Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland

Polish LGBTQ families are reflective of the social, legal, and temporal realities in which they exist, and as such, they should be evaluated in reference to their circumstances rather than being compared to Western European or North American models—this is the main argument of Joanna Mizielińska's book Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland. Drawing on rich sources of data—interviews, participant observations, focus groups, and surveys—the author examines the everyday experiences of LGBTQ families with children and situates them within the broader Polish context of the 2010s. For the large part, her work remains faithful to its thesis, and it draws attention to the families that are not only hidden in Poland but also are often overlooked in scholarly investigations.The current book is an extension of Mizielińska's previous work, both thematically and methodologically. Excluding introduction and conclusion, it is organized around five empirical chapters that examine different aspects of Polish queer families. In chapter 2, Mizielińska focuses on the unique trajectories of Polish LGBTQ families. Unlike their heterosexual counterparts, LGBTQ families in Poland cannot draw on more typical life markers such as marriage or having children to make distinctions between various life stages. Instead, moving in together, starting a home, and formalizing property ownership and inheritance serve as signposts for solidifying and legitimizing LGBTQ families for both partners themselves and their larger circles of family and friends. As Mizielińska explains, same-sex marriage and civil unions are not legal in Poland and adoptions or surrogate pregnancies are either difficult or illegal; thus, moving in together and starting a home is the most common way to mark family formation.In chapter 3, Mizielińska examines the definitional meanings of families as understood by Polish LGBTQ family members. During the interviews, she asked each family member to draw a family map—a diagram consisting of people's (and pets’) names that a person considers family. Based on the inclusion and exclusion of names and their arrangements relative to each other, the author disentangles the relational dynamics of family making. For most respondents, the boundaries between who is and who is not family are fluid and porous. Some make a distinction between theoretical and practical families, the former drawing on more traditional, society-sanctioned familial forms (e.g., as defined by bloodlines) and the latter focusing on the everyday practices of doing family (e.g., sharing household chores or decorating). By moving between these two distinctions, the respondents can incorporate a variety of people into their families, including blood relatives, friends, and stepsiblings. However, as Mizielińska notes, for most people in her study, it is the everyday practice that makes a family.In one of most notable findings of this work, Mizielińska observes that most LGBTQ families in Poland do not sever their relationship with their families of origin. Instead, they build a relationship with them, even if it is often painful and difficult. In chapter 3, Mizielińska documents how this relationship is shaped by the specificity of the Polish context. With an insufficient housing stock and limited financial resources, many members of the LGBTQ families must rely on aid from their blood relatives to secure a place to live. In practical terms, this means moving in with someone's parents, or taking over a house or an apartment inherited from a grandparent, or having parents give or lend money to buy property. At the same time, Poland lacks the institutional infrastructure to care for its elderly populations, so it falls mostly on the individuals to care for their aging parents and relatives. These structural factors create interdependence between queer families and their families of origin, with mutual benefits for everyone involved. This is not to imply that these relations are without any conflicts. As Mizielińska explains, queer families often face considerable homophobia from their families of origin, which complicates the relationships between family members. As such, LGBTQ families often strategically use disclosure to mitigate the negative effects of discrimination. They are selective about coming out to different family members (e.g., telling siblings vs. parents) and often leave the details of their relationship unspoken, letting their parents, aunts, or grandparents draw their own conclusions about the nature of their familial arrangement. Mizielińska cautions that this strategy should not be interpreted as backward looking but rather a rational response to living in the Polish context.In the chapter titled “Queer(ing) Parenthood,” Mizielińska explores the gendered realities of being a non-heterosexual parent in Poland. Drawing on survey data, she provides an aggregate picture of queer families’ structure before moving on to a more qualitative exploration of lesbian- and gay-headed families. Within this work, two findings stand out. First, most of the children in queer families come from partners’ previous (heterosexual) relationships. Second, significantly fewer gay male couples raise children than their lesbian counterparts. Polish law shapes both these phenomena. Surrogate pregnancies and same-sex adoptions are illegal in Poland. Technically a person could pretend to be single, but even in this case, the state is reluctant to let single individuals adopt children. As such, the paths to parenthood are limited for queer people, especially for gay men.In the final empirical chapter, Mizielińska gives voice to the children of LGBTQ families. Their responses illustrate how they make sense of their own family structure, and how they handle outside pressures. The author observes that children's level of comfort with their families often depends on their age, with younger children typically taking their familial arrangement for granted and the adolescents struggling more, especially with their parents’ coming-out process. The children also speak about the difficulties of talking about their families with peers and the homophobia they encounter at school, especially during the religious instruction (Catholic religious education is mandatory in Polish public schools).By focusing on the specifics of the Polish context, Mizielińska broadens our understanding of LGBTQ families, drawing our attention to families that are often hidden or overlooked in Poland as well as within academic scholarship. Her work is most engaging when she illustrates how sexual identity, family, and Polish reality intersect. She eschews a linear examination of queer families based on the assumption that LGBTQ lives and history are always progressing towards society's acceptance and full integration, a view more endemic to North American and Western European models. Instead, Mizielińska relies on the use of multiple timelines and familial trajectories. As she herself notes, “LGBTQ relational trajectories should be seen at the intersection of the three modes of temporalities: biographical/individual time, queer time [i.e., individual person's queer experiences], and historical/LGBTQ time, and never as an isolated phenomenon” (p. 38). Drawing on her rich interview and ethnographic data, the author illustrates how personal experiences of being an LGBTQ person, partner, and a (step-)parent intersect with the Polish context of the 2010s—a context that is still often hostile towards queer people. She leverages this intersectional approach to show how queer families are formed and sustained in an environment that does not support them. In this aspect alone, Mizielińska's work becomes essential in changing our understanding of how (queer) families are created, function, and thrive under unfavorable circumstances.At the same time, I wish that Mizielińska was more consistent with applying the temporal analytic strategy she proposes to her own work. Throughout the book, she makes comparisons between North America/Western Europe and Poland to draw important distinctions between the two settings and points out notable omissions in Western understanding of queer families as they cut across different social, historical, and geopolitical contexts. In this process, she sets up at times an asymmetrical temporal dichotomy where she contrasts queer lives of present-day Poland with those of LGBTQ people living in the U.S. and Western Europe thirty or twenty years ago. This temporal mismatch is most evident when she discusses queer families’ relationship with their families of origin. Mizielińska notes that unlike their North American counterparts, queer Polish families maintain ties with their blood families rather than completely cutting them off. This comparison is somewhat misleading since it assumes that little has changed for queer people in the last thirty years, especially in the United States (most of the references on this subject draw on the U.S. context or are authored by scholars trained in American universities). In the U.S. of the 1980s and 1990s, LGBTQ people were forced to sever their relationship with their families of origin because of the homophobia and the discrimination coming directly from those very families. Today, the social and personal circumstances of queer people have changed considerably in the United States, where queer families are increasingly visible and protected by law. Of course, great regional and demographic differences exist in how LGBTQ families are perceived and treated, and that is the point: the experiences of LGBTQ people are rarely monolithic, be they in Poland, the U.S., or Western Europe. As such, I wish the author was more attentive to these temporal and contextual differences, especially when making cross-cultural comparisons.Overall, Mizielińska's book provides an informative and critical read. Her work is valuable to both those who study LGBTQ families specifically and those who examine families more generally. Her multi-temporal approach represents Polish queer families as complex and worthy of both scholarly and society's attention and recognition.