facultad, which Anzaldúa
described as an acquired ability to look below
the surface representation of encounters to find
deeper meaning. In this article, I engage in the-
orizing from the borderlands, which I argue will
aid researchers in better delineating regulative
power as it affects the family. I build theory in
the flesh and utilize la facultad as a resource in
contributing to deeper understanding of Latinx
families.
In this article, I highlight queer, Latinx
family scholarship and reflect on the obstacles
that arise for scholars conducting this research,
the methodological concerns that arise when
theorizing from the borderlands, and strategies
to overcome these for both qualitative and
quantitative scholars. I explore the potential
for family science theoretical advancement
through the production of queerer, intersec-
tional research. Queerer, intersectional family
scholarship attends to how race, gender, class,
and sexuality shape material reality rather than
relying only on the experiences of the White
middle-class to build family theory. Moreover, a
queerer, intersectional approach attends to what
is missing when scholarship overlooks how
oppression as experienced across intersecting
identities leads to familial differences.
Until recently, most scholars would use the
term Latina or Latino to describe people of Latin
American descent in their research. However,
in offering the masculine and feminine use of
the word, Latina and Latino reinforce a gender
binary. The use of Latinx disrupts this binary
and is more inclusive of transgender, nonbinary,
and gender-nonconforming individuals. To that
end, in this article, I use Latinx when referring to
Latin Americans of all genders and reserve the
terms Latina or Latino for referencing specific
research studies that include only men or women
who are not transgender.
Queer Theory, Intersectionality,
and Theory in the Flesh
Much of the appeal of queer identity and the-
ory lies in its ambiguity. While its definition
is often slippery, queer coalesces around a
set of organizing principles. It challenges the
taken-for-granted assumptions that serve as
foundations to human interactions. It resists
normative regimes, exposing how deviance is
constructed in relation to the normal, not in
opposition to it (Jagose, 1996). Queer theory
rejects static, fixed, and unifying identity cat-
egories and is skeptical of their potential to
empower, offering instead that identities also
confine, discipline, and exclude (Seidman,
1996). Butler (1990), for instance, argued that
gender fuels regulative power by promoting
the falsity that one has a core gendered self.
Queer theorists disrupt hegemonic binaries by
tracing their historical specificities in discourse,
practice, and institutions, and by questioning
the tendency to take these binaries for granted
(Corber & Valocchi, 2003). Ironically, despite
its propensity to disrupt the taken-for-granted,
a major shortcoming of queer theory is that it
often uncritically presumes whiteness to the
point of silencing other racialized identities.
The emergence of queer theory in the
academy has in many ways mirrored that
of many feminists of color who critiqued
White feminism for organizing around a
unified women’s oppression and subsuming
the interests of marginalized racial minority
Queering Family Scholarship
women under the concerns of Western, White,
middle-class feminists. This Bridge Called My
Back (1981) was born from Cherríe Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldúa’s desire to build collective
solidarity across differences without erasing
those (cultural, racial, and class) differences.
They and other feminists of color pushed the
academy to acknowledge their unique marginal-
ities and reflect on its exclusionary practices
(Alarcón, Castillo, & Moraga, 1993; Anzaldúa,
1987/1999; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Trujillo,
1991).
There are many parallels between queer the-
ory’s emphasis on multiple identities and the
exclusionary nature of identity politics as well as
the larger critique by feminists of color of fem-
inism within the academy. A major difference,
nonetheless, lies in feminists of color’s engage-
ment with race, class, gender, and sexuality from
the axis of difference. The canonical work of
Black feminists and activists laid the ground-
work for what Crenshaw (1993) and Collins
(1990/2000) later unpacked and named inter-
sectionality (Combahee River Collective, 1977).
This Bridge Called My Back brought Latinx fem-
inists’ experiences with oppression and identity
formation under White hegemony to intersec-
tionality and feminist discourse more broadly
(Keating, 2012). These scholars began by cen-
tering the experience in the knowledge produc-
tion process, offering an approach that, when
combined with the strength of queer theory’s
deconstructive power, can produce queerer fam-
ily scholarship.
Despite the possibilities that queer theory
offers the family sciences, scholars have argued
that its emphasis on deconstructing identity cat-
egories comes from a place of privilege and
ignores the ways that racial and ethnic iden-
tities can be instrumental for the survival of
non-White people (Johnson, 2001). For instance,
José Muñoz (1999) noted, “The field of queer
theory … is … a place where a scholar of color
can easily be lost in an immersion of vanilla
while her or his critical faculties can be frozen
by an avalanche of snow” (p. 11). Muñoz went
on to critique queer theorists who only superfi-
cially acknowledge the works of queer feminists
of color without engaging their substantive con-
tributions to queer theoretical thought, and those
who incorporate race only as an addendum to
which one must afford an obligatory nod. Gloria
Anzaldúa (1998) also articulated her suspicions
of queer theory, writing:
3
It is they [White middle-class lesbians and gay
men] who have produced queer theory and for
the most part their theories make abstractions of
us colored queers. They control the production of
queer knowledge in the academy and in the activist
communities. (p. 265)
Anzaldúa’s relationship with queer as an iden-
tity may best be described as apathetic. She rec-
ognized its flexibility and thus preferred it to a
lesbian identity, but she also critiqued its use,
deeming it “a false unifying umbrella” (p. 264)
and naming that false unification as partially
responsible for the erasure of “la Mestiza.” Still,
Anzaldúa did not reject identities all together,
instead she preferred “una de las otras,” which
literally translates to “one of the others” (p. 263).
In resisting an umbrella categorization and in the
interest of distancing herself from heterosexual-
ity, Anzaldúa favored an identity that marks her
otherness in the borderlands.
To reconcile the tensions inherent in queer
theory’s inattention to difference, one strat-
egy is to borrow and merge pieces of various
radical theories into an epistemological stance
equipped to capture the complexities that arise
from these intersections (Berkowitz, 2009). One
example of this strategy can be found in Jafari
Allen’s (2011) ethnography on Black Cuban
self-making. Allen adopted a queer perspective
to map Black Cubans’ use of their limited agency
in building their own subjectivities. Allen posi-
tioned the family as a disciplinary agent for
Cuban communism, but he also complicated
this position by exploring how Cubans make
new family out of a network of existing friends.
Here, Allen borrowed Anzaldúa’s (1987/1999)
conceptualization of nepantla—a liminal or
in-between space—to describe friendship and
to capture the uncertainty that comes with being
in an unknown space. For Allen, friendship is
a communal connection that is essential in our
discovery of who we are. Allen pushed queer
theory into dialogue with intersectionality and
borderlands, offering a gendered, sexualized,
and raced account of self-making in Cuba, all
while centering the flexibility of race, gender,
and sexuality and foregrounding the structural
constraints that discipline these identities across
time and physical space.
Another strategy is disidentification, or the
reworking and remaking of a public sphere,
to assuage one’s marginal position within it
(Muñoz, 1999). Disidentification is a survival
strategy to help marginalized people resist the
4 Journal of Family Theory & Review
dominants’ perceptions of their identities and
empower them in developing their own subject
formations. Disidentification, for instance, can
involve resisting the racialized and hypersexu-
alized depictions of Latinx bodies prevalent in
mainstream discourse and transforming it into an
empowering self-image. Disidentification calls
for the reworking of theory to remedy its erasure
or silencing of people of color. Johnson’s (2001)
disidentification with queer theory involved
preserving the inclusivity of queer while reme-
dying its lack of attention to difference, thereby
creating quare—a vehicle for theorizing racial-
ized sexualities. Quare, Johnson noted, derives
from the African American vernacular for queer
and offers a subtle but intentional alternative
to queer theory rooted in the lived realities of
people of color and thus producing theory in the
flesh (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981). Quare theory
centers the material effect that one’s raced
social position has on experience in a White
supremacist society—offering a more appealing
alternative for lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender,
and nonbinary people of color. Disidentification
is a strategy that in merging radical theories
offers a distinct epistemological stance to those
interested in queering family scholarship.
Queering Family Science
Queer approaches to family science have been
influential in expanding the definition of family,
challenging assumptions of what families look
like, and reenvisioning the idea of a normative
family. Scholars often start with a critique of
heteronormativity, “the set of norms that make
heterosexuality seem natural or right and that
organize homosexuality as its binary opposite”
(Corber & Valocchi, 2003, p. 4). Heterosexu-
ality is compulsory, contributing to women’s
subordination and erasing the potentiality for
a lesbian existence (Rich, 1980). We can resist
heteronormativity through queering gender,
sexuality, and/or family (Oswald, Blume, &
Marks, 2005). But we also reify these values
through homonormativity, aligning oneself
with heteronormative family values to gain
access to exclusionary institutions (Duggan,
2002). These normative regimes can color
intellectual inquiry, as family scientists com-
bat the case against lesbian and gay parenting
through research that highlights the sameness of
children raised in same-sex households as com-
pared to those in heterosexual households and
downplays the positive differences (Stacey &
Biblarz, 2001). For instance, daughters raised by
lesbian parents when compared to those raised
by heterosexual parents appeared more open to
resisting gender-prescriptive feminine behavior
(Green, Mandel, Hotvedt, Gray, & Smith, 1986).
Nonetheless, this difference is downplayed in
the research. Similarly, research on the mental
health of children raised by lesbian parents as
compared to heterosexual parents downplayed
findings of their greater resilience to homopho-
bic bullying in favor of a no-difference finding
(Tasker & Golombok, 1997).
Queerer family scholarship moves beyond
reifying heteronormativity and instead consid-
ers the infinite possibilities for family structures,
including (but not limited to) those consisting
of same-sex, transgender, or polyamorous fami-
lies. Studying these family forms offers a vehi-
cle for scholars to assess how those outside of
a heteronormative structure queer the institution
of family and challenge the monolithic and con-
ventional ideas of familial configurations. This
work is strongest when it exposes the ways
that heteronormativity is reproduced or con-
tested irrespective of the sexual and gender iden-
tities of individual research subjects (Oswald,
Kuvalanka, Blume, & Berkowitz, 2009). Indi-
viduals who organize their sexual lives (via what
is, or is perceived to be, heterosexual desire)
do still contribute to the queering of heteronor-
mativity. For instance, when polyamorous fam-
ilies raise their children in triadic and quadratic
parenting arrangements, they embrace some of
the conventional values of heteronormativity and
rebuff monogamy, thus simultaneously reifying
and contesting those normative regimes (Sheff,
2014). Such research contributes to queering
monogamy and naming mononormativity as a
structural and cultural privileging and legitimiz-
ing of monogamous relationships over those
in polyamorous relationship forms (Schippers,
2016).
Just as work on polyamorous families
has elucidated queer potentials in otherwise
heteronormative-appearing family structures, so
does research on families that include gender
variant individuals. Research on the cis women
partners of trans men has noted that these
families are often perceived to be heterosex-
ual, but in resisting this (mis)recognition they
destabilize heteronormativity by challenging
what heterosexuality looks like (Pfeffer, 2014).
As with polyamorous families, these families’
Queering Family Scholarship
resistance of normative institutions occurs in
tandem with their reification as couples find
ways to manipulate their involvement with reg-
ulative institutions to access their family’s needs
(Pfeffer, 2012). Parents raising gender-variant
children resist and reify cisnormativity in bor-
rowing and retooling the narratives offered
in medical, psychological, and spiritual dis-
courses to make sense of their children’s gender
identities (Meadow, 2011). In offering expla-
nations for their children’s gender variance,
these parents fall short of contesting cisnorma-
tivity. However, in reinterpreting institutional
discourses to fit their circumstances and using
these re-created narratives in their social worlds,
they challenge the ubiquity of cisgender. Collec-
tively, these studies exemplify the simultaneous
disruption and reification of hetero-, cis-, and/or
mononormativity and attest to these normative
regimes’ discursive power.
Queerer family scholarship centers people
who are actively involved in doing family rather
than the institution of family itself in which
one is a passive participant. Doing family (and
doing sexuality) in socially acceptable ways is
linked to how we do gender; failing to do gen-
der or sexuality appropriately compromises our
connection to family (Oswald et al., 2005). For
LGBTQ individuals, doing family can involve
building families of choice in adulthood in order
to garner the support withheld from families
of origin (Weeks, Heaphy, & Donovan, 2001;
Weston, 1991). Thus, families of choice are
in historical succession to families of origin,
and gay men and lesbians transition from fam-
ilies of origin to choice in adulthood (Weston,
1991).
Queerer family scholarship moves us toward
a more nuanced understanding of the varied
ways in which families are formed; however,
this research has largely relied on the experi-
ences of the White middle class. Thus, it has
promoted the assumption that family as it is
done in White middle-class homes is represen-
tative of other racial/ethnic families and that the
process of doing family is not mediated by other
factors, which are overlooked in homogenous,
White-majority samples. Further, this research
has failed to offer an analysis of how the
queering process is shaped by race, poverty, or
immigration status. In the next section, I delin-
eate the aspects of queer family scholarship that
must be revised when researchers foreground a
more intersectional approach, and in particular
5
when they center the lived experiences of Latinx
families.
Theorizing from the Borderlands
in Queer Latinx Family Science
In Amigas y amantes, I continued the work of
Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other
queer feminists of color, centering the experi-
ence and attending to the ways it is shaped by
our intersecting identities (Acosta, 2013). Ami-
gas y amantes drew from qualitative interview
data (N = 42) that I conducted with Latinas who
identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer and on
participant observation data in Latinx commu-
nities to shed light on the resiliency these Lati-
nas develop on account of their marginalities.
I offer that sexually nonconforming Latinas do
family in distinct ways from that articulated in
prior research. Study respondents, I found, inte-
grated origin and choice families and, in so
doing, established a rich support network for
themselves, but they also experienced extreme
disjuncture, as this integration involves effort,
compromise, and resiliency. Amigas y amantes
focused on the tension experienced in merg-
ing origin and choice families. Families of ori-
gin struggled to accept what they perceived to
be their loved one’s sexual transgressions but
rarely rejected them. Instead, study respondents
and their families unpacked the root causes of
their feelings of discomfort (e.g., religion, soci-
etal expectations, familial honor), listened to one
another’s pain, and conditioned themselves to
give and receive the support they needed. The
result was a chosen and origin family full of con-
tradiction but equally full of devotion.
The familial practice of incorporating non-
biological or legal kin, including neighbors
and godparents, into one’s origin family unit
is a survival strategy for Latinx immigrant
families—one that helps ease the burdens of
poverty, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Thus, expanding this familial practice to include
sexually nonconforming Latinas’ chosen fami-
lies is not a far deviation from common practice.
Lionel Cantú’s (2009) work on gay Mexican
immigrant men found that the migratory process
requires men to rely on both gay, Latinx net-
works in the United States and origin families
to ease their adaptation. Thus, although the
migration process opens up a network of gay
chosen family, those networks provide support
alongside families of origin. Cantú’s findings
6 Journal of Family Theory & Review
echoed my own, that relationships with families
of origin are riddled with pain but not with
rejection, detachment, or replacement.
The family plays a central role in shaping
how Latinx individuals experience gender
(non)conformity or fluidity. In Amigas y
amantes, I explored the tensions among les-
bian, bisexual, and queer Latinas and their
mothers with regard to femininity. Preserv-
ing gender conformity, in particular through
physical appearance, was as important to
respondents’ mothers as was sexual conformity,
because mothers feared that gender nonconfor-
mity would make sexual transgressions visible.
In another study, Asencio (2011) found that
gay Puerto Rican men receive their earliest
teachings on the social ridicule that comes with
gender nonconformity from the family and
larger community. These men recounted learn-
ing about the familial and communal disrespect
that comes with gender nonconformity and thus
intentionally worked to distance themselves
from la loca, a colloquial Spanish term used to
describe effeminacy among Latin Americans
who are assigned the sex category “male” at
birth. La loca is sometimes used to describe
trans women or effeminate gay men. Decena
(2011) used interview data with Dominican gay
and bisexual men to provide nuance to the prac-
tice of distancing oneself from la loca. He noted
that when in the company of chosen family, in
particular other gay or bisexual Dominican men,
respondents allowed effeminacy (via language
and mannerisms) to surface. In these settings
respondents found the safety to relax the con-
straints of masculinity and embrace la loca as a
form of camaraderie and play.
This growing body of scholarship offers a
complex picture of the process of doing fam-
ily in Latinx communities and thus sheds light
on the ways that immigration, gender, sexu-
ality, and race/ethnicity influence this process.
When queerer family scholarship focuses only
on White respondents, it cannot offer a nuanced
analysis of how intersectional identities and the
institutions that discipline them constrain fam-
ilies. For instance, research that does not adopt
an intersectional lens disallows an analysis of the
complex ways that immigration policies regulate
and scrutinize one’s racial, sexual, and gendered
practices in an effort to reproduce the White,
heteropatriarchal family (Luibheid, 2002; Sum-
merville, 2005). Nor does such research illus-
trate how these policies reify a binary between
those who are “gay enough” to deserve citizen-
ship and those who are not by reducing gay iden-
tities to sexual practices (Miller, 2005).
When queerer family scholarship centers Lat-
inx subjectivities, it can potentially contribute to
the destabilization of familismo to describe Lat-
inx family values. Familismo promotes the idea
that Latinx individuals are culturally obliged
to support their family members economically,
emotionally, and physically and to place the
needs of the family unit above one’s own indi-
vidual needs (Loughrin, 2015). In addition to
being culturally reductive, familismo is often
presented as unique and inherent to Latinx fam-
ilies, without any discussion of the institutions
that fuel it (Baca-Zinn, 1998). The power of
racism, poverty, and anti-immigrant sentiment
to systematically regulate familial connections
and reliance on one another is overlooked when
queer family scholarship centers only racial
majority populations who experience these
institutions from a different social location.
When scholars take on the task of queering
family scholarship and centering Latinx experi-
ence, their contributions offer a revision to the
limits of queer family scholarship that centers
whiteness. Scholars centering Latinx experience
echo the sentiments of queer and feminist schol-
ars of color who highlight the contradictions
inherent in being part of la familia and the ten-
sions its members experience around gender and
sexual conformity. If queer theory is to reach
its deconstructive potential, and if it is to diver-
sify the often homogeneous picture presented of
family as an institution, then researchers must
intentionally set out to unpack racial and ethnic
categories and explore the intersectional differ-
ences in familial experience. In the next section,
I reflect on the data collection process for Ami-
gas y amantes as well as that of other scholars
who theorize from the borderlands, in order to
delineate some methodological challenges when
queering family scholarship in Latinx families.
Doing and Queering Family Research
in Latinx Communities
When I started recruiting study participants for
Amigas y amantes (Acosta, 2013), I knew only
that I was interested in centering the experiences
of Latinas who did not identify as heterosexual.
I wanted to explore how resisting heteronor-
mativity shaped familial experience. Finding
the language for this was not easy. I settled
Queering Family Scholarship
for recruiting people who identified as lesbian,
bisexual, or queer and ultimately collapsed these
categories into one: “sexually nonconforming
Latinas.” However, perhaps more important
than the identity categories I ultimately settled
on is the reflection that went into making this
decision in the first place. I share some of this
in the book’s introduction:
While it may appear at first glance that women
with such varied sexualities would have little in
common, in actuality, these women’s experiences
are very similar in that, irrespective of their sex-
ual fluidity, they are marginalized subjects in a
heteronormative society. The respondents shared
the experience of having significant attractions for
other women, which they were forced to nego-
tiate both with themselves and those they loved.
For most of the women, these same-sex attrac-
tions resulted in long-term relationships with other
women. But for others these attractions led to
short-term same-sex relationships or open rela-
tionships with both men and women. Given the
disparities in the participants’ experiences with
desire, attraction and sexual encounters, I set-
tled on the term “sexually nonconforming Lati-
nas” to describe these women in an effort to be
inclusive of more Latina women whose sexuali-
ties are marginalized for a variety of given reasons.
(Acosta, 2013, p. 5)
In The Sexuality of Migration: Border Cross-
ings and Mexican Immigrant Men, Cantú (2009)
grappled with similar concerns and ultimately
adopted a different approach. Cantú did not set-
tle on any one category to identify his study par-
ticipants. Instead, he alternated between “gay,”
“men who have sex with men,” and “queer” to
emphasize the fluidity of these identities and the
potential for them to be contested. As noted in
the editors’ preface:
This slippage should not be seen as an inconsis-
tency in the text. Rather it should be viewed as
an expression of the limitation of existing iden-
tity categories in capturing the self-identity of the
men in the study—not because they were Mexican,
or could not identify as gay, but because Cantú’s
study included a truly heterogeneous group of men
. . . he tried to capture the shifting sexual identifi-
cations of the men in his study by changing the
terms he used throughout the text and by calling
attention to the limitations of the terms he used.
(Cantú, 2009, pp. 11–12)
As scholars intentionally queering Lat-
inx family scholarship, both Cantú and I
7
constructed narratives that speak to the central
role that identities play in our participants’
experiences while also tending to how these
identities move in and out of salience on the
basis of time, geographic location, and audience.
For researchers engaged in queering family
scholarship, finding language to describe anti-
normative behavior is likely a familiar concern.
For scholars doing and queering research in
Latinx communities, the limitations of lan-
guage are intensified—for them, research takes
place in more than one language. As Anzaldúa
(1987/1999) noted, theorizing from the border-
lands requires its own language, a language that
includes words from all of our cultures. For
instance, the word queer has no Spanish trans-
lation. This language incompatibility created a
barrier to intimacy between my study respon-
dents and their families of origin. As one partici-
pant, Diana, remarked: “How do I explain to my
mother that I’m queer? ¿Qué es eso, ‘queer’?
Los dominicanos no usan eso (What is that,
‘Queer’? Dominicans don’t use that)” (Acosta,
2013, p. 143). Diana’s remarks signaled more
than the literal inability to translate queer for
her monolingual Dominican mother. Diana was
unable to translate queer sentiment. Just as this
created distance between Diana and her mother,
it created distance for me as a researcher in the
field trying to connect with monolingual study
participants. I struggled to find accurate ways
of translating concepts that, in my experience,
existed in only either an English or a Spanish
context. For instance, describing the sentiment
behind concepts such as heteronormativity,
monogamy, and sexual fluidity was challenging,
as my nuanced understanding of these concepts
emerged in a Eurocentric academy. In part, this
struggle with language shaped my decision to
retain the original Spanish from interview tran-
scripts in the book. Keeping the original Spanish
alongside English translations offered the reader
transparency to reinterpret these encounters. It
also allowed me to later analyze the circum-
stances that led bilingual participants to switch
back and forth between Spanish and English,
sometimes midsentence. The clashing of study
participants’ multiple identities became more
visible as they switched languages. Decena
(2011) also retained original Spanish quotes
in his work, offering that “having the Spanish
original and the English translation side by side
illustrates the cohabitation of these languages in
what the men said and in how I analyzed what
8 Journal of Family Theory & Review
they said” (p. 4). Preserving bilingualism in
interview-based research enables the researcher
to expand the language options for communi-
cating complexity. Nonetheless, monolingual
researchers can also overcome some of the lim-
itations of language through listening not only
to respondents’ words but also to their bodies. I
revisit these possibilities in the next section.
The inability to translate queer can also shape
a researcher’s positionality in the field. For
instance, Muñoz (2010) reflected on her nego-
tiation of a queer identity as a researcher in
“straight” Latino spaces:
Being queer is linked to my academic identity,
but it is negotiated differently in my own Latino
communities. If I wanted to conduct fieldwork
in my own community, I needed to constantly
negotiate and prioritize certain fluid identities over
others to minimize barriers. (p. 54)
This process of prioritizing identities is familiar
to many qualitative feminist researchers. Still,
how it affects the coproduction of knowledge
in the field and shapes the level of rapport one
establishes in the field is something on which we
must all reflect.
Another concern for those conducting
research in these communities is the use of
“Latinx” as a panethnic category. Although the
term Latinx allows scholars to disrupt the gender
binary, it is also limited. Scholars conducting
research in Latin American communities should
reflect critically on how Latinx (much like the
more commonly used Latina/o) is an umbrella
term that unites an extremely diverse group of
people with distinct nationalities, phenotypes,
and language dialects. Too often scholars use
these terms to describe research samples consist-
ing of participants almost entirely representative
of one country of origin. Other times, scholars
take research about a specific ethnic group and
uncritically apply it to all Latinx nationalities.
Any research study that seeks to seriously
embrace queer theory’s deconstructive potential
should think critically about the use of racial
and ethnic panethnic categories. At a minimum,
scholars should reflect on how race and ethnicity
are both socially constructed identity categories
that represent the hegemonic regimes of power
within which they thrive. Scholars can go a long
way toward producing queerer scholarship by
naming this issue and being transparent with
how they chose to address it in their work.
Conducting Queerer Family Research
A challenge for family scholars interested in
using a queer theoretical lens in empirical
research lies in the inherent tension in studying
lived reality while simultaneously destabiliz-
ing the very identities that these realities are
based on. Adopting a queer theoretical approach
requires us to see the data as a coproduction
of knowledge of which the researcher is only a
part. The general suspicion among many social
scientists for this methodological strategy has
limited the proliferation of queer methods and
research. Still, scholars cannot limit knowledge
to only what fits in simplistic categories or
is empirically observable (Brim & Ghaziani,
2016). Instead, researchers should queer empiri-
cism by embracing multiplicity and silences.
Chávez-Leyva (1998) wrote that it “is a chal-
lenge to explore the contradictions of silence
within Latina lesbian history, to understand the
multiple meanings of silence to uncover the
language of silence” (p. 432). Fields (2016)
echoed these sentiments, advocating for queer
feminist researchers to not shy away from erotic
encounters in the research setting but rather
to allow those moments and the silences they
create to linger in the interest of helping us
gain more insight into the worlds we study. Still
the question remains, how do we explore these
silences?
When I was conducting research for Amigas
y amantes (Acosta, 2013), I was contacted by
Julie, a Puerto Rican woman who had heard
that I was conducting interviews with sexually
nonconforming Latinas and wanted to know if
she could participate. From that initial conver-
sation, I sensed hesitancy in Julie’s voice. She
questioned whether she qualified for the study,
explaining that she was in a heterosexual rela-
tionship but identified as bisexual. The hesitancy
in her voice continued when we met for the
interview the following week. I found her to be
guarded and reluctant to elaborate on her expe-
riences. I probed in an effort to understand the
experiences she wanted to communicate but ulti-
mately left the interview feeling confused. In
what follows, I piece together various excerpts
from that interview transcript to illustrate part
of her story and the internal conflict she seemed
unable to articulate with words:
During the years I was in college I was unfaithful
[to her boyfriend]. Senior year I was like, “I think
we need a break. I need to explore my sexuality.”
Queering Family Scholarship
. . . So that was rough in the sense of this is a
relationship that I’ve had for some time. He knew
about me being bisexual. I didn’t do it a lot, but
I did.
Julie seemed uncomfortable describing her inti-
mate encounters with women perhaps because
they mostly took place while she was in another
relationship with a long-term boyfriend who
lived in another state. She never explicitly stated
feeling guilt, but her word choice (“I didn’t do it
a lot”), facial expressions (downturned eyes and
pursed lips), and the tone of her voice suggested
as much. Later in the interview, Julie returned to
discussing her sexual experiences with women:
julie: I was at a party dancing with a girl and
then another girl. I told her she was really hot.
We went back to my dorm. She grabbed me. We
were kissing and fondling. No oral. It was a two-
or three-night thing but after that, no.
katie: What did this encounter signify for you?
julie: It was exploring and enjoying. I didn’t
really start to fall for her or anything. It was just
mutual like . . . Now I’m back with my boyfriend.
Throughout the entire interview Julie never
expressed any excitement for her relation-
ship with her boyfriend. She used words like
safe and stable but not love or passion to
describe the relationship. Her tone was flat,
measured, and precise. I felt compelled to
ask her:
katie: Are you happy?
julie: Not necessarily.
katie: So why do it?
julie: A lot of it has to do with heterosexuality.
You have to get acceptance from your family. And
I think that’s why a lot of bisexuals who are in
heterosexual relationships probably do it. Because
of the ease and the stability too. It’s hard to meet
other women.
By this point in the interview, Julie had already
described her close relationship with her mom,
their struggle as a working-class family, and her
mother’s reliance on her for emotional support.
As the interview progressed, I asked if she had
shared her intimate encounters with women with
her mother:
julie: There is nothing that would come of me
having that conversation with my mother about my
bisexuality.
9
katie: If you guys break up? Would you talk to
your mother then?
julie: No.
katie: If you have a significant relationship with
another woman, then would you?
julie: No. She’s been through enough. To further
challenge her with a sexuality that is not what she
knows. I’m just not willing to do that. I don’t want
to do that.
By this point in the interview, it had become
apparent that my efforts to better understand
Julie’s reluctance were frustrating her, so I
decided to not pursue this line of inquiry further.
But in later analysis of the whole transcript and
my typed field notes, and in listening to the
audio again, I began to better understand that
which remained unsaid in the interview.
Julie felt responsible for being the reliable
child in her family who supported others and
made them proud with her academic accom-
plishments and independence. Julie had few
opportunities in life to take risks. Her explo-
rations with women in college were part of an
effort to carve out the space to experience some-
thing she had long desired. College offered the
distance from family and her boyfriend to do
this. Julie was unwilling to take the risk of queer-
ing her mother’s perception of her success in
life and thus chose safety in the silence she
maintained with her family. Silence was easier
than verbalizing the complexities of her sexual-
ity with her mother, as it was ultimately a sexu-
ality her mother did not know.
Listening to her body and the tone of her
voice allowed me to hear the silence in between
Julie’s words and helped me construct a cohe-
sive account of how she did family and how
her intersecting identities as Latina, migrant,
working-class, first-generation college student
and a daughter shaped her sexuality and familial
relationships. Connecting pieces of Julie’s tran-
script like a puzzle while maintaining an inter-
sectional lens facilitated listening to silences.
Valocchi (2005) promoted the use of ethnog-
raphy among queer theorists because the method
requires researchers to pay special attention to
the complexities of lived experience. As a
methodological approach, ethnography allows
the scholar to embrace incongruence between
categories and lived practices rather than rely on
preestablished classificatory systems, as is often
the case for quantitative scholars. Ethnographic
research may be better suited to exploring the
nuances of queer as it is lived, but all methods
10
can question normativity (Brown & Nash,
2010). Engagement with queer theory can exist
on a spectrum, which allows scholars to move
toward a queerer analysis and advance both
queer theory and the family sciences. There is
queer potential in statistical research, provided
it embraces multidimensionality and allows
for the fluidity of people’s responses (Brim &
Ghaziani, 2016). Queering quantitative research
starts with the design and implementation of
measurement tools. Designing a measurement
scale that includes input from queer commu-
nities and is person centered as opposed to
variable centered allows for a focus on the
responses rather than variables and outcomes
(Grzanka, 2016). Further, while preexisting cat-
egorical responses are necessary for survey data
collection, these can be queered if researchers
examine the hetero-, mono-, and cisnormative
assumptions inherent in the response options
they provided for questions intended to mea-
sure family composition. Further, quantitative
researchers can queer the interpretation of the
data they collect by avoiding positivistic think-
ing and instead embracing the complexities
of multiple realities and the layers of knowl-
edge that await detangling. Scholars can move
toward a more holistic interpretation of data by
exploring how intersecting identities shape that
experience (Bowleg, 2008).
Researchers may benefit from examining the
practice of recategorizing responses that do not
fit into conventional categories. For instance, in
1990, the U.S. Census first collected data on
unmarried partners to account for changes in
family composition. However, as matter of prac-
tice, when respondents categorized their unmar-
ried partners as someone of their same sex, the
Census Bureau recategorized those responses to
an opposite-sex unmarried partner (U.S. Cen-
sus, 2017). This practice likely erased data on
same-sex couples and stifled the data’s potential
to more accurately represent U.S. families until
2010, when the practice was corrected. I draw
from this example to suggest that when scholars
dismiss respondents’ marking of “other” cate-
gories on survey questions and instead recate-
gorize them into preexisting categories, they fail
to listen to respondents’ efforts to queer those
surveys.
The National Transgender Discrimination
Survey exemplifies the potential of surveys
to better capture queer life at every step of
the survey’s design and implementation of
Journal of Family Theory & Review
the measurement process (Grant, Mottet, &
Tanis, 2011; James et al., 2016). The National
Transgender Discrimination Survey, the largest
sample on trans populations, asked questions
strategically designed to capture multiple trans
subjectivities. Researchers found it valuable to
incorporate an open-ended survey component
to capture breadth in transgender status. In
analyzing the data from respondents who opted
to answer the open-ended question rather than
select a response from the preexisting cate-
gories, researchers found that most open-ended
responses came from individuals who were
assigned female at birth, which suggests that
these respondents are perhaps more resistant
to trans identity categories than those who are
assigned male at birth (Doan, 2016). Following
the clues that respondents offer us when they
resist selecting the categories we provide tells its
own story. It is up to the researcher to decipher
what that story is.
Ultimately, queer methodology is less about
any one research method and more about orient-
ing or queering a method by adopting a queer
lens (McCann, 2016). Inherent in this process is
embracing the messiness that comes with queer
data collection and approaching that messiness
not as a problem to be fixed but as an important
avenue for exploration in itself.
Toward a Queerer Family Scholarship
In an effort to produce queerer family scholar-
ship, scholars need to more critically challenge
White hegemony in the academy by holding
one another accountable for the assumption
that research on White, middle-class subjects is
representative of those of other racial or ethnic
groups. In advancing queerer family scholarship
that is also intersectional, scholars can benefit
from connecting with material reality, fore-
grounding the seminal works of queer feminists
of color, and focusing on familial resiliency.
There is power in connecting the stories our
bodies tell to the phenomena we study. The phys-
ical realities of our experiences politicize us.
Rather than treating these experiences as liabili-
ties to our researcher objectivity, we may do best
to name them, capitalize on the insight they offer,
and use them for advancement of theory. Theo-
rizing from the borderlands means bridging the
contradictions in our and our research partici-
pants’ identities. Theorizing in the flesh allows
me to position myself as more than a researcher
Queering Family Scholarship
in the field and affords me the space to overcome
queer theory’s inattention to the material.
Scholars can also make queerer family schol-
arship less abstract with scavenger methodolo-
gies (Plummer, 2005) by combining multiple
methods to keep the work grounded in the real.
In one example, Schippers’s (2016) combined
textual analysis, fictional narratives, film analy-
sis, and autoethnography to support a theoretical
critique of monogamy. Although this approach
did not use traditional empirical social science
methods, in combing web content, fiction, and
film with autoethnography, it offered a narrative
that was more embedded in the social than would
an analysis using any one of the methods alone.
A queerer family studies should also rec-
ognize the plurality of LGBTQ parent fami-
lies’ experiences and go beyond an analysis of
LGBTQ parents’ vulnerability to instead explore
their resiliency (Few-Demo, Humble, Curran, &
Lloyd, 2016). Scholars may experience pressure
to ensure that their research does not represent
these families in ways that could be used as polit-
ical ammunition to strip them of tangible rights.
Stacey and Biblarz’s (2001) naming of this con-
cern is no less relevant now (more than 15 years
later) than it was then. Scholars should be engag-
ing in deep reflexivity around these pressures
and what it means for the data we produce and
how we analyze it. Deep reflexivity requires us
to consider not just how our social positions
shape the research but also how disciplinary and
institutional tendencies, constraints, and presup-
positions influence the research (Emirbrayer &
Desmond, 2011). As scholars engage in this
reflection, Anzaldúa’s notion of la facultad is
useful, as it can aid them in digging deeper.
Pushing the discourse beyond an account of
vulnerability requires us to consider how this
vulnerability leaves LGBTQ families suscepti-
ble to divorce, relationship dissolution, mental
health issues, and many other social ills that con-
tribute to instability in some LGBTQ families. In
centering LGBTQ familial resilience, scholars
should address these instabilities more openly,
name the social issues that plague LGBTQ fam-
ilies, and explore the strategies used to cope
with them.
Last, it is imperative that queer theory schol-
ars interested in theorizing across race, class,
gender, and sexuality offer more than a polite
nod to the early works of feminists of color. To
not engage with this material productively is to
give credence to the persisting representation of
11
queer theory in the academy as a White, eli-
tist project unconcerned with dismantling patri-
archy. Echoing the sentiments of earlier queer
and feminist writers, queerer family scholar-
ship is that which disrupts normative regimes of
power in intersectional, material ways.
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